NAGLE AVENUE-PROLOGUE

This book is a lifetime project. It didn’t start on a set date, it evolved from day to day, month by month, year by year. It was born out of my unconditional love for a city, New York, and an immense fascination with its sports stories, basketball in particular. During my sportswriting career, I’ve collected anecdotes, stories, informations about New York. I tried to write them down, and I did it several times. Every now and then, I found out about something new, about this park, this team, this player, this connection. A book about New York basketball is a never ending prject. I published the first version in Italy, back in 2000. I tried to update it many times, and every time basically I wrote a completely new book. Now, I hope this is something final, and I did it in English because it sounds better, it sounds new.
It’s impossible - I guess - to write a New York basketball story. This is not a story. This is a collection of stories. I tried to cover as many bases as possible. NBA, playgrounds, street basketball stories, college basketball stories, some of them ancient, many of them forgotten. For a true New York basketball expert maybe none of them will sound completely new, unheard of. I didn’t want to discover anything. But for many regular fans, some of them could reveal a new aspect, a different perspective, a different era. In truth, I wanted to write them all, because it’s in fact a lifetime project and this is some sort of a closure. At least until a new story emerges.
So…
Everything starts from this place. Nagle Avenue. It’s a special place that I visited because my great friend Arthur Kenney, who is an unknown player from the ‘60s and ‘70s in the U.S., who was a great, great personality for almost a decade in Europe

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