The strange thing, I realized once it was all over, is that Andre Iguodala is younger than I am. He's 21, my little sister's age. And yet, standing on a court with him, I feel like a kid. My face is stuck in this big, dumb smile. I'm giggly. For some reason, I keep thinking of cotton candy.

Iguodala hadn't wanted to play with me. When our photographer, Mike Regan, first called across the gym, "Hey, Andre! Want to play this guy in Horse?" the second-year star kept his gaze on the rim and muttered, "I don't play Horse." A moment later, though, he turned around, eyes agleam.

"Want to play for money?"

"Ten dollars," I suggested.

"Four hundred," he said.

After a discussion of our respective salaries and the interference of a nervous PR guy, Andre was negotiated down to zero dollars. I can't say I blame him for resisting -- he stays late after practice to hoist a few extra jumpers, and he's got to play some chump reporter in Horse? -- but I never considered letting the issue drop. I was on a mission.

OUTPACED: The Gratz girls were excellent shooters and smart players. : Michael T. Regan

The late, great George Plimpton -- who played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, pitched in the majors and boxed against Archie Moore, all as a participatory journalist -- once wrote that, for the young fan, playing at the highest level of sport is considered not so much an aspiration as an inevitability. I personally was destined to become a basketball star -- a 6-foot-3 shooting guard with a buttery stroke and a preternatural knack for the clutch -- until my first shot as a freshman in a junior varsity game was swatted into the empty bleachers of Washington Irving High School.

Most of us learn to accept such rejection, but we never really grow out of the child's understanding of how good elite athletes actually are. We think of them as mythical figures like knights and dragons. Eventually, we pin ourselves in front of the TV and lose all perspective. Last year, I declared with great sincerity that I could have won the NBA's 3-point shooting contest.

So, as the basketball season got under way, I set out to play with teams at every level of organized competition in Philadelphia -- to see what it was like in games with bona fide ballers, and to see what would happen if a recreational fatso like me got on the court with them. I played with the Bulldogs of Simon Gratz High School, which gave us the NBA's Rasheed Wallace and Aaron McKie; I played with the Hawks of Saint Joseph's University, which two years ago gave us an unlikely and inspiring run deep into the NCAA tournament. I had just played with 76ers rookie Louis Williams.

And now I'm standing next to Iguodala. We look like two creatures of the same species, but different breed; a German shepherd beside a terrier mutt. Plimpton found himself completely insufficient to the tasks he tried -- Moore bloodied his nose almost by accident -- and it's perfectly clear why. A voice in my head, which sounds suspiciously like NBA color commentator Bill Walton, begins to laugh.

"Can you believe this kid used to think he was going to be in the NBA?" it asks.

I step on to the court, saying something to the general effect of "let's go." Iguodala, standing directly beneath a basket, wraps his enormous fingers around the contours of a ball and, with a slight crick of his ankles, lifts up and into the air for a dunk. For a moment, it seems like he may never come down.

The Simon Gratz Bulldogs

Simon Gratz High School is a sprawling brick building on Hunting Park Avenue in Nicetown. The gymnasium is located on the ground floor. It is an ancient, cavernous space, bathed in egg-yellow light, with a volleyball net splitting the main basketball court in two. One of the rims has duct tape on it. This is not quite where basketball begins, but it is the place where the pretenders -- the people who play basketball -- get separated out from the basketball players.

When I arrive, the Bulldogs are practicing fast breaks. Guards dribble the ball hard up the floor and dish to wing men gliding beside them, who place the ball easily in the basket. I watch for a few minutes, trying to decide how intimidated I should be.

On the one hand, some of these kids are real athletes. The forwards and centers are what a scout might call "long": long arms, long legs, lithe bodies, all the better to reach higher and farther than the competition. The guards, with their shirts off, look like little machines, all necessary organs and muscles, designed to puff and run inexhaustibly.

