Anderson Parker - The Run - "Welcome To The Run" lyrics

Pickup basketball is a raw, unfettered landscape and a microcosm of our society at-large. Unlike NBA or NCAA games, a pickup game has no cameras to influence the players to act or talk a certain way, no coaches to draw up plays or call timeouts, and no predetermined rules, only those that each court or run historically plays by. What remains is the interaction between [mostly] men, occasionally women, and the game itself, in its purest form. Pickup players just want – no, they need – to play some ball. There is the potential for real growth from boyhood to manhood on these courts; there is also substantial evidence for psychological stasis and inertia (i.e. 50 year-old man whining like 5 year-old boy about a foul call, throwing a tantrum, holding up the game until he makes his point- in a later entry, we will be discussing that dude, who somehow exists at every court). The human behavior at these runs fall drastically behind the times. There is overt racism and s**ism, picking on the weak and less sk**ed, and it is all in your face. There are different races, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, and creeds, all together in a rare amalgam, and it is an ultimately beautiful thing. Of course, in pickup, there are some of the most colorful personalities that even movies like the “Cable Guy” could not even touch…Lord have mercy, are there some characters out there. Many wiser men than ourselves have said that to see who a man truly is, one needs to see how he plays basketball in a pickup setting, and experience tells us that this is true. The Run is an endlessly fascinating world, and it is our intention to explore in excruciating detail how this world provokes, motivates, mystifies, and entertains us. We are pa**ionate about the pickup game, despite the physical and psychological abuse it can bring with it and look forward to over-an*lyzing everything about it to anyone that will read this.