Basketball
There’s no place on Earth to play hoops like the iconic court on New York’s West 4th Street, where legends are born and weak moves to the rim are very publicly rejected.
The court is small. Start with that fact about New York City’s iconic West 4th Street park. It’s obvious enough just at a glance: If the 3-point lines were stretched back to NBA distance—to accommodate the pros who sometimes take the court there—they would nearly touch the half-court circle. Watch one of the big-time summer-league games inside the Cage, as it’s nicknamed, and it’s as if giants have colonized a child’s play set.
But try to find out exactly how far from the regulation size the court is? That’s where it gets interesting. Google it and you will see estimates ranging from “a little smaller than regulation” (the official New York City Parks page) to fully half the standard 94 feet. The legends are evasive, too, answering only that games can feel tight, even a little claustrophobic. Kenny Graham, the founder of the summer leagues that have turned West 4th into a streetball icon and global destination, responds to the question with a coy shrug, saying only that the green-painted rectangle has “been said [to be] many sizes,” and “people love that fact about the court.” It’s as if to say: Why spoil the fun with a tape measure?
The cage rewards those who can squeeze off shots in narrow windows of space.
The unusual dimensions contribute to the aura of the place—but there’s more to it than that. They actually change the game.
Players who rely on speed and finesse find their wings clipped, because everyone is so packed in together that it might feel as if there are twice the number of players on the court. The 20-foot chain-link fence bubble-wrapping West 4th only contributes to the sense that the walls are closing in. The Cage rewards those who can squeeze off shots or gather in rebounds in slender windows of space, or better yet carve out their own real estate in the lane, moving bodies as needed in the paint—which the old-timers nicknamed Death Valley. To call it physical is a skyscraper of an understatement.
And this being New York City, some of the spectators pressed up against the other side of the fence will be hecklers, and they will let you know when you screw up. Jason Curry is the founder and president of Big Apple Basketball; he grew up watching his father compete in pickup games there and went on to play with and coach elite players on West 4th. After making a mistake in a game, he’s thought to himself: “I would’ve rather done that anyplace other than here.”
“A lot of people struggle to play at West 4th Street because of how small it is,” he says. “It’s almost like survival of the fittest. You can’t be soft in any capacity and survive on West 4th Street, or you will get eaten alive.”
The court is a grand stage.
Kenny Graham sensed that instantly about the place when he first stumbled onto it in 1976 and joined in pickup games there—that this court was unlike anything else he’d come across in his travels delivering groceries around the city. In contrast to the typical locals-only neighborhood games you’d find in different boroughs, players migrated in from all over the city, which literally meant they were from everywhere.
“There’s guys from all ethnic backgrounds that come up here to play: Jews, Italians, Irish, Black guys, Indian guys, you name it,” Graham says. “There’s no other park like that in the entire country where you have that type of diversity.”
And then there is the prime location. Most outdoor courts are tucked away in somewhat remote corners of the city, but West 4th is in Greenwich Village, right there on 6th Avenue—a major artery in Manhattan. The hub-like West 4th Street subway station empties out right next door.
“It almost gives the feeling of playing on Broadway,” Curry says, “in the sense that it’s all eyes on you.”
The court’s pickup games have long been a distraction and source of curiosity to the masses of people passing by, and going back to the 1960s there was a league there that only lasted a few years. A few coaches decided to reformulate the West 4th league, and Graham saw the potential for something big. He signed on as an official. Within two years he became co-commissioner and director.
It was in those roles that he exhibited an uncanny knack for brand building. He created Kenny Graham’s West 4th Street Pro Classic, with its own logo and line of merchandise. As the 1980s dawned, the summer league started drawing bigger and bigger names from college and pro ranks. A virtuous circle followed: As the games became more competitive, the audience sizes grew, and as the number of spectators spiked, an even higher caliber of player began arriving, putting the game on the map for more NBA stars. Dr. J dunked in the Cage back in the day.
To call playing in the cage physical is a skyscraper of an understatement.
Before long it wasn’t just native New Yorkers like Stephon Marbury, Jayson Williams and Rod Strickland who were finding their way to the diminutive playground court. Curry remembers the time a decade or so ago that Dwight Howard showed up—during the superstar, Superman Dwight Howard era, when he was arguably the world’s most electrifying player—just to watch a game.
Much of pop culture followed. Denzel Washington visited, as did Spike Lee. Hip- hop stars drop in there, and commercials for national ad campaigns are shot there. Those who never make it to West 4th in person can play there on the EA Sports video game, NBA Street V3.