But they also look like kids. Only one or two has filled out to adult girth, and their faces betray a teenage boy's disproportionate self-consciousness. I've got six years of basketball experience on the oldest of these guys. Sure, I may not be as "fast" or as "strong" as them, but isn't there a certain savvy that comes with age?

The Gratz coach is a hulking, serious man named Leonard Poole. Because 71 percent of Gratz students come from low-income families, and 98 percent are African-American, Coach Poole often finds himself fighting off cliches like "basketball is a way out," or even "basketball keeps kids off the street." Basketball, Poole knows, is a mirage of a career path, no more realistic for the great bulk of these kids than it was for me. A basketball player can find trouble as easily as the next guy. What the game offers, he says, is a source of pride, of status, and a shot at a moment or two of glory.

The coach regards me with polite amusement as he splits the boys into teams for a scrimmage.

"Whichever team you want," he says. I choose "shirts." Obviously.

I don't know if I expected some immediate shock to the system, some quick revelation, but I didn't get one. For the first few plays, nothing happens to me: I run up and down the court; the man I'm covering does not get the ball, and neither do I. Eventually, my man sets a pick, and there is some confusion -- I always fight through screens; my teammate wants to switch and my man ends up scoring. He scores again a few plays later, after driving past me. I knew where he was going, but couldn't get there in time.

And here's Bill Walton. He used to castigate me regularly during high school games, offering pessimistic play-by-play commentary. Now he says:

"This is sad. It's like watching a replay where one guy is moving in slow motion."

The game does seem awfully fast. Velton Jones, my team's sophomore point guard, pushes the ball, and a lot of times "we" get a shot off just as I'm arriving to play offense. Not that the boys are taking bad shots. They're making entry passes, swinging the ball around. You know how people say the kids all want to be Iverson these days? Not here. This is businesslike basketball: very little one-on-one creation, a lot of offensive sets and movement. I, however, am moving too slowly to get open. When I finally get a look from the left wing, my shot is flat and the ball catches front rim.

Still, I want to think I'm holding my own. I've made some good passes, and despite Walton's critiques -- "is he grabbing his side? Does he have a cramp already?" -- I feel my older-guy savvy is showing.

Eventually I catch a pass on the wing and make a real good whip of an entry pass into the post, which forward George Mellon catches and dumps into the basket.

"Good pass!" I hear Coach Poole call out in a tone that sounds strangely familiar. I take a moment trying to figure out where I've heard it before, when I realize, wait -- that's how people talk when the worst player on the court finally does something right.

Oh, no: I'm the difference between the two teams. It can be a subtle thing in basketball. I'm not turning the ball over, or being scored on every time down the floor. But my team is getting beat on rebounds by about 20 percent, and I don't have a single rebound. My teammates have to worry about guarding their own men and helping me out with mine. And I'm certainly not contributing to the fast-break offense.

"Mike," I asked our photographer after my team lost its second straight game, "do you think I was the worst player out there?"

"They weren't looking for ya, D," he said, looking the other way.

Seventh-grade Doron would have been crushed. I decided to go across the gym and play with the girls' team.

When I showed up at Gratz, Ralph Midora, the girls' coach, had invited me to include his squad in my journey through Philadelphia basketball. He had a couple of Division One prospects, he said, and he thought I'd be surprised with the quality of play. I looked over the girls. Some were my height; others were about 5-foot-even. I didn't know what to make of it.

As the game got under way, I bumped into a girl who was cutting across the lane, and I felt her fall away -- more than an off-the-ball bump usually warrants. Just as I was thinking, "Jeez, I'm going to have to take it easy out here," a shot went up, and I felt the sharp pain of her bony elbow stabbing into the small of my back. I didn't get that rebound.

