Jim Couch turned 92 Wednesday. His legs are strong and his memory sharp.
He can walk all over the Dyckman housing project, along the Harlem River in the northern tip of New York City, where he’s lived in the same apartment since 1956.
He remembers when chickens hung in the windows of the vacant storefronts across the street, when Samuel L. Jackson and John Singleton filmed “Shaft” under the elevated “1” train that runs past Dyckman.
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More importantly, he remembers when, according to him, he helped Kareem Abdul-Jabbar learn to shoot the skyhook.
The Dyckman court was enclosed on three sides by a fence and on the other by an apartment building.
The only way in was through a little slit in the chain-link fabric, and Abdul-Jabbar had to duck and slide to cross under, even as a boy.
One day in the spring of 1959, Couch was walking along Nagel Avenue, past Kareem’s family apartment, toward the court and the fence, when he was startled by a terrible noise.
Couch looked inside and the backboard, supported by a single pole, seemed to be wavering.
Then he saw Abdul-Jabbar, age 13 and in the eighth grade, cock his right arm back like it was a catapult and hurl the ball in a straight line toward the board. Crash.
“It sounded like he was going to tear the whole thing down,” Couch said. “Instead of trying to get it to the rim, he would hit it off the backboard real hard. That’s the way he used to shoot it, left-handed and right-handed.”
Jim Couch in front of the Dyckman basketball court. (The Athletic)Couch said that he and Abdul-Jabbar met each afternoon at 4 o’clock in the park, to iron out the hook shot. A slight bend of the elbow, a cup of the hand, and a soft flick of the wrist. Aim for the rim, not the backboard, were Couch’s instructions.
“He was never late (for practice),” Couch said. “I worked him hard. When I got him I refined it a little bit. After about a year, he was pretty good at it.”
Abdul-Jabbar is a legend. One of the greatest to ever play, and for 39 years was the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
“The most unguardable shot in NBA history,” said the reigning scoring king LeBron James, of Kareem’s skyhook.
Couch is famous too, if only among the people who met him on the basketball courts of New York.
“There are certain people in the city who have stood the test of time and Mr. Couch is one,” said Nuggets coach Michael Malone, whom Couch used to push in a baby carriage while Malone’s father, Brendan, was coaching at same courts as Couch.
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In the past, the New York Knicks have wished “living legend” Jim Couch a happy birthday on the jumbotron at Madison Square Garden, a tradition that goes back to Ernie Grunfeld.
Sixers general manager Elton Brand and former Bulls star Ben Gordon owe a great deal of their NBA careers to him. Sixers forward Tobias Harris trained under him. So did Nuggets center Thomas Bryant.
“I was just a young pup just playing in gyms, but (Mr. Couch) saw the talent in me and wanted to showcase it, so considerably, without him you probably wouldn’t see the Thomas Bryant that I am today,” Bryant said.
Mark Jackson, Kenny Smith, Walter Berry and Kenny Bannister all played for him and won a city championship.
“Mr. Couch is a legend in New York, an absolute legend,” Jackson said.
Jerry Tarkanian, when he was coaching UNLV, would beg Couch to funnel recruits to Vegas. NBA executives read about New York streetball legends in the tabloids and called Couch for his opinion to see if they could play.
“He’s as influential and as impactful as anybody when it comes to the young players of New York City,” said former Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt, who now coaches the Ontario Clippers of the G League.
Couch is a 5-foot, 7-inch veteran of the Korean War and a former juvenile corrections officer. Abdul-Jabbar is 7-2, was the No. 1 pick of the 1969 NBA draft, scored 38,387 points, made 19 All-Star Games, and won six rings.
They would always be linked by association with the Dyckman housing project. Couch still lives in Building 2, on 10th Avenue, the Alcindors (Kareem’s name was Lew Alcindor as a boy) lived in Building 3 on Nagel Avenue.
The Dyckman housing project buildings, overlooking the ‘1’ train. (The Athletic)“Kids used to call him ‘Big Lewie,’” said Billy Sims, 74, who lived at Dyckman when the Alcindors were there. “I remember the kids, when they saw him coming down the street, they’d yell ‘Big Lewie.’ They would say the same thing as soon as he’d get on the “1” train, because it was right next to us, because he had to duck to get in.”
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Abdul-Jabbar’s childhood friends say he was sensitive and shy, and wasn’t as nearly as active in the park as they were.
“My older brother and him were friends first because they used to trade record albums at our apartment, while we were playing basketball,” said Andre Harris, 75, who still talks to Abdul-Jabbar on the phone. “Lewie didn’t play ball until I don’t know what age and he never used to come out in the park, and then all of a sudden he started coming out in the park. And we and Mr. Couch showed him what to do. He (Couch) taught us to be tough.”
Couch took Alcindor and other boys from the neighborhood to parks in Harlem and the Bronx to play in the famous Holcombe Rucker League. That’s how Dyckman became a famous landmark for New York basketball. Couch’s early teams were so good that Dyckman, his home base, was adopted as a site for Holcombe Rucker games.
