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Editor’s Note: This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020. View the full list.

The 10-year-old cooked up his nerves. Deep breaths rising and falling, in and out; his hollow chest turning molten hot. OK, Nook, you can do this. He took a step toward the courtyard, where out in the clearing a pack of boys whooped and laughed, playing baseball and talking smack. A cloud of dust rose from the field and through it walked young Juwan Howard, all tall and awkward, coming to introduce himself. 

The boys stopped and turned. 

“Isn’t this great?” Howard said. “I’m so excited to live in a townhouse!” 

A pause hung, then an explosion of laughter. 

“Townhouse?” one of the boys said. “These ain’t no townhouses!” 

Lowden Homes, far on the city’s South Side, out of view, is owned and operated by the Chicago Housing Authority. It’s a public housing project stretching the length of three city blocks alongside West 95th Street, a four-lane artery to and from the Dan Ryan Expressway. Two-story row homes, 128 to be exact, arranged like a company of soldiers with 91st Street on the north, Wentworth Avenue on the east, Eggleston Avenue on the west and 95th on the south. The homes are meant to be temporary, sterile spaces for families looking to get from one place in life to another. They’re not meant for memories. The houses have no attics. 

Howard looked around horrified, humiliated. He’d just moved with his grandma from a two-bedroom apartment over on 69th Street. He thought having a house meant things were better. Those hopes were blurred into a smear as the boys howled – the exaggerated laughter of kids going from playful to cruel. 

Eventually, the cackling faded. The boys went back to their positions, spreading out across that field. 

The courtyard at Lowden was a canvas of grass and dirt. Snow-covered in the winter, muddy in the spring, cracked and dry in the summer. Nothing where there could be something. 

Before becoming the maiden member of the Fab Five, before playing 19 years in the NBA, before coming full circle and being named Michigan head coach last May, Juwan Howard lived in Lowden Homes from the summer of 1983, after finishing the 4th grade, to the spring of 1991, when he moved to Ann Arbor for his freshman year of college. At Lowden, Howard grew from a tall boy to a 6-foot-9 smokestack. He went from shooting a ball through the gaps of the bars in a ramshackle jungle gym in the courtyard to becoming an All-American at Chicago Vocational High. He turned into a verified, certified basketball star, making him, in this country, one of the great vulnerable commodities of the inner-city. No cliché of the American ghetto is more persistent than the lament for the names who never made it out. A year after young Juwan moved to Lowden, the great Benji Wilson was shot and killed in broad daylight near Simeon High, a seismic moment in the city’s basketball history. Years later, Howard would choose to wear No. 25 as a freshman at Michigan in his honor. 

Today, Howard speaks of his teenage years as a quantum. No physical time. Only choices. Always choices. Right turns. Wrong turns. Trap doors. Exits leading to entrances. He found a way out because his paternal grandmother, Jannie Mae Howard, guarded him like his life was a final possession. He’d been born to teenage parents who handed him off when he was 3. Jannie Mae nicknamed him Nookie, though he’s not sure why. Her love, combined with his sheer willpower, all led to a 19-year NBA career and more than $150 million in career earnings.

Telling the story of his introduction at Lowden almost 37 years later, Howard fidgets and winces. He slides his hand smooth across a conference table in the Michigan men’s basketball office, nodding, and begins. “I didn’t realize I lived in the projects until that moment and I immediately thought about everything I’d heard about the projects — bad areas, drugs, gangs, poor people,” he says, that childhood anxiety rushing back, right to the surface. “I felt so bad and empty. I felt that it was beneath me. I was embarrassed to go back and tell my friends at my grammar school where I moved to. I finally understood how bad things had gotten for my family.”

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He also understood he wanted to change things. 

Back at Lowden, in that same grass clearing where 10-year-old Juwan Howard once wanted to run and hide, there’s a blacktop, now gray, faded by a place that concedes nothing except time. The asphalt is flat, shallow in some spots. A puddle spreads across one of the 3-point lines. Two hoops, nylon nets attached, pushed by the breeze of a city with a perpetual headwind. Chicago has hundreds of basketball courts. This one breathes out in the open amid crowded buildings and crowded people. 

