In the not-so-distant future, air travel makes the world even smaller.
Flights between major cities take barely an hour.
Workers commute from Shanghai to London.
Wealthy Kids from Kentucky do play weekends in Iceland.
Blind daters from Buffalo and Des Moines meet for a latte’ in Milan.
And City-Based Sports Team become Global Mega-Teams.
Owners are trillionaires or corporations. The assocation between cities and teams has faded; fans are now loyal only to brands and players. Games are held global super-arenas around the World, at prices most fans cannot touch.
Despite the globalization of the game, parity is gone. Only the well-off can afford subscriptions to watch. The inner city has become further layered underneath wealth and big Money.
The Tokyo New York Manilla Basketball Club has won 5 titles in a row, and is worthy more than almost every single country in the World.
And while all this was happening, Ron Jones was in jail. For 11 years.
Ron had been a really good basketball player, a playground legend, high-school star, on track to take the world by storm.
Before it all went wrong and he would up on the wrong end of an 8 year prison sentence.
While Ron endured prison, a professional basketball hero stepped aside. Troubled by recent trends then snapped by a crippling injury to a friend, Belldon Shelvers lost his desire to play basketball.
Meanwhile, a strong family in Senegal fights to keep their sons true, and uninfected by the Big Money. But times are hard. And the Big Money is closing in.
While sports TV celebrates and fawns, an unproven reporter decries the loss of basketball to the common fan. Will anyone listen?
This is the world the world Ron is released to. A changed world. A colder world. A world where Money and Winning seem to matter more than ever.
A world that was now moving so fast it was losing it’s soul.
A world that needed Basketball Jones.