donbosco
Legend of ZZL
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Indulge me. It is The Madness of March.
Sport in the Age Of Atomic Obliteration. So this is strange - and personal - but this photograph, taken in 1975 at 101st Street and 1st Avenue East Harlem, NYC - has nagged at me for years. I know that I saw it somewhere, somehow - in the ‘80s. How DID we ‘get’ our info, our input once-upon-a-time anyway? To remember requires deep pondering. Pre-Internet we had books and magazines and newspapers and pamphlets and posters and album liner notes and photos and matchbooks. And our desks and tables and coffee tables and bars and backseats were strewn deep with those things. And somehow, sometimes, they still are for some of us.
The photo, called “Blaze and Basketball,” or “The Game Goes On,” was taken by Paul Hosefros, an eventually acclaimed photojournalist with the ‘NY Times.’ In 2007 in a ‘Boise Werkly’ interview he recollected to Katy Dang, about, “the circumstances under which he took that famous shot. He had been tasked up to East Harlem to copy a mug shot. As he was leaving the precinct, he saw the flames licking out of the building. He knew he had to get the shot, but his eye was drawn to the kids in the yard. Clearly, they were aware that there was a building on fire, but it didn’t affect them. They just kept right on playing. He managed to capture the juxtaposition of ordinary life and an extraordinary event. The shot fixes the place in time while being timeless; it is a specific place, but it could also be anywhere. There is a sort of universality to the picture that has given it a life of its own and made it a lasting image.”
The photograph inhabits me because in its universality it takes me to a Cold War haunting. Being born in 1958 I fall squarely into the Baby Boom generationally “they” say. That’s never meant much to me. I am, rather, by my reckoning, an Atomic Ager, born under the shadow of a mushroom cloud and raised up on assassinations and faraway wars in hard to spell places. We saw black and white and then toney technicolor images of things now forbidden - of riots and wars and beatings like they were normal - because they were. (Today we’re warned of triggers and have to ‘click’ to see)
And we all, from Bonlee to East Harlem, knew about The Doomsday Clock and that it tick-tocked near to Apocalypse. I had been relieved once to think that the remoteness of Deep Chatham protected me from The Bombs, then a college age, real Boomer, pointed out to little me that our Tar Heel pride, the Research Triangle Park, and the three basketball-crazy universities nearby, Carolina, State, and Duke, together constituted a big enough, and close enough, target that the pastoral isolation of Bonlee was probably an illusion. If that wasn’t enough, the proximity of Fort Bragg, with us tucked nicely between the two, was actually the real reason that we were cooked should that Clock go off.
Of course in the days when “Blaze and Basketball” ‘happened’ I knew nothing about Harlem save the musical Legends of The Apollo Theater and the radical call for freedom of Malcolm X and overall the tales if a blighted Big Apple. It was as faraway of a place as Da Nang or Dien Bien Phu. But I did know basketball and had read of Rucker Park. I was, frankly, in love with basketball and read everything I could get my hands on about the NBA, the soon-to-be defunct ABA, on of course, The Atlantic Coast Conference.
And there’s the connection, the tie that binds, like the other Atomic Agers in that photo that beloved game distracted and distressed and comforted me in a time of stark truths. My own Atomic Age musing, projected onto a rural outside, dirt court hoop and backboard went like this: I’m outside and shooting free throws alone. I stand at the line and begin my motion, (which is a habitual comfort now going on 50+ years). And then I see in the distance, behind the backboard, a mushroom cloud erupt. I’m fried-we’re all fried-but I follow through, trying as always as hard as I can, to make the shot. I hit it, then The End.
I am drawn to this confluence of ponderings these days, on thus day, as we war again in “faraway places with strange sounding names” and madmen rewind The Doomsday Clock. I live in Harlem now, in a New York City troubled but hardly blighted. The threats now come by way of billionaires and Washingtonians capped by red hats and fantasy history. Piedmont North Carolina is still dear to me though now I am mostly estranged as so many of my people are enthralled by fake news and even faker “patriots”
Of course there’s always and eternally basketball. Firestorm be damned! You’ve got to hit your free throws.