White lines on asphalt. 

No one’s laughing at Nookie anymore. What was nothing then is now Juwan Howard Court. It’s a space that’s open to everyone, but yields to no one. 

Vernestine Banks considered going outside. Then she pulled the blinds open. Oh, Lord no. All those people? All that commotion? Cameras? Ms. Banks was not about to deal with any of that. 

But she sure wanted to see Nookie. 

It was Friday, Sept. 12, 1997. Hundreds of people milled around outside. The sun was out, warming the new basketball court. Music played. Media gathered. Kids ran in every direction. 

Ms. Banks couldn’t believe Nookie was coming home to do this. He’d left six years earlier, going off to college, playing on TV. (In a story told so many times only because of its unthinkable cruelty, Jannie Mae died of a heart attack on Nov. 14, 1990, only hours after Nookie signed his national letter of intent to attend Michigan. It was, quite literally, the day he made it out.) 

To Ms. Banks, he was still the willowy teenager who kept growing and growing. Young Juwan had all kinds of side hustles as a kid, and one was as a resident barber. He’d pop around from house to house, set up shop in the kitchen. High-fades, low-fades, edged lines. One of Howard’s stops was at Ms. Banks’ place, where he cut all four of her boys’ hair. To this day, she claims her oldest son, Ivory, taught Juwan a thing or two about how to play basketball. “They say Ivory played like Larry Bird,” she says. 

The crowd grew larger because Juwan Howard was coming home. He put up the $55,000 to install a regulation-sized basketball court and 2,500-square-foot playground, transforming Lowden Homes’ open-air quad. He was 24, tall and handsome, wearing dark jeans, white kicks and a gray Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt. A real, live NBA basketball player. Millions in the bank and more on the way. He had signed a $100 million deal with the Washington Bullets the previous summer after making the 1996 NBA All-Star game in his second season in the league. And here he was, back on 95th Street, the Son of Lowden, walking through a sea of hugs and kisses. Men, women, kids, the elderly. Everyone wanted a piece of Nookie. 

Really, it couldn’t have been a better day for a dedication ceremony. One of those blue-sky Chicago afternoons when you can’t even fathom the horrid winter that always comes. The children sat at center court, eyes like saucers. “I want to let you know that I’m from the same neighborhood,” Howard began, his voice grown-up but still soft. Over the next hour, he was given three awards from community organizers. It was announced that this was only the beginning; $1 million was being allocated to build playgrounds in Chicago public housing. The crowd cheered.

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Howard looked around and said: “I see some of the friends I played ball in the dirt with out there — they know what I’m talking about — and now we’ve got a real court here.”

Then came the last piece. A square cutout at center court needed to be filled. Howard was presented with a cornerstone. He leaned down, sliding it into place, letting it drop. This was now Juwan Howard Court. 

Something new in a place long neglected. 

Lowden Homes was completed in 1954, built in the years following the post-World War II national housing crisis. It was named for Frank O. Lowden, a former Illinois governor, presidential candidate and champion of child labor reform and modernized agriculture. The property was built to serve as temporary housing for returning veterans, the growing black population and the area’s German, Lithuanian and Italian immigrants, among others. Household incomes for those first residents could not exceed $3,100. The surrounding neighborhood of Roseland was originally a Dutch settlement in the 1840s, known as “De Hooge Prairie,” or the High Prairie. It was named Roseland for the native flowers. 

The area was almost entirely white at the turn of the 20th century, thriving on heavy investment in infrastructure and plumbing from the city. Roseland grew rapidly in the building boom of the 1920s. The Suburbanite Economist, a Chicago newspaper, wrote of “brick bungalows, brick two-story residences, some two-flats, and some small apartment buildings” being built in waves. Soon came the Second Great Migration, and white flight transformed the area. In the 1950s, African-Americans represented 18 percent of Roseland’s population of 50,000-and-growing. A portion of that population swing was represented by black families moving into Lowden Homes. 

