Welcome to “The Cage.” 

It sounds sinister because it is.

For me, the toughest of fights entail chasing after thoughts, wrestling down ideas and then pinning them to spooky little Google Docs. And now, I have a column where my words will be my own. 

I’m not a writer. I haven’t spent enough time thinking about or doing anything to consider myself something. I don’t have a noun at all. But even though I am nothing, I continue to do things like scribbling, speaking, smiling, showering and sometimes even sleeping.

And my favorite -ing is moving.

Growing up in paradise for the aged and crazed (aka South Florida), moving around outside was all there was to do. My friends and I spent our days poking alligators with sticks before scurrying away from the rattled reptiles, launching oranges into the sky during a game of moss, organizing “biker gangs” by jamming football cards in bicycle spokes, pegging each other with air potatoes, whittling tree trunks as we practiced our baseball pitches and crashing touch football games at strangers’ family functions. 

To this day, I find that the most meaningful spaces are those where running, throwing, jumping and juking are free and communal acts. Throughout playful movement, verbs generate value, and as somebody who is yet to have a noun, I love that. 

Obviously, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Most folks can recall and continue to create gratifying memories of outdoor recreation. The movement that these spaces facilitate serves as the origin for almost every professional career and die-hard sport lover, in addition to serving as venues that enrich and define culture. 

This idea is best evidenced by Manhattan’s iconic West Fourth Street basketball courts, also known as The Cage. Fenced all along its perimeter, The Cage has been an incubator for developments in basketball culture for over a century, giving rise to increased physicality, fresh styles and the careers of NBA players such as Jayson Williams, Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Walter Berry. And to this day, anybody can shout “I got next!” to have the opportunity to prove their prowess against some of the best streetball players in the world. 

As inspired by The Cage, this column will aim to capture how people of Los Angeles have claimed public space for moving and curating cultures of play. It’ll be an effort to give voice to the sports and “home” courts that we’ve never heard of.

Leila MacKenzie is a sophomore writing about the relationship between public land and play in her column, “The Cage,” which runs every other Friday. She is also a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.