Maybe it’s because I’m too young to have any memory of overt racial conflict in America. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a mixed-race neighborhood, played in mixed-race sports leagues and attended mixed-race schools. Whether it was any or all of those things, the obsession of many with race in sports—or more accurately, non-white participation in sports—has always fallen flat with me. I have always seen sports as the one place where race doesn’t matter as much as it does elsewhere. If you have game, you play; if you don’t, you don’t. I can’t say my being a white kid was never an issue in a neighborhood that was trending towards first-generation Dominicans, but I can say that on the courts of Inwood Park, your ability to ball was a hell of a lot more important than anything else.