By 1960, 23 percent of Roseland’s population was African-American. En masse, whites fled deep into the suburbs. In turn, the city’s significant de-investment in the area began. Overt in its racism, covert in its execution. Chicago was at the heart of nationwide integration battles, riots and civil rights protests. In a 2003 exploration of the city’s deep segregation, the Chicago Tribune cited Roseland as an area where “white flight depressed property values, which translated into mortgage defaults, business failures, housing foreclosures, crime and unemployment.” After that, next to go was the South Side’s industrial base, pulling even more money out of the area. By 1970, African-Americans made up 55 percent of Roseland’s population. By 1980, it was 97 percent. Beginning in the ’90s and into the early 2000s, much of the black middle class in Roseland too, fled amid plummeting property values and huge spikes in crime. 

In Roseland, the High Prairie was flattened by systemic governmental and social neglect, and few places grew as notorious as the 95th Street corridor and Lowden Homes. In 1998, residents of neighboring Princeton Park Homes, a development encompassing a six-square-block property west of the Dan Ryan Highway between 91st and 95th Streets, presented a 2,500-signature petition to the city calling for it to close down Lowden Homes, convert it to tenant-owned housing or merge it with Princeton Park Homes and allow that property to manage it. 

That petition was filed, unsuccessfully, only a year after Juwan Howard’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

To the people at Lowden Homes, that court was a sign of trust. After Howard dropped the cornerstone in place, Tyrone Noel, once described by the Tribune as a “neighborhood basketball organizer,” made this promise to Howard: “I just want to say that during the past couple of weeks a lot of people have degraded us as a community and said that this court and playground will never last. Juwan, you take a good look because when you come back next summer it will look the same.”

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Ms. Banks remembers the day. All of it. She has lived in the same home, Unit 210, for the last 51 years, arriving as a young married woman in 1969, envisioning a future of family and community. Her husband died in 2005, and now she’s here, in her living room, surrounded by pictures of her now-adult children, reflecting on that day in 1997. 

“There was just a whole lotta people,” she says, shaking her head. “All the kids that lived around here and the kids from across the street over there. Too many for me. I didn’t have to worry about going out there, though, because I knew he’d come right to my door.” 

Instead of attending the ceremony, Ms. Banks stood by her front fence, waiting for Howard to spot her. One advantage of being 6-foot-9 is the ability to look above the fray and see what matters. Eventually, Howard spotted her, waiting patiently, and cut through the crowd. Three decades later, Howard couldn’t possibly remember the moment. Ms. Banks, though? She lights up like a gas range, warm enough to heat the room. 

“He remembered me,” she says. “It was wonderful.” 

This is how those who still live at Lowden Homes speak of Howard — as an epochal figure who every so often sweeps through the neighborhood. A comet. There are few neighbors left from then. Sitting next to her mother on the couch, Carolyn Banks, who was raised alongside Howard and his group of friends, says, “Since then, a lot of things have changed. It’s kinda crazy now. A lot of people we grew up with, they’re gone.” The scourge of drugs is somehow worse. The violence, even worse. There were 492 murders in Chicago last year, down from 567 in 2018. There were a preposterous 762 homicides in 2016. 

Juwan Howard’s home remains at Lowden. It’s right there, directly in front of the court bearing his name. Unit 262. 

Everything else? Nothing is the same. “A shame,” Ms. Banks says. 

Brenda Smith speaks only in exclamation points, despite possessing two of the most tired eyes you’ve ever seen. She wields a hopeful sort of alchemy, but then plain-speaks a sentence that takes the air out of the room. Officially, her title is computer lab monitor in Lowden Homes’ community center. Unofficially, she says, her title is “child activist.” She comes here every day bound to the belief that she’s doing God’s work for these children. Someone has to, she says. But then comes a day like yesterday. A 12-year-old and a 13-year-old told Smith they were no longer coming to the lab because they had stopped going to school. 

