Sean Bell All-Stars take Nike tournament, may not be city’s finest
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
The score may not have signaled a blowout, but the result never seemed in doubt.
Playing before a packed Gauchos Gym crowd on Sunday, the Sean Bell All-Stars scored the opening bucket, built a nine-point first-quarter advantage and cruised to an 85-74 victory over the X-Men in the Nike Tournament of Champions finals.
The X-Men, defending tournament champs, spent the evening trying to close the bulge, drawing to 64-63 in the fourth quarter. Sean Bell responded to each comeback, snuffing out that final rally with a 10-4 run to seal the victory.
“We could get close, but we couldn’t get over the hump,” said Smush Parker, the former Los Angeles Laker who led the X-Men with 24 points. “They were the better team.”
In theory, the Sean Bell All-Stars are now the Big Apple’s best streetball squad; at least, that’s the debate that the Tournament of Champions is supposed to settle.
The city’s blacktop scene consists of scores of leagues, scattered throughout the five boroughs, and each holds an end-of-summer tournament, calling its victor the city’s finest.
That system led to heavy debates, so in 2007, Nike created the TOC, a one-day, four-team playoff for the titlists of the four Nike-backed leagues – the Dyckman Tournament, the West 4th Street League, Nike Pro City and the Tri-State Classic – hoping to give the summer an air of finality.
“It’s great,” said Sean Bell guard Kenny Satterfield, a former University of Cincinnati star. “It gives players a kind of going-away party (before we head overseas). And it gives the city a champion.”
Except things are hardly that simple. Even as Sean Bell coach Rah Wiggins proclaimed his squad “the greatest” and the All-Stars accepted their gaudy championship rings, some questioned whether the team was truly the city’s best streetball squad.
Two top leagues, Rucker Park’s Entertainers Basketball Classic and Hoops in the Sun at Orchard Beach, are not represented because they lack Nike sponsorship.
Dean Murray, coach of Nike Pro City champ Nike One, added that the timing of the tourney kept his top players from playing.
“It’s late in the year, so some of my guys are already gone (overseas),” he said after his team fell to the X-Men in the semifinals. “It’s a great concept, but I still think my team is the best.”
The Sean Bell All-Stars said they recognized such arguments, but that did little to diminish Sunday’s accomplishment. They’d won their tournament berth by default: They were awarded a spot in Nike’s extravaganza when the Tri-State Classic championship game was canceled.
They took advantage, defeating West 4th Street’s X-Men, a dominant squad that featured Parker and former University of Mississippi center Tommie Eddie.
Sean Bell won the championship in style. Satterfield went toe-to-toe with Parker, scoring 13 points, and former Fresno State swingman Quinton Hosley frustrated Eddie, harassing the big man into a technical foul and outscoring him, 27-8.
“We played well, so it was really nice to win,” said Hosley, who joined Sean Bell after a handful of players left the team to fulfill other obligations.
To Hosley, the debates don’t matter; every champion will stake its claim as the Big Apple’s finest. And that’s just fine, he said, noting that the city’s blacktop scene has always been a magnet for legend and folklore and hype.
Did Earl (The Goat) Manigault really place a quarter on top of the backboard, take a leap and come down with change?
“This is streetball,” Hosley said with a smile. “It’s supposed to be a little bit mysterious.”
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