Games offer an escape behind bars

By Michael Dobie | Staff Correspondent

July 11, 2004

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Ulster County, N.Y. - There's nothing like game day, especially in prison.

"For a brief moment, you'll be in here but you won't remember you're in here," said Anthony Rose, an inmate at Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate Napanoch. "You get everybody on the sidelines cheering everybody on like a real game atmosphere. The pride's kicking in. All you're thinking about is this game of basketball and we want to win."

Rose is a member of Eastern's varsity basketball team, an all-star team of the best players in the prison. Intramurals are the meat and potatoes of prison sports. But the tastiest treat on any prison's sporting menu is a game between the varsity and an outside team, usually basketball or softball against a prison ministry or local community center.

Outside games are breaks in the routine. Anticipation and excitement build throughout the prison -- as does anxiety among the players.

"If you're not playing up to the best of your ability," said Michael Thompson, a 6-8 Brooklynite and Rose's teammate, "they're going to let you have it, so you've got to come out here and give it your all."

Most prisons conduct tryouts for their varsity teams. Making the squad is bragging rights. There are no road games. Winning on one's home court is a high, but a loss to an outside team is crushing.

"It's a big deal to beat those guys and if you don't, the team that lost gets brow-beaten by the rest of the population," said Jerry Parsons, an inmate at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill. "It's definitely a time of a lot of anxiety, and the guys on the court are very self-conscious."

Inmate fans love to talk trash and ridicule their peers in colorful and profane language. Often, they root for outsiders.

"They cheer them on more than us," Rose said.

"It's rec for them," said Shawangunk rec program leader Carl Mabry. "They go back to the block and they'll stay up till two, three, four in the morning and talk about the game. If something happened, if someone got dunked on or someone shakes 'em, they'll talk all night. If they got beat by 30, 40 points it's a long night. Sometimes it goes on for three, four nights. They'll be talking about it so bad you can't get any sleep."

Varsity teams play two or three outside games per season. Contests used to be more frequent. Prisons would play each other, one team going on the road. Some states held state championship tournaments.

The quintessential outside game took place in Georgia after The Longest Yard finished filming at one of the state's prisons. When Burt Reynolds and company left their football equipment behind as a donation, a real-life game was scheduled between inmates and Georgia state troopers. It was stopped at halftime. The inmates reportedly were leading, 66-0. They never played again.

Outside games continue in some places, but are virtually extinct in New Jersey and Connecticut and infrequent in New York. Reasons are many: security concerns, public perception, the cost of officer overtime. And fear.

"A lot of teams don't want to come in anymore, especially the basketball teams," one recreation supervisor said. "They're afraid of TB, AIDS, hepatitis. Because of potential blood exchange."

Incoming inmates in New York routinely are screened for tuberculosis and hepatitis.

Mt. McGregor runs a basketball tournament that includes outside teams. Shawangunk and Eastern get one or two visits from local rec centers. The most frequent opponent might be the Saints, a New Jersey-based play-and-preach prison ministry team.

The games are as popular as ever. Kevin Smith has been in nine prisons and on numerous varsity teams since his murder conviction 17 years ago. He's 43, bald and wears gold wire-rimmed glasses. And he still gets excited when he plays for Shawangunk. But there's more to outside games than winning, the former Brooklyn resident said.

"We're looking for good moves," Smith said in a loud, gravelly voice. "We like winning but good moves rile the crowd so they don't get mad."

And if someone gets a dunk?

"That's the talk of the jail two weeks straight. That's props," Smith said. "If you get a good dunk on them, that's a win."