Three little boys are shooting basketball at the Alexander Odum Playground in West Baltimore's Rosemont community when Sean Mosley strolls by the chain-link fence.
"You playing hoops today?" one boy shouts out.
"I'm taking the day off," Mosley answers.
He's standing between the kids and a cemetery made from graffiti. "Free GSC. We miss u Shorty," says one tribute to the fallen of the West Baltimore drug wars.
Sean pauses, recalling the streets of his youth. "I probably know some of them," he says.
A man's laughing voice interrupts: "You're not allowed on that court no more."
Mosley smiles and walks over to shake hands and hug his old friends. There's Brian and Dante, and a big man called B.T.
They're older than Sean by at least nine years, and one time or another they boast at having beaten him at basketball, right here on this court. Brian demonstrates how, if you back into Sean the right way, you can box him out, and Dante says he sometimes calls Sean after watching a game on TV to rib him about how he's played.
Sean Mosley of Rosemont is better known as Sean Mosley of the University of Maryland Terrapins, the 6-4 freshman starter who starred at St. Frances Academy and was courted by colleges and universities from the across the country starting when he was in the eighth grade.
I walked through Rosemont with Sean on Saturday afternoon; he lives in a brown-sided rowhouse on Normount Avenue here and returns home most weekends from a very different life at College Park. His back door opens within steps of the front door of the Rosemont Police Athletic League Center.
Citing budget cuts and a desire to stop using police officers to run 18 PAL centers, the city plans to close Rosemont and another one and turn the rest over to the Department of Recreation and Parks, drawing protests in neighborhoods across the city.
The Rosemont PAL has many success stories - kids who played and studied under the tutelage of city cops went on to join the police in Baltimore and Baltimore County; one went to Harvard and another is attending Tuskegee University in Alabama. Sean is not just a local success story - he shot some of his first baskets at the Rosemont PAL - he's a celebrity.
"It's nice to know somebody that made it," Dante Smith says as the old friends continue to watch the kids on the basketball court. "We don't get to see a lot of kids from here on TV."
