225BatonRouge.com

No one dunks.

And no one minds.

It’s been that way for almost 30 years, when one Sunday night in the fall of 1977 a group of guys gathered for a game of pickup basketball. They’ve played inside the old CYO gym at 22nd and Florida nearly every Sunday night since, with such diligence that pseudo-Commissioner E. Eric Guirard plans vacations to be sure he’s back for the games.

The last time there was no game: the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. “We didn’t play that night,” Sean Reilly says, although they were tempted. They’ve played on Christmas, but not when Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday.

Reilly has been a regular since he got back from Harvard Law School 20 years ago. Another relative newcomer, chiropractor Mike Goff, has been playing 15 years. The buff weightlifter claims, “This is what keeps me in shape.”

Mike Barnett, who played with Guirard as a middle-schooler at Our Lady of Mercy, has been there almost from the start. Paul Braud thinks he began 29 years ago. His brother Floyd was a Sunday regular before his career ended with an ankle injury. Perry Key played a year in college, but he’s a rarity in this group.

Guirard, the local injury lawyer known by his friends simply as “E,” is the passionate driving force behind these Sunday night games that are played to 30 points. Or, as it reads in Rule 2 of the 33-rule, one-page rulebook, they play three games to 30, and a game must be won by four points. But Rule 10 declares that if a team loses the first two games and then wins the third by more than double the other team’s score, the night ends in a tie.

Sunday Night Basketball league organizer E. Eric Guirard (right) goes airborne as he gets off a shot at a recent game.

The teams change weekly. Guirard—“I am the invitation committee”—rates the players, chooses the squads for the night and makes sure there are only 10 players, because no one sits. The 5-foot-8, 49-year-old point guard, whose organized career ended after the eighth grade, pulls out a yellow legal pad with documentation of the Sunday Night League results and performances for years and years.

“My goal in picking teams is for every game to go to overtime,” Guirard says.

Most of the players are in their mid- to late 40s. Most can shoot and play the game well on a horizontal level. Over the years, there have been celebrity players and talented invitees, but as a rule, it’s a core group of regular guys who simply love the game and obviously enjoy being with each other.

There is good-natured teasing, a lot of laughter and no cheap shots.

Rule 4: “Only the person who is fouled calls fouls.”

Rule 5: “All called fouls stand—no matter how weenie.”

Rule 14: “No screaming at a player while the player is shooting.”

Each guy pays $8 per week to cover parking lot security. The court is 20 feet shorter than a regulation 94 feet, about which no one complains.

Guirard himself is an admitted piece of work. LSU hoops followers will recall that he wrote “Tigers to the Top” during their Final Four run in 1981. He’s even got a rap album coming out titled War: Conservative Rap.

But the self-professed “lyricist and melodist” is most at home on the basketball court. So much so that he shelled out $17,500 to attend Michael Jordan’s Flight School adult basketball camp in Las Vegas in August, an experience he chronicled for 225batonrouge.com. It even caused Guirard to miss a Sunday night. “But that’s an exception,” he notes.

Back on the court in Baton Rouge, there is a strong sense of friendship, camaraderie and comfort among the participants, who play hard but with respect for each other and the game. And they don’t take themselves too seriously, Guirard says. “You’d think we’d be better after playing for 30 years.”

Guirard serves as teh commissioner of the Sunday Night Basketball league, and he's crafted rules over the years to ensure fair, balanced and vigorous competition.

“Basketball’s really important in my life,” Guirard says as he laces a pair of new Nikes before running point for the red team one July Sunday night, shortly before he was to leave for MJ’s Flight School. Guirard stayed at the Mirage and was coached by legends such as Larry Brown, Rick Pitino, Chuck Daly and Lenny Wilkens.

“I think it reflects how someone behaves in their normal life activities. The way you behave in basketball is the way you behave as a person, and that’s been very reflective in Sunday Night Basketball,” Guirard says.

“I think it’s the greatest sport going, it’s the greatest exercise going, and it just creates so many friendships that never end.”