The pandemic caused a one-year pause in the summer leagues. But Graham says summer league play will resume on June 25. When games restart and the city is swollen with people again, tourists will throng to the Cage, joining the crowd of regular spectators around the fence. And Graham will be selling hats and T-shirts to people from South Korea and Norway and Brazil, feeding the sense that the place is the ultimate basketball fishbowl.
“I tell people who are local: What’s on that shirt—that shirt is going to be worn all over the world,” Graham says. “All over the world!”
The court is an escape.
Jack Ryan grew up a basketball savant in Brooklyn. By the time he turned 12 none of his friends could stop him, so his brother, four years older, invited him to play with his friends. When he torched those kids, too, Ryan decided it was time to really test his game in Manhattan. “I said, ‘OK, let’s see how good I am,’ ” he recalls. It was obvious enough where to go: West 4th Street.
When you play at West 4th, you join a brotherhood. It's truly that unique.
That’s where the legend of “Black Jack” Ryan was born. Ryan infamously whiffed on opportunities to play in college and the NBA—failures documented on a Netflix show that can safely be written off to immaturity and a rough childhood. At home, his father’s nickname for him involved a variation of an F-bomb, but at West 4h, Black Jack was home. He and the court seemed made for each other. He has once kicked off a college team for showboating, but streetball is a different game; inside the Cage, his flamboyance was an asset.
Ryan once dropped 44 points on former Detroit Piston Phil Sellers, and when a friend told him as much afterward, Ryan blurted out “Who’s Phil Sellers?” According to one published account, Hall of Famer (and New York legend) Chris Mullin described Black Jack as the best shooter he’d ever seen who never played in the NBA.
Ryan sensed as much of a family there as he’d ever had back in Brooklyn. There was a stability to it. He loved that the scorekeeper, Omar, had a habit of drinking too many 40-ouncers out of paper bags before games and kept screwing up the score, prompting Graham to correct him—but Omar was always the guy who kept score regardless. The taunts and jibes from the court announcer, the game’s balletic combat, Graham’s steadfast rules against violence—it all provided some stability in a world otherwise lacking it.
He’s been the MVP in one of the leagues there and even has a tattoo of the court logo on his calf. And he still sees Leo, Sherm, Doc—all the guys he’s formed friendships with over nearly 40 years of playing there.
“Now that I’m older, it’s family,” Ryan says. “It’s my home away from home. It’s my backyard.”
The court is a community.
It sounds odd to say, because the neighborhood is so dynamic and diverse that it defies a single identity. Also, the game is so physical, it can teeter on the edge of open hostilities. After witnessing a number of fights, Graham developed zero-tolerance rules—including temporary or even lifetime bans—for people who instigate.
But there’s a shared esteem among those who take the court. All the hard- earned and carefully nurtured animosities evaporate by the time everyone returns for the next game, and the players resume their collective observance of familiar and beloved rituals: the crossovers and fadeaways and teardrop runners in the lane.
You play at West 4th, those who have taken the court say, and you join a brotherhood or sisterhood of those who have experienced something truly unique. “There’s a camaraderie that goes on there,” Curry says. “As tough as it is, as high-level as it is, there’s a respect for everybody that comes onto that court."
People watch out for each other there. When Curry was 5 years old and sitting outside the court watching his father play, a deranged man wandered past and kicked him, and everyone in the game abandoned the court to chase the fleeing assailant down the steps of the subway station.
The game here is central to so many lives. Seventy teams play in leagues there: 20 each for men and high school boys, 16 for women, 14 for middle-school teams.
Graham, now 69, shows no signs of slowing his pace despite declaring that he’s retired—because, he says, at West 4th “you see the fruits of your labor.” He’s now seeking to outsource the magic of the place, the multicultural stew that is the pride of the Cage. To that end, Graham is working with officials in the Dominican Republic to bring high school teams from New York City and other U.S. basketball hotbeds to the Caribbean island nation during the year-end holiday break, to participate in a cultural experience that also involves basketball tournaments. He views this as the next logical way to grow the West 4th Street experience.
It almost gives the feeling of playing on Broadway—all eyes on you.
And maybe it has also helped to fill his time during the pandemic—but soon enough, things will get back to normal: Players will show up as reliably as the tides, and fans who occupy the same seat or spot along the fence during the summer leagues, night after night, will resume their vigils. The Cage has been around for so long now that it is embedded in the narrative arcs of entire families, generations migrating there together, parents handing down like an heirloom the experience of watching or playing inside West 4th.
So this is true of the court, too: It’s a time capsule.
Over the decades, Manhattan endlessly morphs and shifts and reshapes itself. Buildings fall and rise again, and restaurants flip ownership and identities, and parks fall into disrepair and then are reborn. But that rectangle of hallowed hoops history shoehorned into the Village? The Cage, it seems, is forever.
