Unforgiving steel rims influence New York’s aggressive style of play.


The old steel rim that presides over one of the city’s public basketball courts absorbs missed shots with an angry clank, sending the ball careering upward and the wood and metal backboard into a rickety seizure.

Like generations before them, the young men who play at the ramshackle court in St. Nicholas Park in Harlem know the rim is so troublesome that they tend to avoid perimeter jump shots in favor of aggressive drives to the basket, where scoring is more likely.

“These are ghetto rims,” said Quaeshawn Berry, a lanky 14-year-old who is a regular at the park. “But I prefer these. I’ve been playing on these my whole life.”

These unforgiving, practically unbreakable orange rims - built so simply that there are no hooks to accommodate a net - are longstanding fixtures of the public basketball courts throughout New York City, where they play a minor, if usually overlooked, role in countless pickup games.

But largely unknown to even the most devoted practitioners of the city game is that most of the basketball rims on these courts have been individually crafted by a team of blacksmiths who cut, weld and paint each by hand.

Using a century-old method that has long since vanished elsewhere, the half-dozen parks department employees - all basketball players themselves - have forged thousands of rims, each one worked into a microcosm of the local game.

“There are minor differences,” said John Fitzgerald, the longtime city blacksmith in charge of making the rims. “It’s like no snowflakes are exactly the same.”

Working from a hand-drawn blueprint, the blacksmiths use hammers and the horn of an anvil to shape the steel ring that serves as the hoop, welding it to several slabs of metal that form a support bolted to the backboard. The finished product is a remnant of an earlier era of the sport, somewhere on the evolutionary chain between the original wooden peach baskets and the modern spring-loaded breakaway rims used by the National Basketball Association.

Other cities buy modern, factorymade rims. New York is possibly the only one where municipal rims at more than 700 parks are made by hand.

“I’m totally amazed that they still do it that way,” said Dan Shaw, an engineer for Spalding and an expert on the history of basketball rims. “I would love to see one made. Walking in there would be like watching equipment made 100 years ago.”

New York’s public courts are credited with grooming generations of basketball stars. Jason Curry, president of Big Apple Basketball, which runs clinics and tournaments around the city, suggested that the handmade rims may be one reason many of those players have typically been skilled at driving hard to the hoop rather than shooting from the outside.

But even in New York, the forging of rims may be an endangered art. Some of the city’s most celebrated courts have made the switch to prefabricated rims, which are cheaper but preferred by players. And when a new park is built or redone, a prefabricated rim is installed.

But the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation says the handmade rims stand up better to the demands of New York players, so they will continue to be made - at least to replace those that have been stolen or damaged.

“We have found it’s more economical to make them because they’re stronger, they last longer,” said Jim Cafaro, the deputy chief of technical services for the parks department. “So it’s costeffective to do this.”


By A. G. SULZBERGER