On one side of a standard-issue chain-link fence, 10 uniformed basketball players went at it before a crowd of hundreds and wall-sized tributes to the corporate god Nike, the league's big-money sponsor.

But from the other side of the fence, all you can see are the back sides of those signs. The handball players who gathered there for the weekend's "Tournament of Champions" were left to feel like a ne'er-do-well younger brother with his hand out.

That fence at West Fourth Street might as well be the Berlin Wall, which separated gleaming West Germany from the polluted, backward East. On the basketball side, limousines pull up bearing Kobe Bryant and rapper Jay-Z, who make the scene to film commercials or just make the scene.

The handball side has the feel of an impromptu block party.

"This is the real city game," said Justin Sullivan, who made the award-winning documentary "Big Blue" last year and still follows the action. "But for some reason, basketball has cornered the market on what the media believes is ‘inner-city' sports."

Or, as longtime player - and longtime City Hall insider - Arnie Segarra described it, "Handball is a cult film and basketball is the summer blockbuster at the multiplex." (No wonder Fernando Ferrer's campaign turned down Segarra's idea of featuring handball players in an ad. These guys aren't basketball players, after all.)

"Rookie" - who, it turns out, is many, many years past the summer when he burst onto the handball scene and earned his nickname - is trying to level that uneven playing field.

The best handball player in the city, Rookie (a k a John Wright), put out the word, and all the greats showed up: Yuber "Pee Wee" Castro, Robert "Iceman" Sostre, Eric "Little Eddie" Santiago, Billy the Kid (once the best player in the city, but now a bloated shadow of his former self), Ray Lopez, Emmit Fitzpatrick and Dave Rojas.

Competition was fierce, of course, and the best action came when Fitzpatrick and Rojas came back from a 10-point deficit in their semifinal match to make the finals against Castro and Lopez- and ended up beating them when Pee Wee fell apart in the finals.

By the end, even some of the basketball fans were craning their necks to see the action.