When Carmelo Anthony was 16 years old, he and his buddies would pile into a car touring from one Baltimore neighborhood to the next. Any slab of concrete with two competing hoops counted as their battleground. From Patterson Park to The Dome to Boceks, Anthony and company embarrassed any willing challenger at every stop.

D. Watkins, a Baltimore native and the ghost writer of Anthony’s 2021 memoir, knows this because “unfortunately, I was on one of those teams that got the [crap] beat out of us.”

It was on those playgrounds where word spread about the kid from West Baltimore’s Murphy Homes, lauded as the city’s next big thing. Anthony’s trajectory came to fruition by virtue of his one-and-done championship season at Syracuse and a 19-year NBA career, having retired as one of the game’s pr

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