THE NEXT FRANCHISE: Blooming NBA star Andre Iguodala wanted to wager $400 to play Horse. He still smoked Taussig for free. : Michael T. Regan

After that, I went ahead and played hard -- though I was still struggling with the twin anxieties of not wanting to be embarrassed by girls -- high school girls -- and not wanting to be a bully. In fact, I feel paralyzed by the same two-headed concern now: I don't want to be condescending, but I don't want to say the girls were better than me, either -- because they weren't. Here's the deal: the girls were excellent shooters and smart players. But the athleticism deficit was noticeable. A boy getting into the lane closes the distance between his dribble and the hoop in the air; these girls were forced to stop and throw the ball at the rim. I grabbed a lot of rebounds and blocked several shots, and I boast an extremely modest vertical leap; we played a game to six, and I scored three points in a winning effort.

At the end of the game, I shot a glance at the sidelines. The entire boys' team had gathered to watch us. They were laughing hysterically.

The Saint Joseph's Hawks

When I asked Mike Rice, an assistant coach at Saint Joseph's University, what he thought would happen when I got on the court with the Hawks, he smiled.

"I know what's going to happen," he said.

This was a fairly typical response. The players often smirked to themselves while listening to me explain my project. One shook his head and said, "Oh, I don't know 'bout that." The quiet consensus seemed to be that something bad was going to happen to me.

The game I was scheduled to play in was a coachless preseason pickup game in Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse, a classic school gym that can seem almost intimate when its wooden bleachers are empty. As the players trickled in on this Monday afternoon, Rice looked me up and down, and asked somewhat sarcastically if I wanted to warm up.

I took a ball over to a side court. On the main floor, a couple of the players were catching passes from team managers -- students who, for some reason, choose to spend an inordinate amount of time playing the role of little brother to guys who are their age and younger. This baffled me. Who wants to spotlight his own role as a beta male?

As for the players, they look for all the world like oversized college kids (6-foot-10 sophomore guard Pat Calathes arrived wearing sandals over socks). But when they step on the court they enter a different realm. Chet Stachitas, a bulldoggish senior forward with a diverse scoring arsenal, sets up on the right wing and takes jumper after jumper, mechanically, with no apparent fear of boredom. Dwayne Lee, who two years ago played backup to Jameer Nelson, had earlier been dribbling circles around little cones -- even though he already dribbles like he has the ball on a string. These are the sort of moments that rarely appear in daydreams.

When it came time to pick up teams, Abdulai "Dula" Jalloh, a promising sophomore guard whom I had briefed on my purpose, selected me, explaining for all to hear, "well, somebody's gotta take him."

All of this negativity was starting to make me worried that, not only would I be the worst player on the court but I would also ruin the game for everyone else. I offered to play just the first four points -- except that, once the game started, four points came so quickly that I hadn't even broken a sweat. In typical basketball games, baskets happen when a team finds a good shot; here, almost every shot found the net.

Luckily, the players seemed to have forgotten I was there. I had, too. I watched innocently, as if standing in a quiet forest, while the enormous bodies of big men slapped against each other in pursuit of rebounds. I meandered through casual V-cuts on offense. When the man I was guarding, a floppy-haired guard named Steve McGovern (who was visiting from Loyola), touched the ball and began to drive past me, help came so quickly from a teammate that he could do no damage.

Bill Walton wasn't even criticizing me. At Gratz, I realized, the players were good enough that my inadequacy was glaring. At Saint Joe's, they were so good that it didn't matter.

The biggest difference between this game and every other game I've ever played in was the athleticism -- the Hawks were simply faster and stronger. But there were other distinctions. Everyone switched on every pick -- there was never any confusion. People were yelled at just as much for failing to help on defense as for a stupid turnover. No one threw any "skip passes" -- a pass across the court, which is easily intercepted. Everything was done sharply and strongly. And the competitiveness! Here were teammates, screaming and cursing at one another -- I thought Dula was going to punch someone. But you got the feeling that, if he switched teams, his animosities and allegiances would have switched with him.

It happened abruptly. I was perched harmlessly on the right wing, and Chet had penetrated into a spiderweb of defenders beneath the basket. The ball popped out and toward me. I took two steps forward, picked it up and, still moving in, tossed a little shot off the backboard. It dropped in.

