Community Organizations and Services
From the West Marin Citizen What’s in a game? 2008 by Cyndi Cady
it. This one’s definitely within the upper realms.” He paused. “So . . . what’s the level of play like?” Hoops junk- ies. They’re all the same. On a recent Saturday, two courts of players run sweat- ing from hoop to hoop. A few guys wait on the sidelines for their turn to play. There’s lots of gray hair and several faces that haven’t met a razor yet. Buck Chavez drops in a 3-pointer and Steve Singh, knuckles on hips, walks away from the flurry of action, head down, breathing hard. Two of Buck’s sons, 13-year-old Lucas and 15-year-old Neil, are playing, as well as John Beckerley, now 65 years old. A little kid practices alone on the third court, occasionally stopping to watch the action. In today’s game, there are several sets of fathers and sons: Andrew and Nico Giacomini; Buck, Lucas, and Neil Chavez; John and Austin Smithyman; and Steve and Duane Singh. Duane comes from Walnut Creek every week to play with his dad and the other guys. He never misses a Saturday. When asked if there weren’t courts in Walnut Creek, if there weren’t other games closer to home, Duane says, shrugging, “It’s not the same.” Jake Monson is the little kid practicing alone. He’s seven. He likes basketball, “A lot. Ninety-nine percent,” he says. Jake wanders closer and closer to the two active courts, and finally stands on the sidelines, holding his basketball. Someone waves him in, and he trots onto the court, gamely keeping up with the rest of the guys even though his line of sight is roughly the level of the navels of the other players. Not long after the game’s inaugural year, the players began talking about building a gym. Through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there were several attempts to get the proj- ect off the ground, but it wasn’t until 2002 when a number of pieces fell into place, and Saturday players Dave Cort and Andrew Giacomini pressed forward with what proved at last to be a successful community gym project. Commitment to the gym project was high among the Saturday ballers, sometimes to the extreme. Dave Burns’ 21-day hunger strike to raise funds is now legendary. “I made Gandhi look like a little girl. Hey, don’t print that,” Burns says, laughing. Today, the gym stands, nearly completed, visible from the courts where the game first began. And while the Saturday players are thrilled that the dream’s become a reality, there’s an ironic twist: they don’t want to move indoors. What? After 30 years of struggle, after players dropping out due to ground-down knee joints, after scrapes and scuffs and countless bits of gravel dug out of whatever part hit the ground, why the heck not? Buck Chavez sums it up easily: “We just like playing outside.”
Multi-generational camaraderie, blood, a lot of gravel, and the inspiration for the San Geronimo Valley Gym, that’s what. Lynn Reeser had no idea what she’d started when she gave her husband Richard a basketball for his birthday in 1975. “I think she thought he needed more exercise,” the Reesers’ neighbor Don Holmlund laughs. “Anyway, he got this basketball, and he got Steve Adams, Walter Kassoway, and me, and we started playing on Saturday mornings.” John Beckerley moved his young family to the San Geronimo Valley in 1976 and quickly got roped into the game. Joining Holmlund, Reeser, Steve Adams, Walter Kassoway, and occasionally Gary Giacomini, Beckerley boosted the game to a 3-on-3 competition. The Saturday Game began to grow. Beckerley recalls, “People from all over the county were coming out.” Some players literally grew up on the game. Al Baylacq started playing in 7th grade and is a current regular. A few of the longer-term players watched their kids go from rid- ing their trikes around the court, to joining the game, to becoming Drake High basketball hotshots, to starting fam- ilies of their own . . . and they still show up every Saturday. The original courts at Lagunitas school were made of cement and gravel, and were badly cracked. If players fell or slipped, they got up bloody. “Everyone has gravel embedded in them somewhere,” says Dave Cort, another longtime player. In the late ’80s or early ’90s, fed up with the injuries, the game moved to the Forest Knolls playground…less than ideal, as it had only one court and there were now too many players. When the school asphalted the two original Lagunitas courts and added a third, the group returned in force and continues to this day. Holmlund dropped out several years ago due to a bad knee, but Beckerley, dubbed “The Commissioner” by the other players, still makes near- ly every game. “I see John riding his bike every Saturday, just before 10, heading to the school,” Holmlund says. At 33 years [42 as of 2017] and growing, how does the game rank in terms of longevity against others in the country? When asked if he’d checked out the Lagunitas Saturday Game for his book Hoops Nation , a field guide to pickup games across the U.S., Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Chris Ballard was intrigued. “Hmmm,” he said. “I didn’t know about that one.” Bal- lard has found games that have been going on for a longer stretch, but, “It’s hard to say what’s the longest-running game in the country,” he says. “It depends how you define
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50 th Anniversary
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