Having grown up in Chicago, Chen Yu's strongest impression of the city was that it was covered in basketball courts.
Football and baseball needed a dedicated field, but basketball didn't. A tiny patch of land and a hoop nailed to a wall was all it took to make a court.
Phoenix was the same.
At the end of a street, about an eight-hundred-meter walk from Hardaway's house, there was just such a small court, sandwiched between two low, red-brick buildings. An overpass stood not far away, and the space beneath it was a haven for the homeless. As a result, the area was seedy and attracted all sorts of people.
The court was surrounded by a dilapidated iron fence. The walls on both sides were covered in all kinds of graffiti, and the lines painted on the ground had long since become faded and indistinct.