What do you say to that?

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“You tell them you love them,” Smith says. “What we’re going through in this area is trauma. The murders. The violence. Drugs. All the negativity. These kids are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder like they would if they went to war. The reason they do so poorly in school is because of what they see every day in their environment.”

It wasn’t this way back in the day. At least that’s not how Smith remembers it. There was a community back then. Rough, sure, but neighbors looked after each other’s kids. Juwan was a member of what essentially amounted to Lowden Homes’ grounds crew in the mid-’80s — a militia of kids charged with keeping the property in good shape. He dug weeds from cracks in the sidewalk with an icepick. He raked leaves and dragged leaking bags of trash to the dumpster. It was a side income for Juwan and his grandmother. They needed every last nickel. At Lowden, rent is 30 percent of your household income, but Jannie Mae Howard also needed to clothe and feed not only Juwan, but also some cousins. That’s why they moved from their 69th Street apartment in the Harper Burnside section of Chicago to Roseland.

School was non-negotiable, but Juwan did it his own way. At the age of 10, he refused to change schools after changing neighborhoods. Told by an aunt that it was a 45-minute commute on public transit back to his old school, he spit back: “I’ll do it! Just teach me!” And so, on the first day of school, Juwan and his aunt walked to the L station, took the train to 69th and hopped a bus east to Enrico Fermi Elementary School, his original grammar school. The next day, Juwan went alone. And the day after that. And for the next three years. (In 2013, Enrico Fermi was among 53 Chicago public schools closed amid a $1 billion budget deficit. The vast majority were in predominately black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.) 

Juwan grew so much, so fast. In 1985, out fulfilling groundskeeper duty, his supervisor learned of a surprise visit coming that day from CHA inspectors. She raced out of the office to find Juwan. He, of course, was wearing sneakers because his enormous feet required small pontoons. At 14 years old, he was a size 13 and there were no hand-me-down work boots big enough for him. CHA’s work code, though, required boots. The supervisor handed Juwan the keys to her house. “Get yourself a few ice pops and go sit on my back porch,” she told Juwan. He had no idea why, but happily went on his way. 

The CHA inspectors marked Juwan Howard as absent on that day’s work docket. Juwan kept his job thanks to the supervisor, a 23-year-old mother of two named Brenda Smith. 

Retelling the story, she smiles warmly, but words dissolve into a whisper. Then tears. That was a long time ago. She wonders every day if things can ever be that way again. 

“We were a village back then and Nookie stayed focused,” she says in the computer lab, in front of a wall of children’s handprints smeared in paint on pages, waving hello. “He was never geared to do what the other kids were doing. That’s what sticks out to me. It inspired me. It really did. I saw him work so hard to find a way out of here. I ended up putting all of my four kids through college.” 

If they’re not in her lab, Smith hopes to find today’s kids on that blacktop, shooting hoops. If they’re not there, that’s when she presses her eyes closed and hopes for the best. Lowden is home to roughly 100 mixed-age youths, and the best thing about Juwan Howard Court, you see, is not its games, but its boundaries. For 23 years it has kept the children of Lowden within eyesight. Back in the day, Howard and his friends needed to venture outside the iron fencing, wander three or four blocks to find a real court. Today, they’re close enough to hear, to see.

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“That’s why everyone makes sure the court is taken care of,” says Myra King, president of the advisory council for Lowden Homes. “If nothing else, the court stays intact.”

There’s one rule at Juwan Howard Court. Day or night, rain or shine, a ball must be left on the asphalt for the next kid. Even if it’s a little worn, dimples flattened like bulldozed prairie. Even if it’s a little flat, deflated like property values when your neighborhood is forgotten. No matter what, the next kid gets a shot. 

Divonte Lumpkin, 23, and Tyler Horton, 26, are two of Eileen Horton’s eight children, but they managed to co-opt the entirety of her makeshift trophy case. A 3-on-3 tournament is held every summer on Juwan Howard Court, where the two know every slick spot on the pavement, every bend on the rim. Between the two of them, they collected enough hardware to crowd their momma’s shelves. 

