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" When Aaron &amp;quot;A.O.&amp;quot; Owens tosses a basketball off your head and back to himself, it&amp;#039;s almost an honor. The man is, as far as he and other aficionados of streetball \u2014 a form of stylized basketball born on city playground courts decades ago, but mainstreamed by the AND 1 tours and ESPN in the early 2000s \u2014 are concerned, a legend. Hell, he was the guy who changed tossing a ball off someone&amp;#039;s forehead from a dick- to a basketball-move. Now 39, A.O. is playing in the Ball Up tour, with games around the country this summer. We talked with him about never quite making it to the NBA, the Globetrotters, and, well, something about Jimi Hendrix. I just so happen to be a guy from Philly that can dribble. I learned by going to the park and trying to get the older guys off the court, and getting fouled, and calling fouls, and they&amp;#039;re not giving up the ball, and they&amp;#039;re saying, &amp;quot;That ain&amp;#039;t no fucking foul.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s the era I come from. You want to get physical? I&amp;#039;m going to get physical. You can&amp;#039;t really tell what your opponents&amp;#039; moves are when they get into the game. In open-run he was good, and then he get in the game and he think he&amp;#039;s fking Gary Payton. The first time, it was just a regular crossover. The funny thing I didn&amp;#039;t know \u2014 my teammate was like, &amp;quot;You know that kid fell?&amp;quot; I was like, &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; Because I was past him. So I didn&amp;#039;t even see it. The game goes on, nobody is calling time out. The coach doesn&amp;#039;t give a fk. It was an outdoor league at home, and I did it again. I came home, and some of the guys that were better than me before I got good \u2014 I get on a break and then in and out, in and out. And this kid, he fell. It was like slow-motion. The game just stopped. Kids running on the court. They throwing water bottles. I know Michael Jordan is the best player ever. I know this. There&amp;#039;s no denying that. But I hate him. I&amp;#039;ve never had a pair of Jordans. I was in 7th grade, we met him at the Sixers game, and I walked away from him when he tried to give me an autograph \u2014 because I was an Isaiah Thomas fan. Harlem Globetrotters are cool. I seen it sometimes when they&amp;#039;d throw jabs at us in the paper. Stuff like, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not like them.&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;First of all, we not trying to be like y&amp;#039;all. It&amp;#039;s not a competition. It&amp;#039;s not the same thing.&amp;quot; But I love the Globetrotters, since I was a little kid. West Coast guys feel like we don&amp;#039;t respect them \u2014 at anything. But it&amp;#039;s like: Alright, well, prove it to me. If you prove it to me, then I know you can play. A guy ran up on me and then I took a step back, and I threw it off his head, and he was shocked. And then he ran to me, I did a crossover, went down the lane, threw a move, and I was like: I&amp;#039;m going to try this on the tour. I throw it off the backboard, the guy I&amp;#039;m playing against turn all the way around. So I said, You know what? So I hit him on the back of the head, so that it came right back to me. He turned this way, but I&amp;#039;m going the other way, and my teammate is coming down the lane, so I just throw it up. It was gorgeous \u2014 and he throws it hard. And my own reaction was like, &amp;quot;Fuck it, I&amp;#039;m getting naked.&amp;quot; A playground game is compact, they can touch you. It gets so emotional in a tight game. It&amp;#039;s real. With the arena, it&amp;#039;s like going to work. But with playground games, it&amp;#039;s the essence of what streetball is. But the Garden was cool. It went from, &amp;quot;Oh it&amp;#039;s cool, this streetball stuff&amp;quot; then you&amp;#039;re in the street signing autographs and pictures \u2014 just regular random, like, white guy with his two white kids, and I&amp;#039;m in the Gap, and he&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;We was just watching the episodes last night. They had it running for a couple hours.&amp;quot; I was just like, Damn, this shit is crazy. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s better when we go overseas because they can see it on tape or YouTube all they want, but to actually see it, everything is amazing to them. So when you go overseas and I go in and out \u2014 and it&amp;#039;s like a regular in and out \u2014 it&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;OHHHH!&amp;quot; They just falling over the seats. In Brazil in S\u00E3o Paulo, we played against Jimi Hendrix&amp;#039;s son, from a Brazilian lady. And he was fking good. It&amp;#039;s easy for them to say, &amp;quot;He might try that streetball shit.&amp;quot; Like I&amp;#039;m going to really come in the game and throw the ball off of Jason Kidd?  I just got stereotyped. It could&amp;#039;ve been me. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23928/streetball-legend-ao-aaron-owens/>