From Rucker Park to San Francisco | Sports activities

Within the imaginary that American cinema and tales have created round basketball, there’s virtually at all times a court docket in the course of the road. With their baskets surrounded by gates and low stands. With their midfield duels. Along with his inconceivable performs that appear like capers. With the dream of reaching, at some point, skilled basketball. Like all the things, that imaginary began from the reality. As a result of to start with, these avenue courts arose from necessity —a basket or a hoop match wherever— and supplied a platform for the combination of tens of hundreds of people that got here to the massive cities. In addition they helped to vary a sport practiced largely by whites and with plenty of weight from the Catholic order. The filigree, the mate or the go from behind started to make a spot for themselves within the sport of the basket. The basketball we all know in the present day —and the one we do not— drinks from these sources.

Exactly on a kind of legendary fields —New York’s Rucker Park— begins coast to coast (In opposition to), the journey via the USA of the Galician journalist Fernando Mahía. A solo journey of a number of months aboard a Dodge Gran Caravan via the intrahistory of American basketball, but additionally via that of the nation itself. Mahía writes a chapter-report on every cease on the journey. In the long run, the set provides a whole map of the nation’s panorama and peasantry. He talks about basketball, sure, but additionally about immigration, inequality, success, damaged desires, uprooting, myths that stay within the reminiscence of the neighborhood. He chats with very attention-grabbing characters, discovers corners, traces tales that inform the current via the previous. A daring journey that leaves a really nicely written ebook, watered with a effective humorousness and an air of everlasting melancholy, visiting locations the place the thoughts had beforehand traveled. Final cease, 15,932 kilometers later, San Francisco.

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