Saturday

For a stretch after college all the way up until I started having kids there was nothing more magical than Saturday morning hoops. 

There were a couple of different runs over the years and the last one I really got to enjoy hit right as my life was really shifting. During college, Saturdays were for sleeping in and I was religious about Friday runs, best way to finish off the week. After college living in SF the best run was Koret at 8am. It went three courts deep, USF players and coaches would drift down. Anwar McQueen was a favorite. They had 4 full size courts stacked one after the other and the first court was the best. It was an “I got next” game the whole way through, you would call next then try to grab your five. I usually went with at least 3-4 guys but we’d get split as we went, all of us were good enough to usually get the “come run with us” nod if we lost. Good tough runs, usually done by 11 am. You had to get a day pass to get in which was always for some reason a problem. We would always be sneaking in past somebody, just the sort of gatekeeping that only effects the young. 

Those were great courts. Hagan Gym tucked away at the back of the “modern” Koret Center was accessed by going up three separate stairwells, past the racquetball courts. 

“As for that USF gym, it was built in 1958, meaning the school’s greatest moments — along the way to winning the 1949 NIT at Madison Square Garden and back-to-back NCAA championships in the Bill Russell years (1955-56) — took place largely at Kezar Pavilion. The late Pete Newell, who coached the ’49 team, once recalled that there was a USF gym on Page Street, “but you might say it was a bit run-down. There was a cathouse in the apartment complex above it. Drunks would wander in and out, walking right by us while we were practicing. When it rained, we couldn’t use one end of it because kids had thrown bricks through the windows.”

The fog rolls deep in the morning when you park up on the structure, by the time you come out in the afternoon the sky has lifted and you have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the headlands, the DeYoung (both the old and then the spaceship). The upper gym is a sort of treasure tucked away, it’s where the old Dons practices used to be run before they moved over to War Memorial. USF has a little bit of San Francisco magic to it. It had the Bill Russell dominating years, but it also oddly had the Bill Cartwright years. It’s got the whiff of an Irish Catholic lilt to it’s campus, like Pat Donnegan is going to come red faced out of a corner and talk to you about the benefits of a 2-1-2 zone press. 

When I moved out to Walnut Creek for my first real job that then became my career I for a while kept coming back to the City for hoops, I struggled to find anything to replace Koret and all the other runs I’d gotten into. I tried the local Rec Center populated by the Juco All Stars, the “coaches screwed me” kinda guys who didn’t get back on D and never passed, they also damn sure never cut or played help defense. I quickly abandoned those runs. The floors were dusty and the games dustier. 

I went upscale and tried the Club Sport, populated by high school football players and guys straight off the treadmill, better but so inconsistent. Some days you’d show and it was great, some days you’d never want to come back. My problem was one of self as well. I don’t really score. I’m tall, I play defense, I set screens for buckets, I get rebounds, I could score in the post then and shoot but mainly I won making everyone else better. I could win every game on a Saturday and never score but I had to play with the right guys. 

I wandered into the Big C in Concord and felt pretty immediately at home. It was a place with old guys and gals doing squats in grey sweat suits with leather weight belts on. People were there for the sweat not show. The hallways had people who would say hello. It was sort of an upscale Ordinary Joes.

The hoops were consistent if not spectacular. Not too many dunks, but you could count on your guys to cut, play d, set off ball screens, hit jumpers and move. The little things that make playing more of a biological game. One where if it’s going right everyone feels like one organism. Not a lot of iso, hero ball. This was when Kobe still ran the league, where 1-4 flat was the go to in lots of coaches arsenals. At the Big C we ran offense. If you got stubborn and tried to iso your guy at the top defenses would just load up and beat the crap out of you for your trouble. The court was small, half court was only a step or two past the three. I used to have to warm my arm up to throw outlet passes when I played on a regular court. I got used to playing there and all my outlets would die at halfcourt on a regular floor. 

Saturdays for a stretch there were amazing. We used a chalkboard (which I found out later was stocked by one of my friends with whatever was the cheapest chalk on sale at Rite Aid). First ten would be split up “equally”. I used my lack of scoring as a cudgel to load my teams up as much as I could, but there were always disputes. Every day started with a series of arguments about “whoa no you can’t have Shay and Rich!” or subtle last picks of the ten matchups. Guys would intentionally try to be in the 11 or 12 spot so they could get a non split up team. It was endless fun. When guys would try to get off a bum team because they kept losing (happened to me, happened to us all) cries of “it’s on the board!” would be heard from all over. 

20 guys was perfect, you waited at most 1 game, at 20 we played 3 wins and sit, which pulled both bench teams in. 19 was a really tough break because winners could stay on all morning. The amount of lawyering, bartering, running into the weight room or looking down the hall to see if “Brad” or whoever was coming in was constant. It was all part of the fun. In my late 20’s at about noon or after 5-6 games it was over to the café for a pitcher of beer and then back into the gym to watch and heckle while the stragglers kept playing. Those were the really fun days. We had the Rodriguez Brothers, Jose and Danny and whatever cousins they brought that day. Jose a nimble big guy with Raiders and A’s tat’s got married young and was already way ahead of us on kids. Danny the golden boy was the savvy point guard, ex high school quarterback. Danny Del Moral, spoke broken English, looked Serbian, was 6’4” and had played for the Mexican National team was an absolute beast in the post, loved his Bood Light and was (is) one of the nicest guys I know. Bramer, the ex hockey player with a 90% 10 footer that looked like a spastic shot it showed me all the similarities in hip checking between hockey and hoops. Rey Viado the guy like Bramer in his early 40’s then, always a smile, always in a good mood, always happy to have a beer. So many others. We would sit there for hours drinking beer, bullshitting about the games that morning about who played how. What guy was a hack, who you couldn’t stop no matter what (Rich), who was driving you crazy not boxing his guy out or forcing stupid shots. It being Concord Ca most of these were sunny days (at least in my memory) and we’d head out to the pool deck and sit in the sun and do it for hours more. It was a sort of run down club but it had a hot tub, pool, etc, eventually you head over shower and come back out. Eat a burger have more beer and continue the debates. Those days we’d break our debates to go play HORSE. Time stood still.