You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Sports and Recreation.”
In the summer of 1984, I sublet an apartment on East 3rd Street between Avenue A and B, about one hundred yards from the building in which I had spent the first 18 years of my life. I’d been away for six years—the first four at a small college in the midwest followed by two years in a roach infested [...]
In the summer of ’77, I met Mark Roth in Pathmark on Hylan Boulevard. Heading home from a Sunday drive, my parents stopped to pick up groceries for dinner, and waiting in the Express Lane, he got behind us with a bottle of Mott’s Apple Juice. I was sure it was him, but then, what would the Number One ranked [...]
Why am I on Randall’s Island, shivering in a ski jacket, gloves, a scarf, and a blanket wrapped around me? It is 7 PM on a Friday evening, and I can see the Manhattan skyline lights flickering on. Normal people—sane people—are warm in bars, toasting pisco sours instead of facing blustering winds on Randall’s Island. Where is Randall’s Island, anyway? [...]
I don’t know who invented the game or whether it is still played today. Slap Ball had a brief vogue in New York City schoolyards in the early Sixties, and in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I grew up, it attained minor cult status as the game of choice for the physically challenged. A welcome alternative to punchball, softball, and baseball, [...]
My husband has figured out a way to play poker round the clock, save when he is at work, in the shower, reading a book or in bed sleeping. He plays it on his phone against other poker enthusiasts in round-the-clock online tournaments. It doesn’t bother me – he’s not the type to bet or lose a lot of [...]
By any standards, Mark Margolies, who is now in his late sixties, lived an uneventful life. He was modest and soft-spoken. Even after he graduated from Brooklyn College, he lived with his parents until he was 30, mainly staying in his room, working only sporadically, and reading philosophy books. Then, on a weekend hiking trip, he met Gabrielle, the teacher [...]
Every Spring, tennis players in New York City who want to play on the city courts have to buy a tennis permit. The Parks Department doubled the price this year to $200 for an adult permit. Seniors only pay $20 . If I can pass for 62, I’ll save $180. I'm unemployed. The first time I tired to pass as [...]
It’s hot. We have one air conditioner and one TV. The TV is black-and-white; the air conditioner is in my parents’ bedroom. I usually sleep with my door wide open, letting in a cool breeze from the back door to our attached row house, the access to our backyard. Back then no one imagines someone might sneak in and kidnap [...]
Last August, on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon, after a debilitating outdoor 90-degree basketball game courtesy of The Word bookstore league, I was shuffling along the sidewalks from Greenpoint to the Bedford L stop trying to bring my core temperature below triple-digits. Needing a respite, I stopped to watch a softball game on a playground diamond across from McCarren Park [...]
Some people say the 1958 NFL Championship game between New York and Baltimore was the greatest game ever played. Some say it was the playoff game where Carlton Fisk hit that home run. Some say it was the 1980 Olympics when the US Hockey Team beat the Russians. All those people are wrong because I didn’t play in any of [...]
Depending on how you look at it, Kamran Shirazi is famous in the world of chess for his flamboyant and innovative style of play, or for his amazing ability to lose, or perhaps both. He cobbles together a living by combining prize money from chess tournaments with fees from chess lessons, for which he charges eighty dollars an hour. If [...]
An odd thing happened during game two of the Knicks' first round play-off series, against the Indiana Pacers. With a little under six minutes left in the third quarter, the Knicks were fighting there way back from a 10 point deficit, when Anthony Mason made a spectacular reverse dunk. The Pacers immediately called a time out, and the crowd, understandably, [...]
For some people, a bicycle is something to be taken out for a pleasant jaunt in the park on weekends, an opportunity to feel the breeze in your hair and to coast alongside novice roller bladers whose eyes are wide with terror. Then there are the brave souls who use it to make a living, the bicycle messengers, a group [...]
Between 10th and 11th avenue, on the north side of 18th street sits the Roxy night club which, on Wednesday nights, houses a medley of characters whom appear to have been pickled by time. Wednesday at the Roxy is "disco night." Everyone is on roller skates. The speakeasy secrecy of this sub-culture scene contaminates one with an air of stagnation; [...]
1993 Like most of the people who haunt Shea Stadium these days, Steve Calandro is a diehard Mets fan. He's also a vendor, and the vendors, like the Mets, aren't having a terribly good year. The vendors work for the Harry M. Stevens Corporation, and when things are slow, as they have been this season, who gets to work is [...]
I was nearly there. Carrying my chair, beach bag and small cooler the few final yards to my usual spot, I was almost past the part I dreaded. It was the trek from the parking lot at Riis Park in the Rockaways, to my little beach at the start of neighboring Breezy Point. To get there, I had to walk [...]
