Beyond the Chicken Coop IV - Hoop Dreams

Club and community of La Domrémy (Photo: Luca Howes)

In Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021), the “chicken coop”, in reality a prison cell, comes to symbolise the isolation and foreignness of being an émigré in Paris. Inspired by the expatriate journalists at the centre of the film, Luca Howes aims to overcome this loneliness, bringing warmth and familiarity to his descriptions of the city where he is spending his year abroad.

The playground is packed. Friday 5:30pm in the Saint Paul neighbourhood of Paris means that the local sports facilities are full. Little Matéo is playing tag with Djibril and Sophie. Over at the basketball court the evening’s spate of pickup games are still warming up. On one end, the youngsters, playing 4v4 with their school backpacks on the sidelines. Someone’s phone pokes out through their jorts, Nike TNs on the blacktop, Decathlon’s finest the game ball. Bricks and airballs abound, kids testing out and growing. They want to be Kobe, Wemby or Luka, shooting stepbacks and fadeaways.

A missed pass sends my vision to the other end of the court. This end is for the pros, the heads, the real hoopers. One or two have recently graduated from the basket opposite but most have plied their trade at Saint Paul, Jemmapes or Carpentier for years, the lifeblood of the city’s thriving playground scene. Here the game is polished, the flashy moves poorly imitated by the jeunesse opposite are instead executed to perfection as lobs are thrown and dunked over defenders. The sun only came out a few weeks ago and the city has sprung to life, sunset starts at 8pm so the playgrounds are full from four o’clock until they close. I’m in shorts and a t-shirt, forever grateful to be liberated from the complexity inherent to cold weather fashion.

My friends arrive, we realise we won’t get any time to mess about at Saint Paul so we walk up to Square de la Roquette. The court is more rudimentary here, the elite players are gone, replaced by adolescent enthusiasm. The walk over is long, which gives us plenty of time to chat. When we arrive we find a free basket and shoot around for a little while before hopping into 3v2. Kayla and I team up for what proves to be a lethal combo of passing, cutting and layups. We overwhelm the opposition with a performance that would make prime Jordan and Pippen look like 7 year olds playing in the driveway.

Since moving back to Paris in January, my relationship with the game has faltered. I was out for a lengthy spell with illness and coming back to club training was not easy. Besides the language barrier, I felt like the level of play had surpassed me. My confidence dropped, I’ve been avoiding going to training and even when I’m selected for the team, my minutes and impact have been limited.

When I came to this city I saw it as an opportunity to throw myself into basketball, it’s got one of the strongest hoop cultures in the world and is arguably the most important city for the sport outside North America. In an ideal world, this year would have shaped me into a professional prospect; slippery handles, elite court vision, a knockdown jumpshot and, just maybe, a penchant for high flying athleticism, mixtapes included of course. None of this materialised. Instead I’ve seen basketball slip down in my priorities, partly from the dissatisfaction of this season, partly due to no longer being a wide-eyed 14 year old with dreams of hearing my name as a lottery pick in the NBA Draft. Life took over, and I embraced it. It’s no longer lockdown summer where the only thing I could do was play basketball. I’ve realised there are better things in this world than push ups and plyometrics.

The upside of all this is that when I do get out into an environment like the one on that Friday, everything releases. There are no obligations, no form shooting, no three man weave, just play. It was in Playground de la Roquette that I rediscovered the sense of joy innate to sport. Each pass and reverse layup compounds with the bounce of the ball to create a new heartbeat to the game, playing against these friends I was able to move differently. I saw each of my defensive lapses not as eternal failures but ways in which the game became more balanced. Each missed layup or forced shot could be redeemed by running the play back. The post-game dap ups had a new meaning: “We had fun today”, and in the early twilight of the park, I gulped down water from a fountain as though it were a divine elixir.

Waiting to play in a gym with no timer or scoreboard (Photo: Luca Howes via BeReal)