Anybody who has played basketball at the Sunday morning Graham and Parks School game knows it’s a fun time. What you may not know is that this game has been going on, with lots of changes, of course, for a long time – at least 30 years by my reckoning, maybe more like 40.
Here’s how I know.
Mid 90s era:
It was around 1996 and I’m living in a Porter Square triple decker with my girlfriend and I say I’d love to play some basketball. I had only recently moved back to Boston so didn’t know a lot of people but she mentions a guy she knows who likes to play ball, Andrew. I call him and he says he plays at a school in Cambridge. I start going.
The vibe is pretty easy-going. I hear about this basketball league called Never Too Late which fits the description of a lot of people at this point. They never played high school but started hooping as adults. A good number of women, including Brenda who played hard, and Martine who was the wife of Steve, the original organizer of this game.
When he was in law school, he started renting the gym and organizing games. Their son at the time was like 8 or 9 so the first game at the school could well have been in the 80s.
The joke is that we’re the JV team and the varsity team plays after us at 11. Led by Rob, these guys are more serious ballers. Shannon, who was a great ball handler and playmaker, plays with both teams, slowly elevating the games of the little folks. I play the later game once in a while too.
2000s
My attendance starts to get spotty after my son is born in 2001. The cast of characters changes. Peter, who had moved from California, Edith, Paul W, and a bunch of guys from JP, including Chris A. Kevin brings his young daughter who hangs around the bleachers while we play.
I have good memories of this period – good games, classic matchups – Ira versus Paul L!
A combination of these people also play at the Cambridge Community Center during the week.
At some point, Peter and Edith get married and have a child! They drag her to the gym many Sunday mornings. Many of the JP guys abandon us for a game closer to home.
2010s
I start coming more regularly but I can’t recall exactly when. The floor gets a badly needed upgrade (photo of old one above.)
This might be when a flashy point guard from San Diego who does brain surgery on the side starts showing (whassup Thai). The game stays true to its Cambridge roots when Jason and for a while his brother start showing up, elevating the game up a notch.
Memorable one-liner: During a break in the action, Ira once says to me “It’s not as weird being 58 as it sounds.” Paul plays into his 70s. Robert C. needs to retire from hoops as his knees have other ideas.
A few of us play at the Play Forever League in the sweltering heat of Fidelity House in Arlington (former stomping grounds of Pat Connaughton of the Bucks.) Jason leads the league in rebounds but we get eliminated in the playoffs. My son, now in high school, actually subs in one game and hits a three pointer off the glass at the buzzer – classic moment.
2020s
Covid shuts down the game for a long time. A core group plays a little bit outside here and there.
Bahij, self-appointed commissioner, brings in some young blood (unstoppable Mike, others) much to my chagrin. The game is in full swing post pandemic.
I just returned after a bit of a hiatus and realized that I may be the longest serving baller, so I felt compelled to write a bit of this down. I’m quite sure some of the details are wrong and I’ve left out a lot of people too.
For me, this has been a wonderful journey. I was never able to play on the high school team in Newton so this is me realizing my teenage dreams – many years later!!!
Leave your comments below with your own memories.
Fantastic idea to chronicle the history of this game, Martin! But one small correction–*I* am now the longest serving member of this not-quite-fraternity! (Edith is the last woman player standing—she still plays through her hip pain every now and then.)
I’ve been playing in this game since 1991, when my then-girlfriend flagged an offering from the Cambridge Center for Adult Ed—a “Better Basketball” class. I’d played a bunch since my teens but was never much good, never had any coaching, and hadn’t played at all for a while. So it seemed like a good idea. The class was led by a guy named Steve Bzomowski, who’d played at Fordham and had been an assistant coach at Harvard. We played in the old cage next to Harvard stadium and in the class was a guy named Tom Martin, who before long invited me to join him in a weekly Sunday morning game at what was then the Peabody School in Cambridge.