“That was life,” Tyler Horton says. “That’s what it was. Waking up, all you saw was that basketball court. If it weren’t for that basketball court, my life would probably be totally different. Good and bad. That court made me.”

Both brothers grew up playing on Howard’s court and attending an annual summer camp hosted in downtown Chicago by the Juwan Howard Foundation. The camp was created for school teams from all over the city. Lowden, though, had its own team. Howard would call CHA and tell Myra King: “OK, I need 20 or 30 of them kids. Make sure they’re on the bus.” A yellow school bus would pull up a few days later on 95th Street at 8 a.m., scooping up as many kids as could fit. Sometimes that bus ride was the farthest outside of Roseland the boys would get in any given year. It was a different world, one in which they met the likes of Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, Shawn Respert, Andre Iguodala and Eddy Curry, among others.

The camp was nice, but the real games were back home. Divonte and Tyler grew up playing pick-up to 21 and shooting for dollars. They went up against old heads like Ivory Banks. “There were guys out there who’d say, ‘Man, I used to kick Juwan’s ass,’ so I was like, well, damn, you don’t even have to be the best to make it out of here,” Lumpkin says. 

And there it is. What so much of this boils down to. 

The idea of “making it out” is an unavoidable impulse at Lowden Homes. It’s spoken of as a fable. It’s what drives an all too precious few to ignore the quick money, avoid the fights at the Red Line Station and make it there and back in one piece. There’s a certain way to maneuver around the South Side. There can be no blind spots. Occasionally, a lucky few get a pass. In the late ’80s and into the ’90s, the dealers and bangers knew Juwan Howard was on his way out. They built a wall around him to keep the road clear. Lumpkin got the same treatment as a high school junior and senior. A standout at Harlan High, he was told by some voices in the neighborhood, “You get in any trouble, call us.” Other times, when the heat rose and the shit was going down, he’d be held back. “Nah, you sit this one out, basketball player,” he’d be told. 

School came easy for Lumpkin. He’s not sure why. He was at the top of his class at Harlan and popular with teachers. And yet, even still, in 2010 he nearly saw it all come to an end. While he was playing 3-on-3 one day, a few friends ran onto Juwan Howard Court, yelling that they’d just gotten jumped. There was no hesitation. Lumpkin and his friends went careening out of Lowden Homes, found those guys, kicked their asses. Minutes later, they were back to their game. 

Next came one of those moments that can go in any direction. Lives change. Just like that. Lumpkin remembers it vividly — out of the corner of his eye, seeing those dudes appear from around a building, reaching behind their back. 

“They came walking inside our neighborhood, and that’s usually the one thing that people don’t do,” he says. “Everybody in Chicago knows — you don’t walk into Lowden Homes. That territory is off-limits. Even if you’re walking past Lowden Homes, walk on the opposite side of the street.”

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Shots rang. Bodies scattered. The perfect falsetto of sneaker soles skidding on pavement for a game turned in the panicked scramble to find an escape route. Lumpkin relied on his instincts. “Dove like I was going for a loose ball,” he says. “That’s the first thing my momma told me. When they’re shooting in the neighborhood, hit the floor.” 

The paradox here is that Lumpkin says he was at the right place at the right time to avoid being hit while not mentioning he was at the wrong place at the wrong time to be there in the first place. This is how you think, though, when you’re one of the few that make it out. 

Lumpkin is telling this story by phone from Texas Southern, about 1,073 miles from Lowden Homes, but who’s counting. He’s a Division I basketball player and a graduate student. He finished his undergraduate degree last spring, graduating summa cum laude with a 3.97 GPA. His stats: 56 As and one B+. He was an accounting major and a member of the NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. This summer he’ll take the CPA test and begin a job with Deloitte with hopes of finishing his MBA at an Ivy League school. 

He is so damn bright that he never needed basketball to get out of Lowden Homes. What he needed basketball for was as a forcefield. The game was his protection. Juwan Howard Court was his home. 

