A season under the gun

SHOW DECK

STORY

Rick Telander’s powerful look behind the scenes at the Orr High School basketball team and the challengesits players faced in a community struggling with poverty and violence.

Maybe early 20s, a young man of color, here on the West Side?

That is, stay out of jail. Avoid violence. Learn. Have a future. Remain alive.

Who knows? Who knows at all?

I ask myself those questions often as I visit Orr High School, which sits like a low, beige box on the southwest corner of Chicago Avenue and Pulaski Road.

To place the school, it is helpful to think of it as 40 blocks west of State St. and eight blocks north of Madison Street. On clear days outside Orr, the John Hancock Center looms to the east like a not-too-distant monolith in a foreign world.

A grand Chicago is there where the sky meets the water, the place where the sun rises. But if you talk to policemen or teachers from the West Side, you will find that they know adolescents from those neighborhoods who have never been downtown, never seen the lake.

It’s a fitting metaphor—this self-imposed, narrow encampment — for the killings that have shocked the world yet harm almost no one in the white community, in the suburbs, or in Chicago’s famous and well-protected tourist and shopping areas.

And if you want a Ground Zero in Chicago’s world of violence, especially as it influences and affects a public educational institution, you can’t go wrong with Orr. Though it has only about 400 students these days, the school is surrounded by the decay and danger of an urban area that showcases the bleeding of an American city to much of the civilized world.