The following article was reported and written in the winter and spring of 2002. This article deals, in part, with the fact that Jason Kidd's childhood was formed in part by his chores caring for horses. ** It was a cold winter night, and the Knicks were playing the Nets. I took the bus from Port authority. No sooner does [...]
Snow and cold are anathema to the skateboarder. The winter in New York can be a frustrating time to pursue an activity best done wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Hardcore skaters still hit the streets to skate midtown's smooth plazas on frigid nights, but that can be a slightly masochistic and uncomfortable experience. One remedy is to move the action [...]
The Westchester Wildfire, a newly formed franchise of the United States Basketball League, held open try-outs the other day at their practice facility at Suny Purchase, and nearly eighty people showed up, in spite of the $150 dollar fee. A fair number were playground all-stars for whom the try out was a kind one day basketball fantasy camp, an opportunity [...]
The more games the New York Knicks won the more they raised the ticket prices. I could only afford to see them at Madison Square Garden if they continued to have losing seasons. I’d buy a ticket from a scalper. Instead of charging more he’d sell it for a fraction of what it was worth, because no one wanted to [...]
Men will ruin $500 suits scrambling for a $5 baseball. It’s an adage as old as the idea of men wearing suits to a ball game. It also happens to be true. Every person attending a major league baseball game -- from the youngest child being indoctrinated into the ritualistic church of Baseball at the shrine known as the Ballpark [...]
I choose what I’m wearing carefully on Tuesdays. I like to show a little midriff, some shoulder. In a bar, before I play, I look around and notice other people’s midriffs and shoulders. I look at the curve of bodies bending across tables and feel my own. I want to laugh the throaty laugh of a James Bond ingenue. I [...]
The New York City Marathon is fun to watch for several reasons. The leaves in Central Park are beautiful--still on the trees but fragile and colorful. It's moving to see the look of physical pain on the runner's faces. It's moving to see that zoned out, exultant look on the runner's faces. It's interesting to watch everyone watching these looks [...]
We arrived at Giants Stadium. There are four huge spiraling ramps through which the stadium's population of 80,000 enter and exit. They wind their way from the ground level up to the top, a huge cement coil faintly reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum, though with a more prison vibe. My friend explained that it was a tradition for all the [...]
A photo is due soon of this basketball court, along with some anecdotes, the usual bloody minded gasping for words to explain basketball prose to be found on this site and http://www.thebasketballdiaries.net
There it was, in my Inbox, mocking me. Dragging me down to its oceanic depths. Instantly, drowning me in thoughts of that horrific day downtown in August of 2000 when I attempted to swim a mile in the Hudson River. The New York City Swims people e-mailed a friendly reminder to sign up for this summer's swim, 8/4/02, from the [...]
Ellen was our captain. When they started canceling step classes at Body Strength Fitness, a small, privately owned gym on 106th Street and Broadway, Ellen clandestinely circulated a petition for the reinstatement of high-energy aerobic courses. She solicited support before and after classes. She held impromptu meetings in the locker room. She kept the whole of the high-impact faction up [...]
So then we had enough for a full court and in the April heat we wandered over to the full court where they often fence the whole thing off to shoot commercials because of the way that building rises dramatically up above it, the massive open space of all that asphalt the smack of a softball, your head jerking up [...]
A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy's Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole--back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man "Puffy" opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the local blue collar types could [...]
The play was going to be close. The runner, my best friend Sam, was trying to go from first to third on a ball lined into the gap in right center field. But the guy in right had jumped off with the bat-crack and knifed in smoothly. He’d gloved the ball and was launching a low hard wicked throw to [...]
1. Lasker Rink: Central Park at 108th St. "I can shoot better than you," this six-year-old boy is taunting as we're slapping pucks against the boards. He's referring to the wrist shot technique I'm trying to demonstrate which apparently he finds unimpressive, and I have to admit I don't blame him, though the sting of his jab is lessened by [...]
“It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.” --Erica Jong I’ve started to go running at 6 am. I am not a competitive runner: I don’t run daily, I don’t clock mileage and I don’t sport special athletic duds. I am a runner for time. Well slept, [...]
On a lazy hot August afternoon my parents and I emerged from the coolness of the Walter Reade theatre at Lincoln Center after seeing a movie from the sixties. It might have been Italian, maybe something by Visconti - my memory of it has been erased by subsequent events. We ran into my co-worker Jim who had also been in [...]
"Gotta Knit," is on the second floor of a walk up on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. I heard about it from my girlfriend when she waltzed in the door one day and said, "I’m back from my knitting lesson," all breezy and matter of fact. "Your what?" I said. She told me about "Gotta Knit!" and all the women [...]
The night was thick and hot and I was done playing, ready to go home, but Dan persuaded me to have one more beer with him. He looked like a cartoon character: large head, square matinee-idol hair and perfect shiny teeth. I had lost my match; he had won. Dan was bright and funny and he was feeling garrulous, as [...]