"Way to get a bucket, reporter," Dula said as we ran back up the court.

Well, Dula ran. I was floating.

Confidence is the aphrodisiac of basketball. You make a couple shots in a row and you feel like you can't miss -- and for a little while, you're right. At Saint Joe's, I was smitten. I slapped a ball away on defense ("good hustle, reporter") and made a couple of nice passes. After my team won the first game and I was invited to stay on for a second, 6-foot-9 forward Arvydas Lidzius passed me the ball for an open three, and I stroked it in perfect rhythm, not for a moment thinking I might miss. Someone on the other team yelled out "Shooter!" as the ball splashed through the net. It was the athletic equivalent of an orgasm.

But gradually, things went downhill. The other team started to isolate on me a bit more, and Steve scored a couple of hoops; I threw a skip pass, and it was intercepted. I was forced to switch onto Dwayne Lee after a screen, and he blew by me like he was zipping through a yellow light. Walton was starting to mutter.

After my team eked out its second victory, I voluntarily dropped, thinking things could only get worse. My teammates congratulated me, which initially struck me as odd. Plimpton found that when he got roughed up on the baseball diamond, the players were glad that their profession had treated him so poorly. I like to think that this distinction said something not about the individuals involved, but about the game of basketball: In hoops, more than in any other sport, the performance of the team as a unit is capable of lifting up the individual parts.

But the most revealing moment of my afternoon had come before the games. I had been walking to the water fountain, past the court where Dula was shooting by himself, because the manager who'd been rebounding for him had gone to attend to someone else, when his ball bounced over to me. I picked it up and snapped him a pass. He caught it, took a jab step, and then elevated -- you could see the bottom row of the bleachers behind him beneath his sneakers -- to release a jump shot that rotated like the earth on its axis. I was still standing beneath the hoop when it splashed in, so I did it again, and then again. As I stood there, subbing in for the manager, I felt that, unlike when I played in the games, I belonged here. Dula was doing something with a ball and a basket that, to me, was a work of art. I was just happy to help.

The Philadelphia 76ers

The absurdity of this whole endeavor really hit me while I was taking my pants off. Ten seconds earlier, I had been just another one of the schlubby sports reporters standing on the sidelines of the Sixers' sparkling practice facility in the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, looking up in awe at Chris Webber, who is bigger in person than any photograph can possibly communicate. Now I was donning athletic gear to step onto the court. Only problem: I was still a schlub.

Fortunately, the Sixer with whom I was scheduled to compete was the one with whom I compared, let's say, least unfavorably -- if only because he's still 18. Philly took Louis Williams in the second round of the 2005 NBA draft. He hails from Lithonia, Ga., where he won last year's Naismith Award for the top high school basketball player in the country. This year, he joins the last batch of high school ballers ever to make the jump directly to the pros, thanks to a new league age limit.

From the one day of practice I watched, I would say that you shouldn't expect to see Louis contributing immediately. Playing against the other Sixers, he looks like -- well, like a kid fresh out of high school. His arms are skinnier, he's just 6-foot-2, and he still wears braces on his bottom teeth. In a scrimmage, he got trapped against the baseline by bigger, stronger guys and picked up his dribble in inopportune places. At the same time, though, Louis has tools. He has a wicked jump shot that he can launch from absurdly far out. He has an explosive first step. And he has a vertical leap that they say is in excess of 40 inches. He first dunked as a 5-foot-7 seventh-grader. When I was a 5-foot-7 seventh-grader, we oohed and aahed over the kids who could tap the backboard.

Louis also has confidence. He came to the NBA in spite of the fact that many said he wasn't ready. He wears number 23 and compares his skill set to Iverson's. As he walked over to greet me for our game, I heard him say to a coach, "I just gotta drill this guy real quick."

Because we couldn't risk knocking knees and having Louis suffer a multimillion dollar injury, Louis and I had to play Horse, a shooting-only game in which a player gets a letter for each opponent's shot he fails to match until he spells the name of the titular farm animal.

