Brotherly Love summer hoops league relocates to Philly

It’s official. This summer, the Brotherly Love League will be in the City of Brotherly Love.

Founded during the pandemic, the summer pro-am basketball league conjured up by Philly ballplayers Novar Gadson and Ramone Moore spent its first two seasons at the Kroc Community Center in Camden since the city had pandemic restrictions on crowds in 2021.

The goal was always to hold it in Philadelphia, and this season it will be on Broad Street, at Ben Franklin High.

“The league still has the same momentum,” Gadson said over the phone the other day. “Even more momentum now.”

A highlight, Gadson said, will be July 8, “legacy day,” when a couple of dozen Philly hoops legends will be honored, from Lynn Greer to Flip Murray to Mardy Collins. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without those memories,” Gadson said.

The plan is to have older legends on the court playing.

“We asked Flip, ‘You want to play?’” Gadson said. “He wants to play for sure.”

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The second game that day, Gadson said, will be Brotherly League all-stars against Rucker League stars from New York City.

“We’re bringing old Philly back in the building, then we’re turning our head and going up against New York.” Gadson said.

Gadson, a Bartram High and Rider graduate, now 33 years old, played professionally overseas this year in Japan. He said the Brotherly Love League will again include teams from all over the city and region. For instance, there will be a team from South Philly (“When they play, the whole South Philly comes out”), a Chester team, a Danny Rumph team.

“Two years of no nonsense, no violence,” Gadson said of the whole effort.

They’re now registered as a nonprofit — “targeting mental health awareness,” said Gadson, who is president, with Moore as VP. “There’s a lot going on [in the city] … This, for me personally, is a way to attack everything I endured as a kid. Attacking homelessness.”

He’d experienced that?

“Multiple times,” Gadson said, explaining how he lived in West Philly and Southwest Philly and South Philly, that he stayed one night in a park, but usually the situation was living with friends or his aunt, from the ages of 16 to 22 — “never experienced having my own room of privacy, slept on couches.”

You hear about basketball saving somebody. Gadson wants to be the person doing the saving. He didn’t really play until he was 16 and the circumstances shaped him, Gadson said, explaining how he was always truant. One time, he said, the police caught him and brought him back to school. “I was trying to sneak out again,” Gadson said.

A man saw him, told him, “You’re too tall to get through that window.”

The man, Tahar Sutton, now a Quinnipiac University assistant coach, previously an Imhotep Charter and Paul Robeson High assistant, was then running an after-school program at Bartram.

“He saved my life,” Gadson said, relating how Sutton convinced him to come to the after-school basketball program — “If you like it, stick it out.”

He has to this day. “I’m trying to get as much out of this game as I can,” Gadson said.

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He has played in professional leagues in Italy, Lithuania, Hungary, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan. He joined up with Moore to play in The Basketball Tournament, and they dreamed up this league while stuck in quarantine. Moore, the former Temple star, is retired after a long professional career overseas. Mike Ringgold, a former Rider player, is back with the league handling finances.

They’ve had big-time cameos from the likes of Paul Reed and Bones Hyland — “he came and shut the whole gym down,” Gadson said of Hyland.

A place to play for talented local ballplayers is the primary goal. It’s the added bonus that gives Gadson an extra kick, seeing smiles on young faces in the crowd.

“I was that kid who needed some type of hope,” Gadson said. “I’ve seen a lot. This kind of gives me the gift of the vision.”