The Cage

The rest of the Dubuque stories are not going to be told in chronological order necessarily. I'm just going to tell them as they come to me. "The cage" was a fenced in blacktop playground with two full court basketball courts located at an old downtown Dubuque church. The church was built in the northern section of the city in what we called the "low end", a vast downtown located on the flats below the limestone cliffs of Dubuque and the Mississippi River valley. To really set the stage and describe the whole ambiance of The Cage and of the city some descriptions of the lay out and the history of the city has to be told. Dubuque is an old city built on and around the many underground mines that exist throughout the local region. A geology teacher I had at UD said there were miles and miles of mine shafts and tunnels through out the city. The architecture of the buildings was Victorian style mostly,with lots of brick and limestone, and with houses and neighborhoods built on every cliff and on every nook and cranny imaginable. The downtown was huge compared to that of the ICE. Dubuque's downtown stretched north a couple of miles with numerous mini small business districts and neighborhoods. Most of the residential districts were built up on the cliff tops. All the brick buildings and churches reminded me of Chicago. In the 1960's the population of the D was near 90,000 persons. In the 1990's the population was a mere 60,000. A huge portion of the storefronts on the low end were boarded up. The downtown was like a ghost town, thanks in most part to recessions that hit the Mississippi River towns in Iowa during the 1980's. The film "Take This Job and Shove It" was filmed at the Dubuque Star brewery. There seemed to be a bar on every block in the city. I loved to play basketball anywhere and everywhere and like I used to do in the IC I traveled around Dubuque looking for courts to play and dunk on. The Cage and its surroundings looked like it came straight out of a huge inner city.
The antagonist of this story is none other than a kid named Mick Glajoe (pronounced French style according to Mick). Big Swan befriended Mick, and Glajoe actually became a roommate of mine at the crazy ass Wilson Street pad during the summer before my sophomore year at UD. Mick loved to talk a big game, and one night while hanging around the house he started talking smack about how he could whip me on the basketball court. I couldn't even take him seriously, but he kept talking junk. I was like, "Look Mick, you better pipe down because your making a fool of yourself." Some of our roommies like Big Stace added fuel to the fire by provoking us to make a wager. It was late and dark when the smack started flowing but it was probably late summer time or early autumn so it wasn't cold outdoors. Mick put up a new pair of Nike's for the wager(he worked at an old Dubuque shoe store called Kunert's) and I put up? I can't remember what. So we all climbed into a few cars, about eight dudes or so, maybe a few honeys came too, and headed to The Cage. Once there the cars parked facing the best hoop (flattest surface and straightest rim) with all the headlights left on in order to illuminate the ass kicking that was about to transpire. The game was not close. I knew I could beet him with one hand tied behind my back. The final score was like 10 to 1 or something. It was a bit nippy out but I think I even managed to throw a weak dunk down on him. He never payed up on the bet. I didn't give a damn about the game, but the whole memory of playing in the cage at night with the car headlights shining and a whole bunch of cats that were from Chicago and other places where basketball was viewed as an ancient art that was deeply woven into the culture of the inner city youth and especially black America, watching and rapping and jiving while the game was going on, is what I appreciate most about the memory of the experience. Mick Glajoe is in a few other of the Dubuque memories and stories that float around in my head, but some of the best Glajoe tales are not directly basketball related.

Asbury Park

This was the main outdoor spot for pick up games during the summers in Dubuque. Asbury was a suburb located to the north of Dubuque, and it had a nice park with a swimming pool and tennis courts and one really nice outdoor basketball court. The court had a smooth synthetic tennis court like surface and the rims were a couple inches low. Lots of memories playing at Asbury. Havatake said his favorite dunk of mine was when he threw me an ally oop from half court and I two handed dunked it on a kid (my nutts in his face) that used to date one of Havatake's old girlfriends. One time Big B and I came up to UD from the ICE in the summer and drank some 40 oz's and then went to Asbury to hoop it up. That day I decided to wear some old kicks I bought in Chicago's Jew town years earlier. They were old and beat up but I wore them for memories sake and for good luck. The kicks were made by a company called "Jump". The crowd at Asbury were dogging my Jump shoes on the sidelines. I recall Darby laughing and pointing when I made a stutter step cut and scraped my Jumps on the surface as I crossed up my defender on the way to the higher far hoop for two. I know one thing about that day. I got more rebounds than anyone. Big Mo and D Rog were there and I remember after the game hanging out, chiefing a blizzunt and getting their confirmation on my rebound prowness, but even they were miffed at my decision to sport the Jumps. I loved the fact that everyone was clowning me, and I had to explain to Big B about the many levels of "the game" and the mojo power of using or wearing an old item that has certain sentimental nastalgic value. The power of this story more than makes up for any negative affects I suffered from the experience of having people dog my shoes. Wearing those old Jumps was pure me, and it seems few others in my life ever understood my way of thinking when it came to things like this. Mick Glajoe was at Asbury the day I wore my old Jump sneaks from Jew town, and maybe after hearing the remarks on the sidelines about the old paint covered low tops I was wearing he got the idea in his head that I sucked at basketball. Big mistake on his part and the whole story of the Cage match against Glajoe reveals the hustle in the game, or maybe it goes even so far as to reveal the hustler inside of me.