During a break in the first half of last Sunday’s Public League championship basketball game, the public-address announcer read a list of the five previous champions. “Nineteen-eighty-four Public League champion–Simeon Vocational,” he said. Screams, hoots, and applause came from various sections of the crowd. “Nineteen-eighty-five champion–Simeon.” Same response, a little bit louder. “Nineteen-eighty-six Public League champion–Martin Luther King High School.” All the previously quiet areas of the Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Chicago–which is where the game took place–suddenly came alive. The response was not as loud as that for Simeon, but it was more intense. Boos came from the Simeon areas. It was like hearing the separate small skirmishes on a large battlefield. “Nineteen-eighty-seven champions–King.” Same responses, only louder. “And 1988 champions, defending champions of the Chicago Public League–Simeon.” And now everyone was screaming in one way or another, hooting or booing, clapping or razzing, in that shrill, high-pitched tone familiar to us all from high school assemblies.
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Undefeated Simeon took the court first for its warm-up session. Dressed in white-and-gold sweat suits, the players split into two groups, ran down the sidelines to the far end of the court, high-fived one another as they formed concentric circles, then swung back to the other side of the court–the two groups running figure-eight patterns–where they repeated the high-five procedure. Then the King players came out, dressed in darker, black-and-gold sweats, a figure of their mascot jaguar on the back, and the two teams formed two tangent circles almost automatically and slapped one another’s hands as they passed. Simeon’s rooters obviously outnumbered those from King, but the King fans were a sturdy lot, loud and proud, and they were backed up by a band, which punctuated the events in a very partisan manner throughout the early evening.
King’s fans, its players, and its coach all adopt the attitude of the outnumbered outsider. Simeon, meanwhile, has the confident elegance of a basketball-court boulevardier. King, coached by the irritable, brazen Sonny Cox, had bypassed the usual early-season showdown between the two teams when it declined to play in the Mayor’s Tournament this season, accepting an invitation to another holiday meet. Simeon had, as a result, rolled through the mayor’s tourney and through the rest of the season. King, meanwhile, had slipped once, making them underdogs in Sunday’s title game. Now, not only had the two teams won the last five Public League championships, but twice during that stretch they had met in the title game, with King winning in 1986 and Simeon last year.
Crawford is a short, muscular, scrappy guard, the sort who–in his every aspect on the court–reflects an attitude of deprivation and transcendence. In short, he sets out to make each opponent pay for the gods’ neglect in not granting him an extra six inches of height. Listed at five foot nine, he may be more than three inches shorter than that, but he is–nevertheless–a fine player. He displayed his character in the first quarter, when he drove the lane, stopped, took the open shot, popped, and then guarded Snipes, chest to chest, all the way back up the court, jawing at him, talking dirt, and giving him a bit of verbal in-your-face the whole long trip. He’s a tenacious defender, a real fyce dog–hiking up his shorts, pursing out his lips, getting low to the ground, and yapping all the time–and at the end of the first half he found himself guarding Brandon after a switch-off and hounded him into a bad shot to end the period, holding King to a 30-24 lead. The mustache he was working to grow was only slightly darker than his closely cropped scalp.
We were sitting in the first row of the balcony, at center court, and the main King cheering sections were across the floor, one near each hoop–the band at one end, the pep-club-type kids at the other. As the clock ticked down, they grew increasingly ebullient. The band threw in bursts of everything from Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” to Kool Moe Dee’s “Wild Wild West,” and the pepsters answered back with the various rhythmic chants common to high school sports, finishing with “We’re going downstate!” My companion for the day–an old political/media pal I’ve known since the days earlier in the decade when we were both, for a time, court reporters–was no more familiar with the scene than I was. In fact, neither of us had been to a high school game since, well, since we had been there ourselves. It all came back, though–at once familiar and, now, quite distant–the easy emotionalism, the intense self-involvement, the feeling of being part of something larger (even if it is only your damn high school). The game ended, the Simeon players slouched on their bench as the King players gloried at center court. Crawford broke into sobs, we’re sorry to point out, but was consoled with a brief embrace by Snipes. Only a couple of minutes later, though, there he was, dancing at center court as the team lined up to accept its trophy. Snipes stood out in front of them, between the team and the presenter, and he grooved to the brassy band music. He kicked one leg, then the other; he threw an arm over his head and straightened it out, then the other; and then he tipped forward and fell into the arms of his teammates.
