Basketball is Bridgehampton's passion

One end of it is called "The Tracks." And from those railroad tracks out on the Sag Harbor Turnpike north to Huntington Path - folks here call it "The Crossway" - is what amounts to the backwater of the Hamptons. Of Bridgehampton.

The rich people, the weekend people, the summer people, the beautiful people? Most all of them live "South of the Highway." From Montauk Highway, south to Dune Road.

But the rest of them?

"The rest of us," Bridgehampton boys basketball coach Carl Johnson said matter of factly, as if he were drilling a jumper back in the day, "we stay from `The Tracks' to `The Crossway.' That's where most of us stay."

The "us" in that sentence is a euphemism. What Johnson meant, in terms of black and white, is black. The black community. The descendants of migrant farm workers and potato diggers, the sons and daughters of slavery. Those folks from "the other side of town." From over there, across the tracks - a stone's throw from the sand and sun and surf and all that luxuriance. From where life is hardscrabble.

To understand the passion for boys basketball in Bridgehampton, to understand its role - the success of it in a school that has only 36 students, grades 10 through 12, third-smallest in the state; that has only 16 boys, 15 of whom are on the team - you have to start with all this separation.

The rich have their land and their mansions, their bank accounts and accountants and stock portfolios and financial advisers. They have their Jaguars and Mercedes and Rolls-Royces. And the rest of them?

They have their homes and rent and their workaday lives. They have the Child Care Center out on the turnpike with its three basketball courts and six baskets to take their minds off their often tough-as-nails existence. They have but one thing to call their own. Their basketball team at Bridgehampton.

"Basketball and Bridgehampton," Bridgehampton senior guard Terrell Hopson said. "It's like religion. Both begin with `B.' Both go together in a way most people can't understand. When we go out there, it's almost like we're spreading the word."

Hallelujah! Since 1978, when Bridgehampton became the first school to win a class title in what was the inaugural state tournament in New York, this tiny school from the East End has been a dominant force in the state in the only sport in which it fields a team. (Its students compete on combined teams at other schools in other sports.) One of 208 Class D schools in the state, it has won five New York State Public High School Athletic Association Class D championships - more than any other school in any of the four state classifications (A, B, C or D) - and three state titles in the Federation tournament. It has won 15 Class D title in Suffolk County, including 13 in the past 17 seasons. Though the smallest of only six schools on the Island with an enrollment of fewer than 200, it is the only small school ever to reach the Suffolk championship game, losing to North Babylon in 1986, Comsewogue in 1989 and Northport, 50-35, in 1995.

In a town where most of the white families send their children to private schools, such as Mercy, and the public grade and high school has an enrollment of 169 pre-kindergarten to Grade 12 and is almost 90 percent minorities, the team has become the black equivalent of "Hoosiers." As Bridgehampton athletic director Mary Anne Jules said, "It's amazing."

A native of Baldwin, she had more than 1,000 kids in her graduating class, a lifetime's worth - several lifetimes' worth - here. "But our kids don't view smallness as a negative, don't perceive it as unfair when we have to compete against bigger schools," she said. "They view it as a challenge. This is Bridgehampton. Their cousins played here, their brothers played here. Their dads played here. I can't imagine we'll ever have trouble fielding a team."

Back in 1988, the talk was the Town of Southampton might close this place because of its falling enrollment, might send the remaining kids off to other schools - to places such as East Hampton and Southampton and Pierson. Though there were only 451 blacks, 21 American Indians, 13 Asians and 30 Hispanics in Bridgehampton, according to the 1990 U.S. census, compared with 1,468 whites, the minority community - the rest of "them" - fought the move. And won.

"Bridgehampton without Bridgehampton High School?" said Hopson, who was just a little kid back then - carrying bags for his cousin, Bobby Hopson, just as he had carried bags for his half-brother, the coach, Carl Johnson, who had carried bags for his cousin before him, Gordon Johnson. "Bridgehampton without Bridgehampton basketball? That would be like Washington, D.C., without the monuments."

Because if basketball here is religion, then the quirky little bandbox gymnasium is its sacred house of worship. In most places this small, the team holds the ball while the faithful pray for deliverance. Here, despite often being both outsized and outmanned, they spread the gospel with a run-and-gun, in-your-face style that often delivers 100 points - all as the boisterous congregation rhapsodizes in sermon that is take-no-prisoners.

And why not? The undersized floor measures 37 x 54 instead of the official 50 x 94 - "I've been advised," Bridgehampton chief school official John Edwards said, with a laugh, "it is highly illegal" - and there are only six inches between the walls and the ends of the court, shoe-horned into the octagonal gymnasium. There is a stage at the far end, mainly because the place doubles - no, triples - as a cafeteria, auditorium and gym in a building where students range from pre-kindergarten to Grade 12. There are five rows of bleachers on each side, one foot, maybe two, between them and courtside.

