Review of : Heaven is a Playground by Rick Telander

In the summer of 1974, Telander, a writer for Sports Illustrated, spent his time in and around Foster's Park, the notorious training ground for street ballers, befriending the rotating cast of neighborhood characters.

Probably the best thing about this book is Telander's remarkable ability to evoke a sense of time and place. Flatbush, New York, concrete jungle, hot hot summer, city playgrounds, deteriorating basketball courts, drinking cold beer in the shade, radios, endless noise, endless heat. Telander puts us there with him, among these players, both basketball and otherwise.

They are all, more or less, for better or worse, basketball prodigies. They live basketball because for most, that's their only chance to get out of the ghetto. Which sounds crazy to write but it was (and is?) true. And in Foster's Park, if you wanted out, you had to have Rodney Parker on your shoulder.

With all its sad figures, Parker, for me, is at the top of the list in Telander's melodrama. Parker had declared himself a kind of 'ghetto scout', proclaiming who was deemed worthy of his attention and time, and then doing his darndest to get that player into college or better yet, the NBA or ABA. When he wasn't scalping tickets, he was at Foster Park, mentoring his proteges or lecturing kids about what it meant to be a man (though Parker seems to have a tenuous grasp of adulthood himself). And what was in it for Rodney? Apparently nothing. As Telander comes to believe, Parker did it for the love of the game...and as the reader comes to realize, also for the thrill of the deal, and the love of power (however small), and the love of admiration (however imagined) and, as it turns out, for friendship.

As characters, Parker, along with Fly Williams, carry the narrative. I found them to be the most interesting and pyschologically perplexing. Telander does an excellent job of bringing their emotional idiosyncracies to the surface, helping us see behind the mask of braggadocio. Williams ultimately "betrays" Rodney, though you get the sense that Williams couldn't really help himself...he was too damaged, his life destined to self-destruct.

And also, I want to add, there is a purity within these pages. Basketball, though an escape route for some, is played mostly for the love of the game. Simply because there is nothing like a game of three on three, four on four, playing to win, yes, but also playing just to play.