It was a fully co-ed group then, and somewhat rag-tag, including a bunch of folks like me who weren’t very good, or fit. Some days we even played on the short court in half of the gym because some folks couldn’t run full. Even by that time the game had been going on for quite a while—maybe back to the mid-’70s—and I’m pretty sure Tom was a charter member, along with fellow player Steve Linsky, then among the best players in the bunch. Maybe also Andrew Spooner, who I believe was the Andrew who recruited Martin. (Tom/Steve, if you’re on this list, please fill in the blanks here!) And the culture of the game was firmly established—competitive but friendly, no grousing, respect the call, share the ball, keep everyone involved, winners step off if there’s a third team waiting to play, welcoming to anyone who’s willing to fit whatever level of play they bring into our way of playing together. —A culture which has somehow lasted through three-plus decades more and hundreds of players cycling through.
Over the next few years the game got better as we picked up new players and some of us old players picked up new skills under the tutelage of coach Bz, who quickly turned his Better Basketball class into Never Too Late Basketball, a still-thriving program for older players like us. I took his classes pretty much straight through for the next five years and don’t think I’ve ever had a more satisfying experience than really learning to play this game under his guidance.
In 1996 I moved to the Bay Area for three years but came back a few times a year to visit work HQ and family, and when I did I’d stop in and play on Sunday mornings. Martin joined the game sometime in there, along with Kevin Massey and Paul Williams, who also still play today. Also Paul Levinson and Ira Topping, who I believe also came to the game via NTL and who played through injuries into the their late 60s (Ira) and early 70s (Paul) before retiring just before Covid.
Also Edith. Edith came to the game with Paul W., her then-boyfriend. Like her, I was otherwise engaged when we met on the court, but we noticed each other and five or six years later, after we’d both moved on from those relationships and a few others, we started hanging out together and before long had bought a house together, had a kid and gotten married. The gift of NTL just kept giving.
Sometime around the time I moved back from CA a few Sunday players started—or maybe merged with?—a Thursday night game at the Cambridge Community Center, so many of us were playing together twice a week. If we were short a player or two some of the local high school kids who’d hang around the gym would step in, or janitors Buzz or RJ might put down their brooms and join in for a few points. That game, alas, closed up for good with the pandemic.
Edith and I have both lived in JP since before we got together, and in the early 2000s I recruited my JP neighbor Chris Arnold, who in turn recruited most of the rest of the JP crew that Martin referred to—David, Josh, Ken—maybe half a dozen at its peak. After a decade or so of schlepping across the river they mostly defected for their own local game, but Edith and I were not going to be better-dealed by an upstart outfit, no matter how much more convenient. We were locked in with the Cambridge crew. We love the game and its enduring culture. We also love the friends we’ve made—and keep making—there. I think the game was the thing I missed most during the pandemic, and was happiest to have finally restart.
Thirty two years in, two major leg surgeries later and bearing down on 65, the arc of my skills and ability has risen (never very high) and fallen again (not yet quite as low as where I began) but I still feel welcome in the gym and gratified that I can still occasionally beat most of the rest of the bunch down court, make a decent shot, grab a rebound or hit someone with just the right pass. It’s still the most fun I ever have and I’ll keep playing until I can’t do it any more.
This is great Peter! Thanks for the additional info and context. I must have started while you were away in CA because I remember you showing up — hence I thought you were “new” 🙂
You guys are all lucky I live in Montreal at the moment because I would be busting your butts every Sunday!
I moved from Brookline to Cambridge in 1990. A friend came to visit and said he played basketball down the street at what was then called the Peabody school. He asked if perhaps his daughter could come to my house on Sunday mornings and play with my son while he was at basketball so his wife could have time to work on the book that she was writing (which later won the Pulitzer Prize for biography) When he and his daughter arrived the next Sunday he talked me into going to the school to have a look even though I had never played basketball in my life . It was supposed to be 3 on 3 half court but someone hadn’t shown up so they begged me to play in my jeans and tee shirt. It was fun even though I sucked. Synchronicity; The Cambridge Adult Ed Catalog came that week and a new course was offered called, “Never too Late Basketball” I signed up and soon was at the Harvard Field House (soon to be demolished and replaced by the swimming complex) learning how to dribble with a great group of people that also apparently had never stepped on a basketball court basketball before.
