A Dunk So Hard It Knocked A Guy's Teeth Out, And Other Tales Of New York Street Basketball

New York City has more than 1,800 basketball courts.

Some time in the early 1970s, there arose from these chain link-girdled gladiator pits an in-your-face style of play called "street ball." This so-called city game — with all of its flash and trash talk — is the subject of a new show at the Museum of the City of New York. 

Curator Lilly Tuttle told WNYC that street ball's "less choreographed, more improvisational style of basketball" allows players to "loosen up, play a freer game, and have a bit of a performative aspect." In an exhibition video, former Knicks center Tom Hoover offers a concrete example of the concept with a possibly apocryphal anecdote about the time a teenage Julius Irving dunked so hard on him that Hoover's teeth fell out. The play unfolded at Rucker Park in East Harlem, one of playground basketball's legendary arenas.

The exhibit makes the plausible case that the style of play that emerged from New York's hard courts bubbled up to transform not only the NBA but the rest of American pro sports.

That said, what matters most to a guy like Bobbito Garcia, aka DJ Kool Bob Love, is that basketball's evolution keeps happening in tight asphalt spaces all around the city — in those active incubators of urban life called playgrounds.

"New York City didn't birth the sport but we raised it," he said. "And New York City is where this culture thrives, where this culture breeds, and where this culture gets new breath." 

Click on the audio player for more details on New York's unique contributions to the city game.