But the country is increasingly becoming the five-star playground of the Caribbean, pulling in tourists that might otherwise have gone to Jamaica, Puerto Rico or St. Thomas and gearing up to give the glamour spots of Anguilla, St. Bart's and Turks and Caicos a run for their money.
There are these old stereotypes about basketball players — the ghetto star, the playground legend, the slow country kid who can shoot the lights out — but Yao was something new.
While Bonetown and Project X both feature well-known porn stars, Digital Playground's Utherverse is the first game to feature all Digital Playground branded pictures, videos, and characters, possibly marking a new frontier for porn.
The week ends with a conscious party under the stars, a playground for the aspiring world-changer.
His mentor was his father, Robert, who never played high school basketball but was a Baltimore playground star.
Julius Evans, 37, a onetime playground star in Chester known as Doc, is a kind of shot doctor who monitors a routine in which his brother takes 1,200 to 1,500 shots every other day, time permitting.
Marbury, himself a playground star, left Georgia Tech after his freshman season and was taken with the fourth pick in the 1996 draft by Milwaukee, which traded him to Minnesota.
The players, ranging in age from thirtyish to fiftyish, included John Rogers, the well-connected financier who graduated from the Lab school a few years ahead of Duncan and has been one of his most important political allies, and James Fleming, who was a playground star on the South Side before middle age and hard knocks slowed him down.
According to urban legend, the greatest basketball players are always the virtuosic playground stars who squandered talent that can be endlessly mythologized.
While Paris and Nicky Hilton, Tina Turner, Bono and a constellation of other stars frequent its playground, so have a number of international artists, intellectuals and politicians.
"The greatest thing about New York is you don't have to be in the N.B.A. to be revered as a star on the playgrounds," said Bobbito Garcia, who is making a documentary about street basketball.