I believe Peter was a member of that group and I might have mentioned the Peabody game. Over the years, most of the original group was replaced by Never to Late Alumni and friends and was great exercise. I miss the game and the camaraderie. Perhaps I will play there again when I am a little younger…
I joined somewhere in the early ‘90s, invited by my wife’s brother Gil, shortly after we moved to Cambridge and our kids were born. I originally only played the Thursday evening game, which included Andrew, Patrick, Gil, Edith, and Paul W, and others. But shortly, I negotiated Sunday mornings, too, by offering to bring our toddlers so my wife could sleep in. Son Dashiell spent his time in the gym engrossed in a book and eventually decided he could do the same at home. Daughter Kassia literally climbed the gym walls when not begging to play in the game. She eventually got her wish to play, which lasted about a year before adolescence made the idea of waking up before noon on Sundays unthinkable.
Growing up in northern Minnesota, grade school recess basketball in winter was exclusively a passing game as the cold-deflated ball would not bounce on the packed snow. Spring was a little easier when our boots and heavy coats could come off. But I didn’t play much after grade school. By the time I started playing again in Cambridge, my 6th grader’s muscle memory for basketball had to awkwardly adapt to an out of shape adult’s body. It wasn’t a pretty sight that first year, but I got better and playing soon became an indispensable pillar of my life.
I eventually took a NTL course when I heard about from other players, but I came to the conclusion (probably shared with the instructor) that it wasn’t so much a matter of being too late in my case, but rather of just being inherently uncoachable. Several players have tried to give me advice for improving my outside shot over the years, usually starting with, “have you tried looking at the basket when you shoot?”
It’s been about 3 decades of playing now, interrupted occasionally by ruptured disks, rolled ankles, and an ACL rupture, with a few facial cuts requiring stitches given and received. (I no longer count finger jams as injuries but just a fact of life.)
I have so many great memories from my early years of this long lasting game:
– Andrew’s fadeaway jumper
– Gil’s post-up moves
– Paul L’s endless pursuit of “nothin’ but net”
– Ira’s effortless outside shots from the wings
– Peter’s windmill drives to the basket
– Tom’s (apparently patented) steals from behind, just when you thought you were past him
– Paul L’s giving Kassia her first shooting lessons, making his arms into a rim and offering his head as backboard
– Edith’s non-stop motion that often left her wide open for full-court lobs
– Thai’s “let’s give ‘em a game!” when the score seems hopeless
– The bliss of movement in the brief interlude between fully warmed up and exhausted
Paul Levenson writes:
Good morning Martin,
below, I offer some of my reflections on the pick up basketball games that took place on Sunday mornings At the Graham and Parks school…. and how they were connected to the Thursday evening games that went on for many many years at the Cambridge community Center. My initial connection took place when I saw a sign in Elsie’s restaurant in Harvard Square. It was the home of the famous RB special. A roast beef sandwich with some kind of Russian dressing. The small place was extremely popular. I saw a sign there for basketball lessons posted by Steve Bzomowski who was the assistant basketball coach of the team at Harvard. I started taking some of Steve’s classes to build and sharpen my own basketball skills. It was there that I met certain players who were participating in pick up games. Perhaps it was Tom Martin, who invited me to the Sunday morning game.
Very soon I became the person who kept the books, rented the spaces and organized the games both at the Cambridge community Center and the Sunday morning game at Graham and Parks public school. Fortunately the people at the Cambridge Community Center trusted me so I had a key to the building and we could enter early or stay late.I played at both gyms for many years until my knees gave out at age 74.
Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the Sunday morning game as well as the Thursday evening game was the incredible diversity of the players. We had players who grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, Nepal, China, Croatia and Thailand.
I always thought that someone should have done an article on our mini United Nations. There were blacks, Muslims Jews and Chrisians – all of us getting along… except some very friendly trash talk – which I miss!
An interesting anecdote: I distinctly remember Stephen Linsky’s last game. I remember clearly the very last shot that he made before he left the gym and moved to Western Massachusetts. The shot was from around the top of the key, and the ball dropped into the bottom of the net without touching the rim. I may have said some old time remark like “Tickle the twine!!!” A beautiful final basket for him… Then he walked off.
Ahoy Martin, from the distant shore of 81 years old… thanks for doing this…
Nothing-But-Net-Paul