The North Carolina Tar Heels. The legacy of this esteemed college basketball program conjures up words like prestige, championships, class and dominance, along with Hall of Fame names like Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Dean Smith. They’ve won 27 ACC regular season titles, 17 ACC tourney titles, competed in 18 Final Fours and captured five National Championships.
The question that begs to be answered is how did the program ascend to such rarefied heights. Read More »
The Dunk! The Ram! The Slam! The Bong! Whatever you want to call it, it’s an art form, birthed on the playground, that has revolutionized the way the game is played. And in game 4 of the Western Conference playoff battle between the Houston Rockets and Pheonix Suns on May 5th, 1994, Kevin Maurice Johnson threw down one of the illest yokes of all-time. Read More »
all photos: courtesy of georgia tech sports imformation
Kenny! No last name necessary. Say it on any playground in NYC and everybody knows who you’re talking about. Even the young cats who are on the come up, if they ball on the asphalt of the concrete jungle’s five boroughs, they’ve heard about the legend of Kenny Anderson.
In the most recent issue of Bounce Magazine, #21, we sat down with Kenny to unearth the story of his formative years. To really understand how the playground gave us one of the greatest phenoms in NYC history and hear from the man, in his own words, you need to cop the issue immediately. Read More »
Christopher Paul Mullin was a simple, neighborhood guy from Troy Avenue in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. The love affair with hoops was a multi-generational thing that began in the driveway of the family’s small row house. Read More »
TNT announcer Kenny Smith wasn’t giving props at last year’s dunk contest to anyone who went with an unoriginal dunk. If it was done before, he and the crowd demanded more. Rudy Gay went straight to youtube to find the moves for the slam dunk contest. Dwight Howard and Gerald Green came with props, using cupcakes and capes to revive the event that many said was playing itself out. Now that the bar is raised and people are looking forward to the contest, I’m personally waiting for someone to add some streetball/b-boy flavor to the festivities. We got players lobbing and kicking the ball to dunkers. How ’bout some “Alimoe-B-boy” aka “The Section 8″ to add more flavor to the event.
The Section 8 movement is for all my brothers and sisters who came up from the jects, tenements, and homes that were looking for someone to notice their skills. I’m down with it and a part of it. Alimoe is one of the most original ball handlers in the world. His infamous “wrap the ball around the defenders head and then pass it off the backboard to himself for a dunk” is a game-executed move that was done at EBC and the Holcombe Rucker Tournament. Here are some good “section 8″ suggestions. Read More »
“It was all a dream…”, B.I.G.’s opening lyrics to Juicy
It’s no mere coincidence that as we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream, along with the historic Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama and the dream that he represents, that this offering in “The Playground Gave Us…” pantheon focuses on b-ball’s “Dream”. Read More »
During this holiday season, I’ll be dipping into the archives to offer up some updated goodies in the form of some of the most delectable “The Playground Gave Us…” joints from ‘08.
She rose out of North Philly’s notorious Raymond Rosen housing projects – where she used to put in during pick runs with the likes of Hank Gathers and other legends – to become the greatest point guard ever in the history of the women’s game. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the skills of lead men extraordinaire Isiah Thomas and Kenny Anderson had nothing on Dawn Staley. Read More »
