Downtown News staff writer Ryan Vaillancourt spent a year reporting on the inner workings of the Skid Row basketball league, starting by getting himself into pickup games at Gladys Park. He finally was invited to join the league this past summer. His first of three parts runs in the paper this week, with photos by Gary Leonard. Excerpt:

It was more than a year ago that I, a reporter with a basketball habit, first wandered into Gladys Park.

It’s a small plot, fenced off from the southwest corner of Sixth Street and Gladys Avenue by green iron gates that get locked every night at 6 p.m. Stepping inside for the first time was unnerving. A white guy in slacks and a tie doesn’t really blend in.

Even in the context of Skid Row, the park was a depressing scene. Parks are supposed to be refuges and recreational escapes. This wasn’t that at all. Beyond the usual pieces of infrastructure — a thin swath of grass, the court, some picnic tables, and an inexplicable shuffleboard platform that the homeless use as an unforgiving bed — not much differentiated the inside of Gladys Park from the outside.

This part focuses on a 60-year-old ex-gangbanger known in the league as OG Man, who is "something between a grassroots community hero and a neighborhood father figure....for a 60-year-old, his shoulders and torso are broad and strong, but at about 5-foot-7 he’s not a big guy. He favors a backwards cap on his bald head. A laminated card emblazoned with the Skid Row 3-on-3 Streetball League logo usually dangles from his neck on a lanyard, like a badge."

Photo: Gary Leonard