“He was 6-7 and a half when he was 13, so what we did, we just had a copy of the birth certificate,” Couch said. “We’d tell parents ‘Hey, this is his birth certificate. There’s nothing we can do about it.’”
Couch eventually entered teams all over the city, at Rucker Park and City College, and children from as far as New Jersey traveled to train under him. He opened training sites at night and on weekends in the summers at New York City colleges because there were too many children flooding the park. Nate “Tiny” Archibald helped Couch run some of his open gyms. Couch refused to charge any player for his time, but created a foundation in his name to buy uniforms (which he would wash for players), enter them in tournaments, and keep his program running, for decades.
“Not only did he give kids a chance to get exposure, but I thought he was a great mentor,” said Hewitt, who also played for Couch one summer when he was in college.
Malone, Harris, Bryant, Brand, Gordon, Jackson, Smith, and countless other NBA household names crossed paths with Couch through his renowned, citywide program. It all started at Dyckman, with Couch, Kareem and the boy’s friends.
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But when it comes to Kareem and the skyhook, Couch’s name is never mentioned, even though Couch remembers it all so clearly.
“You know Couch?”
Abdul-Jabbar wore the black and purple lettermen’s jacket Adidas made for him. His long legs were covered in a pair of jeans, and he shifted uncomfortably on the sofa at the NBA Legends’ Lounge when I brought up the name.
He was in Salt Lake City for the 2023 NBA All-Star Game, where he would help the league commemorate LeBron passing him as the all-time leading scorer at halftime. For weeks, I had tried to reach Abdul-Jabbar through his publicist to check Couch’s story against his own. I was rebuffed at several turns, even while I was in Los Angeles the night LeBron passed Kareem, when Abdul-Jabbar was in the building.
This encounter with Kareem, in a ballroom inside a Marriott hotel on a February Saturday in Salt Lake, was afforded through a chance invite by the retired players’ association to select media outlets to sit with Abdul-Jabbar and talk about anything.
Including old men and skyhooks.
(Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)Abdul-Jabbar said his grade-school coach convinced a local player to show Kareem the hookshot when he was 6-6 and in the sixth grade. Kareem didn’t seem to remember the man’s name, but I knew it, because I’d read about him before.
George Hejduk told andscape.com in 2019 that he was the one who introduced Abdul-Jabbar to the shot. There is little reason to doubt it, as the author of the Hedjuk piece had witnessed Hedjuk greet Abdul-Jabbar at a book signing where Kareem proclaimed “I owe this man everything.”
“I stood at the top of the key, told him to put his hands in the air and come to me,” Hejduk said in the article. He said he worked with Abdul-Jabbar for about a half hour, and then didn’t see him for two years after that, until they played in the same pick-up game at the Dyckman court.
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“I didn’t see much of the skyhook then, but he did dunk on me twice,” Hedjuk said.
Abdul-Jabbar said Hedjuk had shown him the “Mikan drill,” named after George Mikan, which teaches players to shoot with loft from short distances. He said “I learned ambidextrously. I learned how to use the glass, and I learned the real good footwork. Those things helped me my whole career. I’m pretty sure Couch knew him.”
I’d already known Couch had never heard of Hedjuk, nor could Couch say who had first introduced Kareem to the hook. He could only say he was certain Abdul-Jabbar was doing it wrong that day he happened upon him at the park, which was why Couch said he worked with him for a year. The footwork, the touch, those are all things Couch says he helped Abdul-Jabbar learn.
“I don’t know about that,” Abdul-Jabbar said, cocking his head to the side and looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
“My grade school is where I really learned,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “The custodian let me have the key so I could get into the gym in the evening, I just had to put the chairs and stuff back where they belong. And I worked on it like that by myself. By eighth grade, I had it down.”
I became interested in Couch while reporting another story, the one about all the NBA teams secretly practicing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, on 59th Street in midtown Manhattan.
The John Jay coach who started it all, Guy Rancourt, hired Couch’s son, Sean, during a game Sean was coaching at Dyckman Park, because of the reputation he and his father had built training players all over New York.
Sean Couch, 57, who starred at Columbia University and was drafted by the Indiana Pacers in 1987, regaled me with stories about his father dating back to the late ’50s and early ’60s at Dyckman, tales of stealing players from local drug dealers by convincing them to play on his teams, and of the complex network of contacts Couch has built by training and coaching thousands of players, without charging any of them a dime.
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“There was a couple of kids who were really good, but they also were popular, and they were doing runs for dealers,” Sean Couch told me. “So my dad said to them, ‘listen, either you’re going to do this (play basketball) or do that (run drugs). I was about eight years old, and I woke up and there were some guys in our apartment, they were shouting at my dad and my dad was shouting at them. They were shouting at my mother and they were fighting in our apartment. And I remember they took me and they grabbed me and put something over my face.
“I remember waking up and I thought it was a dream, you know? But then I remember I looked at my dad’s hand, and there was like a cut, a scar.”
Pat McGrath, 69, now a retired banking executive, played for Couch at Rucker Park in the late 1960s. There was a fight one night during a game, and McGrath, who was just watching, went out onto the blacktop to try and save a friend from being punched.
