Greason, 98, is one of baseball’s “forgotten heroes,” according to the Center for Negro League Baseball Research. Seventy-five years ago, he shut down the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro American League’s championship series and then earned the Black Barons’ only win in the final Negro World Series, which the Black Barons lost to the Homestead Grays.

Basketball first appeared in the Tibetan highlands about 100 years ago. At that time, the rugged, sparsely populated Tibetan plateau was ruled by warlords on its eastern frontier and in central and western Tibet by the Buddhist government of the Dalai Lama.

In the daytime, Pachner recently said, he could only distinguish between dark shadows and bright light, white and dark, while in the evenings he couldn’t sleep, and “the whole motion picture of my life passes unwittingly, unwantingly—I don’t desire it—but with great vividness and authenticity, and like a tremendous newsreel.”

Jeffrey Mejia, 20, is Berkeley’s starting point guard and a co-captain, who as a teenager lived in a Bronx homeless shelter for about a year with his mother and sister. “Feeling like I didn’t have a home — I was really ashamed and didn’t want to tell anybody,” he said.

Once a month, Kundla rides by bus with fellow residents to a church downtown for bingo and lunch organized by the League of Catholic Women…Kundla keeps his own winnings, green notes called Bingo Bucks, in a billfold in the cupboard under his TV, which he redeems every Friday for Hershey bars.

John Risher drove north on Route 29, a briefcase resting in the car’s back seat. Through sunglasses, Risher, who is 106 years old, surveyed the highway, which sliced between trees of yellow, orange and red — and whose branches hung over the road, forming a tunnel of autumn colors.

During baseball season, Ardizoia sits by the bay window, on the second floor overlooking a quiet street, and watches the Giants play. He keeps a pocket schedule within reach, and crosses off dates to indicate another game gone by. But when there is nothing good on TV or when friends are not around, he gets lonely.

…One day, according to Galina Berenshteyn, her husband came to her and said, “I would like to put the Statue of Liberty in the backyard.” “I said, ‘This is a joke,’ ” Galina recalled, “I couldn’t believe that this is true!” Berenshteyn scoured the Internet and tracked down a seven-and-a-half-foot-high fiberglass model of the Statue of Liberty at a store in South Hampton.

“He’s a beast,” said Igor “Mamute” Caetano, a professional mixed-martial arts fighter and black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) who is head instructor of a rival Toronto gym. “Everybody that faces him just gets killed.”

As editor, he sometimes pedals his bicycle down Main Street to community meetings and to report on island politics…On Main Street, where red buses adorned with American flags shuttle residents free of charge, people stop Mr. Lutz with news tips or problems they hope the WIRE will resolve.

He hopes to get up to 225 pounds, which, judging by his elephantine diet and all the weights he lifts, is a target he should meet with ease. Rocco eats a devastating amount of food. His mornings begin at 8 o’clock, at which time he heads downstairs to the Goulds’ kitchen and consumes six Eggo waffles. “Or I have, like, two bowls of Lucky Charms,” he explained to me. “And I might have an apple.”

A bony, 73-year-old Dominican pitcher stood atop a mound at the northern edge of Manhattan, tossing curveballs and sliders to the rhythm of salsa music. In the batter’s box, a portly man with a white goatee, gnawing on a wad of tobacco, awaited the pitcher’s long, exaggerated delivery. As the innings wore on, no one seemed discouraged that the fastballs lacked giddyap, that the wooden bats were devoid of pop or that the base runners, whose bellies protruded from their red-and-blue uniforms, were slow and unsteady afoot.

At the dead end of a private, wooded road about 20 miles north of Chicago sits a two-story house belonging to Gene Melchiorre, a short, pigeon-toed grandfather of 15 known by his many friends as Squeaky.

Raised within the Ashanti tribe, Mr. Addo was always taught that improving the lives of one’s elders is of the highest virtue. “They remind me of my grandmothers and aunties back home,” he said.

I’m drinking a scotch in the VIP section of the Garden of the Gods, waiting for the God of Gods, Seth Rogen. Any minute now, he should be walking past 50-foot-high Corinthian columns flanked by statues of Julius Caesar mounted on war horses and into the private area between the Neptune Pool and Temple Pool, in which I’m standing, comfortably, beside a heat lamp…I’m not supposed to be in the VIP area. I snuck in here a few minutes ago by hopping the rope when nobody was looking.

What Heschel’s players are learning from their new coaches goes beyond basketball. “I think they’re learning respect for different kinds of people in the world,” Dortch said. “That there’s something to learn from everyone.”

“I am the idol of many children,” said Mr. Segundo, 51 years old. “When I go on stage the kids go crazy. I go home with pain, but in my mind I think, ‘Wow, everyone was so entertained!’”