The boards crack and creak when you walk on them, sort of like the floor at the old Boston Garden. The three-point arcs intersect the sidelines six, maybe seven, feet from the baselines - though someone jokingly extended them so at the bottom, they are outside the court boundaries by a good foot or so. It is seven feet from the top of the key to midcourt - and, of course, another seven to the top of the other key.

Twenty-seven league and county and state championship banners hang on the walls, though, as Hopson said: "I'm sure there are a lot more in the basement downstairs."

"You see kids in there, watching the games," Carl Johnson said. "Those kids tell me, `I can't wait to play in this gym.' "

It's like fever. And Johnson, like all of them here, remembers when he first got the bug to play for the "Killer Bees." He was 11, maybe 12, carrying those bags for his cousin, Gordon.

"I knew," he said. "I had to play."

His aunt, Ethel Banks, was the matriarch of the current incarnation, which followed years after the first title, won in 1935; years after the most notable Bridgehampton native - Carl Yastrzemski - passed through. She came north in the 1960s, came to work the fields, and from her descendants - the Hopsons and Johnsons - came a dozen or so stars, among them Bobby Hopson, Troy Bowe and Terrell Hopson.

Carl Johnson himself was a rail-thin point guard who teamed with Wayne Hopson in the backcourt on the 1977-78 team that beat Lyme Central for that first state title at the Rochester War Memorial. The two went on to win two more state titles - the only two players in history to win three straight - and after the last one, Johnson, who made All-Long Island, seemed headed for basketball fame at the University of Maryland. But a friend accidentally shot him in the right arm with a shotgun five days after the third title and basketball was never the same. Maryland took Steve Rivers out of Long Island Lutheran. Johnson went off to college in Utica. "Awful place," he said.

Then he came back and took work and became an assistant to John Niles, who had replaced Roger Golden and whose son, also named John, was the last white player to play at Bridgehampton. That was 1990-91, the last time Bridgehampton made it "upstate" - to the state tournament. It didn't win. Johnson became the first black head coach here the next season, which was significant not only because he is good, but also because of the symbolism.

See, that 1990 U.S. census found that almost half of the white families in Bridgehampton - 289 of 659 - had a household income of more than $50,000 in 1989, while only 24 of the 134 black families did. And that more than 100 white families earned more than $75,000 - 70 of them more than $100,000 - while no black families did. That meant Johnson, whose work is as a salesman down at Hildreth's Department Store in neighboring Southampton, had a chance to reach some of his own, to teach generations through basketball, in a community in which he otherwise might not have had a voice. "I tell them that this is something they can be proud of," Johnson said. "Because it is something that is theirs. I tell them, `If you can work hard on the basketball court, you can work hard in the classroom.' If they believe they are good enough to win out there," he said, pointing to the court, "they can believe they are good enough to win out there." In the world outside Bridgehampton.

And this team is doing just that. Not only have Terrell Hopson, Nathaniel Dent, Nick Thomas, Maurice Manning, Javon Harding and the rest of them found success on the court - where they've gone 15-3, edging Southampton for the regular-season title in Suffolk Conference IV - but Hopson has a shot at the honor roll this semester and Thomas is being heavily recruited by New York University. And not only does this team have a realistic chance to go "upstate" - to the Class D Tournament - for the first time since 1991, some think it has a chance to win the Suffolk Class B-C-D title - Amityville (B) and Southampton (C) are the likely contenders - for the second straight season and earn another shot at becoming the first small school to win the overall county championship.

One possible opponent? Maybe Sachem, the largest school in New York with an enrollment of 3,424.

That, and the tallest player at Bridgehampton is Hopson, who is 6 feet tall. Dent, the center, is 5-10.

"So what?" Hopson said. "Yeah, we're small. We don't have a lot of kids. But even if your school has 3,400 kids, our attitude is you can only have five on the court at a time. And if our five is better than your five, guess what? We're going to win."

That attitude caused General Electric to come here last season to film a segment for its employee seminars on teamwork. It hit a handful of Fortune 500 companies - and Bridgehampton basketball. And last year, when Manhattan real estate magnate William Rudin had his birthday bash at Madison Square Garden, the team was invited - and Rudin told the players to stop by any time to play on his court. Down on Dune Road.

"I'll be 35 in April," Johnson said. "But I never thought I'd see that. It was nice."

"There are a lot of things people who look at us think we can't do," Terrell Hopson said. "They see our size, see we don't have the kids, see the negatives. But we win here because we've learned to turn negatives into positives. That's what we do. Our mentality is that we do things you don't think we can, no matter what - because we believe in ourselves."

As he said: "We're Bridgehampton."