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MAN IN THE FRONT PASSENGER seat shifts his weight as we pull up, then starts talking again.
"I know exactly when it was," says Devin Ferguson as he adjusts the fit of his hat. "I know exactly what he did…"
They were 11. It was a rec league game. The ball was drifting out of bounds outside of the three-point line. Rudy Gay caught up to it in the corner, cuffed it with his left hand, and threw it at the rim backwards. It went in as the shot clock buzzer sounded.
"I'll never forget," says Devin, chuckling. "It was me and this boy named Kenny Allen, and we was like, 'He going to the NBA.' I swear to God."
Everyone steps out onto a couple of neighborhood basketball courts. A community center is to your left, and the ocean is so close you could throw a basketball into the water. Young kids are playing a casual game on one of the hoops, stopping every 20 seconds to look at us. Is that…? They seem to be asking themselves. There are shouts from the parking lot. People know he's here. They see the
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cameras, the crew of people and that one really tall guy. But no one's overbearing. This is his home. Earlier in the afternoon, we walked across a street toward Sollers Point Tech High School and people drove by as if this was nothing.
By this point, it's about 7 p.m. We've been outside for three hours. When we first got to Dundalk, a suburb just southeast of Baltimore, our shirts were sticking to our backs in the heat, and yet you could feel the slightest breeze coming in off the water. Now, the humidity is leaking, and the sky is reaching for darkness.
The camera crew takes us toward the far basket. It's empty. Nearly all of the white is chipped off the backboard. The rim is bent up angrily and it's hard to tell whether it's warped or just broken from too many dunks. There are ugly cracks running on the cement from the basket's base to the free throw line.
This was the hoop where the crew used to play when they were younger. Too small to ball with the big boys, even with Rudy, they were always sent to this broken, 10-and-a-half foot rim with the