Basketball represents a social event for some, a way of life for others

11:52 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 14, 2006

By SCOTT FARWELL and PAUL MEYER / The Dallas Morning News

Mark Cuban may own the team, but the Mavs belong to the masses.

From Highland Park to Fair Park, along Munger and Main, through a city that cleaves easily into geographic and economic and racial quarters, the NBA playoffs offer a glimpse of a unified Dallas.

Viewed another way, they illustrate an emotional divide about the meaning of the game.

Tuesday night during Game 3 of the Finals, Alexander Hudson slashed to the basket at Glendale Park in southern Dallas, elbowed his way inside and rattled a layup off a rusted backboard. At his feet, four names are spray-painted on the court: RIP – Wilma S., Byron L., Craig W. and Lil Sam.

"Basketball is everything down here," said Mr. Hudson, 20. "All day, every day. We're Mavericks fans all the time, not just during the playoffs."

Eleven miles away, the fashionable and privileged gather at Primo's Bar & Grille on McKinney Avenue to watch the game.

Fans blow cool mist over televisions and tables. Women with plunging designer tops mingle with actors and athletes. Men punch Blackberries while waiting for the bathroom.

"I've never been hard-core, or anything like that," Danyell Furman, 33, says of her Mavericks allegiance. "It's more the camaraderie."

There's also kinship on the court along Ledbetter Road.

Young women gather at picnic tables, tapping numbers into sequin-adorned cellphones. Old men lean on bicycles, riffing missed passes, praising rainbow jumpers.

Rivulets of sweat slide down players' arms and backs. Shorts are slung low. The game flexes and flows, erupting occasionally in an argument over the score, or in laughter over cutting comments, or in a particularly well-executed flurry of cussing.

The Mavericks-Heat score comes in periodically via text message and is shouted in from the sideline.

For all the international flavor in the league, the Dirk Nowitzkis and the Yao Mings, basketball remains an inner-city game dominated by black superstars. For many young players, the NBA offers an intoxicating dream.

"I don't think I have a kid playing who doesn't think he's going to be an NBA basketball star one day," said Robert Allen, who's coached boys basketball for 36 years, the last seven as head coach at Seagoville High School.

He said the Mavericks-inspired media binge would stoke the imagination of his players and, more important, their parents.

"We should all be allowed to dream," he said. "But we must ... be real with our kids."

Other coaches say their players get it – that books should always come before balls.

The basketball odds are stacked against them.

About three in 10,000 high school senior basketball players will eventually be drafted by an NBA team. About one of every 35 will play big-time college basketball, according to the NCAA.

Spud Webb knows both worlds. He grew up playing ball at a local rec center. His skills took him to junior college, then North Carolina State, then the NBA. And two decades ago, the 5-foot-7-inch point guard was elevated into a symbol when he took off one night in Dallas and won the slam-dunk contest at the NBA All-Star Game.

He is the success story, the wealthy former athlete sitting Tuesday night in a place where successes go.

"I never seen anything like this when I was growing up," the Wilmer-Hutchins grad said from a front table at Primo's.

"Here they come to see the Mavs win. They don't care who scored what or how many fouls somebody got."

Mr. Webb doesn't socialize. He's transfixed by the game. But during halftime, he reflects on the kids playing ball on the urban courts of Dallas.

He said the street dreams are bigger now. There's television. Salaries are published in the newspapers. Everything is bigger.

"You have to have a backup plan," he said of the dreamers.

Von McDade slept with his basketball. He bounced it up the stairs of Dallas' public housing projects. He carried it to classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Mr. McDade was drafted in 1991, the same year UNLV's Larry Johnson – a former Skyline High star – went No. 1.

Today, after being cut by the New Jersey Nets, and later the Denver Nuggets, Mr. McDade is the manager of the Larry Johnson Community Recreation Center.

He sees the hope and knows the heartache to come for nearly all of the young players on the southern Dallas court he oversees. And it's no wonder.

Their imaginations are soaked in aspirations for professional sports or popular music, he said, because their lives are marinated in those role models.

"They don't see Royce West coming through here; they see Larry [Johnson]," he said. "And they don't see Condoleezza Rice because they don't have cable."

Recently, he said, a marketing group for the rapper Scarface came through to take pictures of the kids.

"You won't see Borden Milk come in here talking about 'Got Milk?' " he said. "We don't get those wholesome images."

The pickup game at Glendale Park breaks just before halftime of the Mavericks-Heat playoff game.

Quintarrus Hodges, 26, and Centanus White, 22, retreat to their two-bedroom apartment at The Villas Sorrento in southern Dallas. Perched on folding chairs before a 24-inch TV, they wash cheese popcorn down with Bud Ice and Gatorade as the teams trade leads.

Minutes later at Primo's, the moneyed crowd falls silent as Dirk stands at the line with 3.4 seconds left and a chance to tie the game. His second shot clanks off the rim.

Across Dallas, fans groan.

E-mail sfarwell@dallasnews.com and pmeyer@dallasnews.com