I opened the game with a 15-foot bank shot from the left side, which I made. Louis smirked, cock-walked over to the spot I had shot from and missed long.

H.

I took a long three and missed it. Louis, now with something to prove, proceeded to take me on a tour of bank shots, all over the court, at the end of which I managed to have just one letter. Finally he missed, and I made a free throw. He missed it.

HO.

The game became a back and forth of long jumpers and, for Louis, occasional left-handed circus shots, during which I managed to keep pace surprisingly well. To watch him move so close up was to appreciate why he is an NBA player: the Gratz players were fast and highly competent; the guys at Saint Joe's were like basketball black belts. But Louis had something else, a quality of motion that made it seem like he was dancing. Though, for all that, his shots were going in only as often as mine were.

"The kid is toying with him," Walton explained. "He's gonna let him come close, and then laugh him out of the gym."

We ended up tied up at HORS, and I had the ball.

I took a deep, deep three from straight away. It spun off my ring and pinkie fingers and came up short right. "That's pathetic," Walton opined. "His one big chance, and he blows it."

Now Louis could put me away. He took, of all things, a running hook shot in the lane, and… crap. He made it.

Then, against all odds, I made it too. At this point, a security guard had wandered into the gym and was watching the contest. He was very excited. "Don't lose, Louis!" he said, louder than was necessary. Louis, annoyed by my successful hook shot, took a lefty hook, and missed it.

One more chance.

I went to the deep, deep left corner -- beyond NBA 3-point range -- and threw up a pop fly.

It felt good.

It looked good…

In a postgame interview, Louis would say that he was "a little sour" about the way the game transpired. Perhaps he could have incorporated a couple of dunks, or at least taken back that lefty hook. Instead, he gave me a chance, and his attempt to match missed long.

HORSE.

Holy crap. I just beat an NBA player in Horse.

The security guard was whooping and hollering ("I'm gonna call all the papers!"). Louis was smiling bashfully. The PR guy was making excuses ("he just practiced for two hours"). Mike Regan, the photographer, was pumping his fist in the air, and Bill Walton didn't have a goddamn thing to say.

As for me, I have some important questions. Do the Sixers want to offer me a contract right now, or do I have to declare myself eligible for the draft? Shouldn't City Paper pay me at least what the Sixers are paying Louis? And wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Louis and I had to play Horse so that he wouldn't injure me?

One thing is for certain: Louis Williams is my new favorite NBA player. The farther he goes, the farther I go. Can you imagine if he becomes the next Allen Iverson? I'll never need another small-talk anecdote in my life.

After the game, as Mike and I were leaving the gym, we noticed that Andre Iguodala was still shooting. Mike called out to him, and our negotiation ensued. If I hadn't beaten Louis, he probably would have stuck to his $400 price tag. But my triumph piqued his interest.

"He ain't gonna beat me," he said.

He was right, of course. Though we didn't count his dunk, and I scored first on a free throw, Iguodala soon commenced banging jumpers from all over the court. I matched a few, and even got a few chances to score again, but I was never really in the game. Anyway, just watching Iguodala up close was a thrill. When he cocks his elbow for a jumper, his biceps flex into a veritable globe, and yet he's somehow not so thick as to lack agility. I should also note, for all you Sixers' fans, that the jumper looks pretty good this year. When he releases it, he makes a little noise, in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, that sounds like "Oh man." I don't know if he makes that sound when he shoots in games. I certainly hope he does.

After thrashing me, Iguodala shook my hand, and I walked out of the gym with my face stuck in an enormous smile. I had taken a journey into the heart of a childhood dream and glimpsed the promised land. Now I have to go back. Back to watching games on TV, back to losing perspective. Back to playing pickup games with the rest of you schlubs in parks and playgrounds.

I'll be the guy in the Louis Williams jersey.

(doron@citypaper.net)