We were in the third grade then, at P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, and in those days basketball seemed far less important than lighting fires in alleys or knocking over the garbage cans that lined the sidewalks on our block. By the time we were in the seventh grade, though, basketball had come to mean everything to us. Every afternoon and all day Saturday and Sunday we lived in the schoolyard, and on Friday nights Izzie’s father and mine would take turns bringing us to see games at Erasmus Hall High School. Sometimes we’d chip in to buy sports magazines, and we’d cut out the full-page color photos of our heroes to scotch-tape on our walls. Once, at a Knick game at Madison Square Garden, between halves, Izzie got Cousy to sign a color picture of himself from Sport magazine, and he mounted it on a piece of oaktag and pasted it to his wall, by his pillow. Izzie was really good then. Everybody thought for sure he’d be an All-American when he grew up. He had everything—speed, drive, and the greatest shooting eye anybody in our neighborhood had ever seen.