Richard Bossong, 70, who sometimes performs as “Nollaig the Wizard” and “Hobo the Hobo,” ate mushroom barley soup…Mr. Bossong placed two sponge balls inside a visitor’s closed fist and one into his own. When he opened each hand, the visitor held three balls; Mr. Bossong’s had vanished.

Unlike in boxing or martial arts, nothing is off limits. “Do whatever you want,” Nakash told me. “In this room if someone attacks you, use the chair. Break the chair on his head.” The three of us sat down on rusty folding chairs in a white, windowless room. “If someone attacks you with a knife, with an ax, with a baseball bat, or somebody wants to stab you,” Nakash said, “it’s a problem.”

A beautiful marble elevator playing classical music brought them up to their spacious suite on the 24th floor. On a wide ledge separating the bedroom area from a sunken living room were dozens of Holocaust Survivor Band T-shirts, some of them reading “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER QUIT.”

Late one recent night on Bible Street in Cos Cob, Conn., in the carpeted basement apartment of a gray bungalow, Mike Sandlock, 97, had a dream that he was in Yankee Stadium.

Once, an Old-City Christian archaeologist named Eugenio Alliata, who dons a flowing brown robe in the style of a Franciscan monk, told a visitor to his museum, “Issa is the most famous dweller in all the Christian Quarter. His name is on every door and every wall.”

On Wednesdays, Mr. Culian, 61 years old, stacks boxes filled with about 2,000 papers into the back of his car, then spends about six hours driving around Queens, delivering the periodicals to bakeries, restaurants, and other businesses with Romanian-American clientele. He also mails newspapers to all of his subscribers, and ships hundreds more to distributors throughout the U.S. “People say, ‘This guy’s crazy! How the hell is he doing it’ But I am proof that this thing is for real,'“ Mr. Culian said.

Along County Road X, just outside the farming village of Clinton, Wisconsin, stands a large white house with a wraparound porch that, for one day each year, is also a home run fence. Two of its pillars are foul poles, shaded yellow; chalk marks on the yard designate foul lines and lead to a miniature dirt infield, where a three-step concrete staircase rests in front of a backstop. Displayed on the backstop is an old-fashioned scoreboard titled “Stoopball League of America.”

Unlike on American Idol, the judges had all sorts of trouble criticizing contestants. Rosenfeld said that during one elimination round, the judges “wanted to crawl under the table” to avoid hurting singers’ feelings. One judge, Yeedle Werdyger—a popular Jewish singer who is the son of the Orthodox music icon Mordechai Ben-David—was so distraught that he cried and had to be consoled by the other judges.

Mr. Rivera, who likes to mimic the sound of percussion instruments in everyday speech, said his secret lies in his choice of metal. “That’s why the sound is great,” he said. “Percussionists come here, they go crazy. ‘Doo! Doh-kah-doo! Doh-ka-doo! Do-kah-doo!’ They know what they’re looking for and they buy it.”

“You’ve got the Empire State Building, you’ve got the 42nd Street lights, and we’re playing Smash in the park. I can’t believe it.”

Several of Saturday’s attendees dressed in traditional Mongolian costumes, and the top outfits were rewarded with prizes. The best wrestlers were given framed pictures of Mongolian calligraphy and were handed wads of cash.

On this night, some of the male spectators appeared spacey or disinterested, but most were engaged, bobbing heads and tapping shoes to the pop, techno, reggae, hip-hop, and funky beats. At one point, six men shot up from their seats, locked hands, and spun Hora-style around a makeshift dance floor.

On warm days, shouts of “Billy!” echo down the tree-lined block, and people wave at him from across the street. “It’s nice to get said hello to,” said Mr. Lyles, wearing his trademark glasses and old-fashioned flat cap. “To be a nice person, man: they don’t have that going on any more like they used to.”

Three years ago, Shyangden sang and played guitar to the roars of thousands. These days, the closest thing to a roar during his performances is when the No. 7 train thunders across the elevated tracks above Roosevelt Avenue.

If the new leader of the free world were to ever stroll into his restaurant, Azencot says he’d offer Obama some advice. “I’d tell him to be strong and that if he’s going to be a good president, he must make peace here in Jerusalem,” says Azencot, who acts as though an Obama visit were entirely plausible. “And the second thing I’d tell him is to change all the cars in the world from gas to electricity.”

Michael. Magic. Wilt. Kareem. Yossi? “Growing up, I wasn’t especially good at basketball,” admitted Tamari, 37. “When I was in high school my friends and I thought we had a future in athletics. But we were wrong.”