HOLLYWOOD — At 6:05 on Wednesday morning there were fourteen men on the courts off Poinsettia and enough light to see the rim, and the first game had already been running for ten minutes.
This is not when these games happen. For something close to forty summers the pickup basketball here has happened in the evening — six to nine, later in July, the last game finishing under the lights or by streetlight and a certain amount of guessing. Last week it moved to dawn, and the thing that interests the regulars is that nobody moved it.
“There’s no group chat,” said Ephraim Doskocil, 44, who has played here since he was nineteen and who is treated by newer players as the closest thing the courts have to an institution. “There’s no chat, there’s no captain, there’s no schedule. Somebody showed up at six on Sunday because it was a hundred and four degrees on Saturday night. Then four people showed up at six on Monday. By Wednesday it was fourteen and the evening game just wasn’t there anymore.”
The evening game did not resume until Sunday, after the heat broke.
The courts have appeared in these pages before, most recently this month, and the appeal of the place has always been the absence of administration. There is no league office, no fee, no sign-up and no plan to create any of the three. Teams form by the oldest method available: first five, next five, winners hold the court. Calls are self-made and disputes are settled by a shrug and a re-rack. The only formal rule anybody could name is that you do not bring a whistle.
That structure, or lack of one, turns out to handle a heat wave better than a league would.
“If this were organized, somebody would have had to cancel it,” said Tobin Achebe, 31, a nurse who works day shifts and had never once played here before last week because six in the evening is unreachable for him. “Instead it just went somewhere else on the clock. I got four games in before work on Wednesday. I have been trying to get into this for two years.”
He is one of maybe six new faces the week produced, all of them people whose schedules had permanently excluded the evening game: two nurses, a baker who starts at four and finishes at eleven, a bus operator on a split shift, and a man who works nights at a post house on Selma and now plays on his way home. Three have kept coming since the games moved back to evenings, which is to say they now play at six in the morning by themselves and wait.
The heat did produce one piece of near-organization, and it came from the players. Somebody — several people said “somebody,” nobody said who — began leaving a cooler of water at the fence on the hot afternoons. It was there Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, refilled, with a stack of paper cups. The recreation center 200 yards away was operating as a county cooling center all four days, with its own water and its own air conditioning, and several players said they used it between games.
Whether dawn basketball survives past the heat is an open question, and the regulars are split in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. The evening game is the social event; people come to sit on the low wall and not play. The morning game is short, quiet and serious, four games and gone, and two players said they preferred it enough to be uneasy about saying so.
“Evening is the neighborhood. Morning is the basketball,” Mr. Doskocil said. “I have played here twenty-five years and I never knew there was a difference.”
The forecast for the coming week is upper eighties. On Thursday morning at 6:15 there were six players on the court, one of them the nurse, and they ran three-on-three for an hour without keeping score.