Players scramble for the ball during the Hoop It Up tournament downtown circa 1992. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
The Hoop It Up 3-on-3 basketball tournament started in Dallas under the auspices of D Magazine publisher Terry Murphy in 1984. He got the idea from a Sports Illustrated article on the venerable Gus Macker 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament tour that served about 44 smaller-market cities. Murphy possessed Texas-sized ambitions to take the concept nationwide. By 1992, Hoop It Up boasted 70,000 players in 40 U.S. cities and Zaragoza, Spain.
There were no prizes except for bragging rights and a chance at the national championships in Dallas.
In Richmond, the dynamic Nina Abady, who became the director of the nonprofit booster group Downtown Presents in 1985, sought to bring as many people and as many different kinds of them into the city for memorable good times.
Downtown Presents put on The Festival Park New Year’s Eve in the Coliseum’s plaza, Easter on Parade along Monument Avenue, the Big Gig of citywide concerts, the Two Street Festival celebrating the African American culture of Jackson Ward and the Friday Cheers music series. She led the campaign that raised $8 million to transform the Loew’s Theatre into the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts (today’s Dominion Energy Center).
Abady explained her hoop dreams to the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1992. “What better way for people to know each other, play together and hopefully shake hands with each other,” she said. The Steubenville, Ohio, native grew up during the 1930s in racially divided Macon, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama. Her education and professional background included law, social work and teaching. During the 1970s, she taught sociology at Virginia Union and Virginia State universities and helped raise millions from private sources to support the historically Black institutions.
Richmond’s Hoop It Up, co-sponsored by the Ukrop’s grocery chain and Pepsi, launched with 537 teams taking to crowded courts arranged around the skirts of the Richmond Coliseum in April 1992. The tournament opened amid a national obsession with pickup basketball, particularly the half-court, 3-on-3 variety, a slower, more accessible counter to the traditional full-court game. Hoop It Up also emerged amid the growing popularity of the NBA — Michael Jordan was at the height of his powers — and following the spring release of “White Men Can’t Jump,” a movie starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as street-ball con artists who go on to compete in a 3-on-3 tournament.
The Richmond tournament garnered so much interest that organizers had to turn away teams due to a lack of space.
“They came by the thousands — young, old, black, white, men and women — to speak the universal language of basketball,” reported Mark Holmberg of the Times-Dispatch. “That’s street ball. Down and dirty. No refs. No mercy.”
Opposing teams called fouls on each other, and the closer they got to the winning score of 16, the more fouls got called, increasing the potential for disputes. The event’s organizers cited the unaffordable expense of hiring referees, and the games often got out of hand.
The thrown elbows and trash talk surprised some spectators and encouraged rowdy behavior in others.
Abady philosophically observed, “Bringing diverse people together isn’t always neat and comfortable. … If it’s anything, it’s equal-opportunity basketball.”
Despite quibbles with its inaugural edition, Hoop It Up expanded the following year, drawing 950 teams. Former college players from the University of Richmond and Virginia Union joined the fray. Mike Winiecki (brother of Richmond magazine Associate Publisher Emeritus Susan Winiecki) of UR was part of the Flavor Unit team that included former Spiders Pete Woolfolk and Eric English (now Henrico’s chief of police). “They drew up lines and set up hoops,” Winiecki recalled of the courts ringing the Coliseum. “It was old-school, ’90s street ball, very physical, and tempers got lost. And there was a big crowd. It was fun.”
Flavor Unit won the Hoop It Up men’s division. Winiecki went on to coach at Clemson and with the NBA G League’s Lakeland Magic. “And then I got tired of the hamster wheel,” he says. He’s now a CarMax team manager.
Abady did not see the tournament’s Richmond progress. She died at age 69 on Nov. 5, 1993, of cardiac arrest. “When good things happened in Richmond,” the Times-Dispatch editorialized, “they probably involved her.” The city christened the Coliseum plaza as Nina F. Abady Festival Park.
Richmond’s Hoop It Up numbers declined from a 1994 high of 1,160 teams to 1,110 teams in ’95 and then 850 squads in ’96. In 1997, Hoop It Up canceled its Richmond event, citing a “lack of growth.”
In 2019, Kevin Garnett, a 15-time NBA All-Star, acquired Hoop It Up through his company, Big Ticket Sports. The national tournament remains open to all ages and abilities but is more organized today, adding referees and featuring a Pro Am league with cash prizes, with national championships in Tempe, Arizona. The new Hoop It Up holds court in cities such as San Antonio and Salt Lake City, but not Richmond.