“Some of them kids utilize that basketball court,” says Eileen Horton. “If it wasn’t there, it’d somehow be even worse here. That court, it’s their savior sometimes.” 

Making it out is often a matter of motivation. You see it to believe it. Divonte Lumpkin saw Tony Allen do it. Tony Allen saw Juwan Howard do it. 

Allen is fresh off a 14-year NBA career that, by all measures, should have never happened. Allen, 38, moved with his mother to Lowden Homes in 1990. He was 8. Seven years later, a basketball court was built only a few steps from his home, Unit 248. “A court? Right in front of my fucking house! I couldn’t believe it, man. Changed my life,” Allen says. Life, though, still managed to get in the way. Allen skipped school the way other kids skip stones, and by 1998 he dropped out as a high school sophomore. His mother, fed up, left the house. Knocking on the door one day, trying to get into 248, a friend came over and told Allen his mom had moved out. 

Over the next two years, Allen spent his days playing on Juwan Howard Court, working the streets and watching the world go by. Through it all, one memory was seared in his mind. He arrived moments late on the day of the 1997 dedication ceremony, only seeing Howard pull away down 95th Street in a Bentley, leaving behind an adoring crowd and a smooth blacktop. 

“All I can remember is thinking, wow, is that what money can do?’” Allen says. “I thought, damn, I’m going to the NBA.” 

A 6-foot-4 guard, Allen was too talented to be held down, unless he did it to himself. He landed at Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kan., then Wabash Valley College in Mount Carmel, Ill., and finally at Oklahoma State, where he led the Cowboys to the 2004 Final Four and was named Big 12 Player of the Year. Then off to the NBA. Then an NBA title with Boston in 2008. Then NBA All-Defensive honors in six of seven years from 2011 through ’17. He retired in 2018 with more than $40 million in career earnings. 

For more than a decade, Allen has returned to 95th Street, speaking to the children at Lowden Homes. He arranges for book-bag giveaways in the summer and turkey handouts in the fall. 

“It all goes back to that court,” Allen says. “The dude literally made me believe I could do what I did. He did it the way a legend is supposed to do it. I doubt he even knows any of this, and really, man, that’s the crazy part. In my era, a lot of my close friends had serious game. They could hoop, but no one had the drive and the will to chase it. It was fast money, kids, girlfriend drama, gangs. But Juwan was my hero, for real. I chased what he had. There’s no telling where I would’ve gone or what I would’ve done without that.” 

These are the games played on 95th Street. Sometimes there’s a bad bounce, but the memories of those games on that blacktop tie the threads of time. As Tyler Horton puts it: “There are always preventable situations, but in the streets, things just happen.” 

He pauses. 

At 26, Horton is eight years into a 32-year sentence for attempted first-degree murder: inmate M45489 at Henry Hill Correctional Facility in Galesburg, Ill. According to court documents, on the afternoon of March 15, 2012, a man from the neighborhood, Denikos Hawkins, walked onto Juwan Howard Court, trying to get into a game of shoot for dollars. There was commotion, a confrontation. Later that night, Horton and Hawkins crossed paths on the sidewalk of Lowden Homes, not far from the court. 

Horton claims Hawkins tried to pull a gun. Hawkins claims Horton pulled the gun and fired unprovoked. 

In any event, Denikos Hawkins was shot eight times in the arm, back and legs. Tyler Horton went to jail. He was 18 on the night of the incident. His earliest projected parole date is 2039. His release date is Aug. 21, 2042. He’ll be 49 years old. 

“That’s the reality of it,” Horton says of the other way out. 

Horton maintains his innocence, says he hopes his next appeal will go through. In the meantime, all he can do is “try to maintain, stay out of trouble and go about my days.” He planned to hit the gym later that night to get up some shots. The Hill Correctional annual 5-on-5 was coming up. 

“I’m fixin’ to go over there now, practice, get my wind up,” he says. 

