Porch perching was once my favorite sport. The stoop in front of my building on 46th street in Astoria, Queens, was the court. A rickety ole’ chair and a table-top holding my choice beverage was the equipment. And a large,
Porch perching was once my favorite sport.
The stoop in front of my building on 46th street in Astoria, Queens, was the court. A rickety ole’ chair and a table-top holding my choice beverage was the equipment. And a large, wool winter coat acted as the perfect uniform.
I always played porch perching in the months of January and February, when the weather was just right. It was probably five degrees above zero, with a wind chill at -10 or so. New York can get pretty chilly in the months following Christmas, and porch perching was the only sport I could play.
If you’ve never heard of it, porch perching is a sport a couple friends and I played when we were too cold to strap on our sneakers and mosey on to the courts across the street and shoot hoops.
Rather than braving the cold winter storms that ravage the Big Apple three months of the year, we decided we would make a game out of watching crazy urban kids play basketball.
So how do you win?
Well, the person who goes inside the apartment–for any reason from frostbite to pneumonia–automatically loses. The last man standing, which was usually me, would win the big prize: Dibs on the chair right next to the heater for the rest of the night.
So what would compel a bunch of numbnuts like ourselves to compete in such a hokey game posing potentially hazardous consequences?
Have you ever seen basketball played on the streets of New York?
Watching those kids play basketball was the highlight of my five-year tenure in good ole’ Gotham. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Some of those kids are hitting threes at age 11, dunking at 13 and throwing down 360 degree, spinning ally-oops at 15.
The warm feeling I got watching those kids perform high flying acrobatics made the cold subside for as long as the last porch percher was standing.
It could have been my favorite sport, but then I came to Hawaii.
I haven’t figured out what to call the new sport I’ve invented here in Kaua’i, but it involves a similar concept that made porch perching such a rewarding event: I sit and marvel as island athletes pour out their most amazing stunts, and I remain fixated on them longer than anyone could ever try.
It’s the surfers I watch, naturally.
And while many American sports writers can’t see how surfing could possibly make for a good spectator sport, they have never been able to see it from my angle.
Kauaians are amazing surfers.
And the sport I play here on the island, as it was for basketball in New York, is an ode to everyone who goes out to the swells of the maliciously indifferent Pacific to shred in the name of athletics.
Surfing here is like basketball in New York.
Kids in the big city don’t get much. The Parks and Department Commissioner for the city once told a friend of mine’s son, “here is your playground, kid: a fenced in cement area with two steel cylindrical pieces strapped on two poles on each side of the blacktop. Make use of it, cause it’s all you got.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Parks Commissioner here in Kaua’i gave a long, slender board to a child, pointed to the ocean, and said “do something with this out there, cause it’s all you got.”
Some of these surfers are taking 10-footers at age 11, scorching the pipeline at 13, and bailing out of a nasty cliff break at 15. And what’s better, they’re still doing it at 17, 37, 47 and 67; and many of them are women, too.
New York has it’s greats as proof of its basketball prowess. Stephon Marbury, Lamar Odom, and Charles Oakley are a few on the long list.
And Kaua’i has it’s list of champion surfers, too: Andy and Bruce Irons, Margo Oberg (who was recently inducted into the Hawaii Sports Hall of Fame), Titus Kinimaka, Kaipo Jaquias and Sonny Garcia, to name a few.
On rainy days in Kapa’a, the basketball courts are vacant, the softball fields are silent, and the golf courses are practically empty.
But on the beaches of Kealia, Wailua, Kalapaki and Hanalei, you can see a line of surfers awaiting the perfect break.
Weather is never an issue to these guys.
I was driving by Cocoa Palms, the other day, and the weather man on the Ron Wiley show cautioned patrons to stay away from the erratic swell that clogged Eastern Shores with blinding white-water breaks.
“Kealia and Wailua are closed today,” I remember him saying. “It is much too dangerous to surf out there this week.”
That warning didn’t seem to bother the 12 or so surfers who seemed lost in the seas of an angry Eastern shoreline at Wailua.
I had to stop.
For about 15 long minutes, I sat there and watched those guys attempt to catch waves.
It brought me back to that porch on 46th Street in Astoria, Queens–to that warm feeling that made sitting out in the stark cold a bit more bearable.
It made me realize why the weather never bothered those inner city kids in New York, and why it never detered Kauaian surfers from catching the perfect break. Athletes perform in the best and worst of conditions, and they do it in the name of sport.
It may be dangerous, and it may be uncomfortable. But passion thickins the skin, and it’s interesting to see how two different sports in two different worlds can have one common similarity–the love of sport.