“Next thing I know, I get hit in the back of the head with a pipe,” McGrath said. “I picked the wrong guy to grab and his whole gang was pounding on me. Jim came running out. And if it wasn’t for him, I’m not sure if I’d still be around. He started throwing guys all over the place.”
On a Sunday in January, in the middle of a long stay in New York, I took the “1” train up to Dyckman Street, above West 204th Street. I could see the Harlem River and Building 2 of the Dyckman project, where Couch still lives, as the train slowed to a halt.
He was wearing a Knicks jumpsuit and hat when he and his granddaughter met me outside of the Dyckman Express restaurant, where we were to have lunch. We were stopped by Omar the barber, who cuts Couch’s hair at no charge. Latin drums pounded through the speakers of a passing car with the window open, as Omar bounded out of a barber’s chair and yelled “HELLO, MISTER COUCH!”
Over rotisserie chicken, red beans and rice, Couch told me his entire story, from starting in the park as a 25-year-old, fresh out of the army, to developing a training program in which anyone who came to him had to endure two hours of conditioning before they were allowed to play games.
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On the table before me, he laid out a picture of him with Samuel L. Jackson, from the “Shaft” filming.
Jim Couch showing his pictures of himself at the filming of ‘Shaft’. (The Athletic)There was one of Couch, attending the summer girls’ tournament he still runs in New York, wearing a t-shirt commemorating his induction to the city’s basketball hall of fame.
And there was another of him, and Abdul-Jabbar, and a Dyckman neighbor, standing outside the court. Kareem was playing for the Lakers at the time.
As he showed me the picture with Abdul-Jabbar, Couch mimicked with his arms how the tall, awkward boy was shooting the hook that first day he saw him do it in 1959, and then showed me the form he said he’d taught to him.
Abdul-Jabbar seems to agree about who Couch was to him and his friends at the beginning. “He got us in places to play, that was the important thing,” Kareem said. He also seemed to confirm another detail Couch had mentioned about the two of them – that 20 years ago when Abdul-Jabbar was interested in coaching at Columbia University (he ultimately was not interviewed for the job) – Couch called the school’s administrators on his behalf.
“I heard through the grapevine that he did, at least he brought my name up,” Abdul-Jabbar said.
Couch had told me Abdul-Jabbar “called and thanked me for making that call, and I appreciated that.”
But Abdul-Jabbar simply doesn’t share Couch’s recollection of that afternoon in the park, some 64 years ago.
“Mr. Couch was great for us,” said Sims, who now lives in Tampa, Fla. “A lot of our fathers didn’t do it, and I have to admire him for being out there with us, because his kids came after I was there. They should be naming the basketball court after him in the park. It all started with him.”
But what about Couch and Kareem?
“He worked with all of us, it wasn’t an isolated thing,” Sims said. “If any of us was in the park, and Mr. Couch would walk by, he’d work with us. He spent a lot of time with everybody, but taking (Kareem) aside to be like a tutor, I can’t say I remember that, because I wasn’t out there to see it.”
Two days after I met Couch at Dyckman, I sat with Milton Lee for lunch near Columbus Circle at an Italian restaurant, Masseria dei Vini, in which legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is an investor.
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Over bowls of pasta, we discussed how Lee worked for years in the Brooklyn Nets’ front office, started a sports technology and data company that he just sold to data and betting giant Sportradar, and how he’d gotten his start in basketball as a coach in Couch’s expansive training program in the early 90s.
Lee remembered Elton Brand, a high school kid in a grown man’s body, working out in one of Couch’s gyms, and Ben Gordon, already in the NBA, stopping by for conditioning and pick-up games in the summer.
“Chauncey Billups and Reggie Freeman showed up once, it might’ve been Chauncey’s draft year,” Lee said. “Reggie was an NBA prospect too, at the time. They came up to Manhattan College, and we’d been working out for a couple hours. They weren’t allowed to play. (The coaches) just said ‘no, you weren’t here for the workout. You can’t just roll in here and jump ahead of everybody else.”
Lee, like so many I interviewed for this story, said he’d never heard the one about Couch and Kareem.
But in between bites of pasta, Lee set his fork down on the plate and remembered back to those idle moments when Couch’s courts were empty, save for the coaches, Couch, and a basketball.
“I almost feel like that’s Couch’s only shot, the hook,” Lee said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him shoot anything else.”
Which reminded me of another story I’d heard. At the urging of Tobias Harris’ father, who was at one time Sean Couch’s agent, Sean started a showcase for high-school talent in the tri-state area in 2013. The showcase, in his father’s honor, featured a mix of conditioning and games.
Sean Couch said Raymond Felton, then a guard for the Knicks, was in attendance at the first showcase, because his nephew was a participant. Jim Couch came out to applause, and to open the showcase with a shot.
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It was a skyhook.
“Everybody in the room was like, ‘Oh, wow,’” Sean Couch said. “It looked just like Kareem’s shot.”
(Dick Raphael/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)(Illustration: EamonnDalton / The Athletic; Photos: Andrew D. Bernstein, Jerry Wachter / Getty Images)
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