They can’t see him, but he’s there. Juwan Howard, “Nookie” around here, is driving down 95th Street, pressing his foot softly on the brake. His eyes narrow, seeing those rows of redbrick boxes, that black iron fencing. He wonders who’s still there. Who’s left? 

Howard slows but doesn’t stop. The wheels crawl down the road. Out of the window, this place passes by like an urban diorama. 

Even in the summer, when the trees are full and the blacktop is crowded, one can look straight through from 95th Street, across Juwan Howard Court, all the way to the front door of Unit 262. In a lot of ways, everything is here, but nothing is left. 

In the years since, Howard has returned only occasionally. Yes, he built the court, and yes, he held a camp, but most of what he has done in Chicago happens out of the spotlight. Like with Helen Finner, the mother of lifelong friend Marlo Finner, a star at Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High who went on to play at Missouri. When Juwan needed it most, Helen treated him like a son. He returned the favor years later by sending a limo to her house every year on her birthday. It would roll up to Ida B. Wells Homes, another South Side CHA project, and pick up Helen and a few of her friends. They’d get dressed to the nines and cruise around the city before going to a fancy restaurant for dinner. Howard covered it all. 

“All of my mother’s girlfriends looked forward to my mom’s birthday,” says Janice Finner, Marlo’s sister. “To see a limo in that neighborhood and it wasn’t for a funeral? That was like, wow.” 

When Helen Finner died in 2001, Howard flew into town to speak at her funeral. 

“Meant the world to me, man,” Marlo says. 

There are all kinds of stories like this. Howard donating clothes. Howard covering financial burdens. All things that go unseen, unsaid. 

The court on 95th Street, the gift that bears his name, has been whatever those who needed it made of it. But time is fading fast, falling over the horizon into something unrecognizable. Divonte Lumpkin can’t think of anyone coming behind him. “Nobody is really hooping anymore,” he says. “Everybody is just carrying guns and selling drugs.” 

“The court survived,” Brenda Smith explains, “but the spirit of Juwan and all his friends his age who played on that court, that spirit of being able to play basketball without fighting, without it turning into a shootout — that spirit is gone.”

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Howard knows all of this, hears all of this. Nostalgia bleeds into pain when he talks about Lowden Homes. In theory, he’s the biggest thing to come out of that place. In reality, what Lowden represents is bigger than he could ever be. 

What is home if you can’t go back?

“There are a lot of new folks that live in the neighborhood that I can’t really identify with,” Howard says. “That doesn’t mean I’m afraid to go back or anything like that, but I don’t know how many relationships I have with a lot of people that are still there.”

None of this is clean and easy. Like at Lowden, there’s no unblurred, satisfying ending. 

“The truth is, there’s no need for me to go back, sit out there and hang out on the block, you know?” Howard adds. “Like, my life has changed. It wouldn’t be smart.”

He thinks on it. 

“But I would like to go back through there and walk through the neighborhood and step up at the park and shoot a few jumpers and shake some hands and share some of the old stories. I know there would still be a level of comfort there. You know, I don’t look back on it and wish that I had anything different. My experiences were all beautiful growing moments.”

On this summer day, as Juwan Howard’s car crawls down 95th Street, the old man points to the place where his story began and where his court wrote the prologue for so many others. He wants to talk about what it took to get out of there. He says it’s always important to remember where you came from. 

Howard glances next to him and peeks in the rearview mirror. He is 47 now, happily married, with six children, four boys and two girls. Every offseason, ever since they’ve been old enough, he brings the boys past Lowden. They need to know. Howard used to bring Juwan Jr. and Joshua by here and show them this place. Now it’s his teenage sons, Jace and Jett. The two boys arch their necks, looking out the window. Jace is 6-foot-7, catching up with dad. Jett is the youngest, but might end up being the best of the bunch. They are children of vast privilege, but that’s not their fault. 

They see the redbrick houses and the black iron fencing. They see Juwan Howard Court, where, on that flat asphalt, a ball waits for the next kid to come along and take his shot. 

(Top photo: Brendan Quinn / The Athletic)

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