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[Excerpt]

New York’s neighborhoods are filled with characters who come together to play on Spanish Harlem sidewalks, Bronx parks and in basement and backroom clubs in Washington Heights. Older men in caps and young men in muscle-T’s and gold chains go at it, slapping dominoes onto flimsy tables, speaking in Spanish in games lubricated by Presidente beer and salsa music.

This was the scene recently at a dominoes club in the Bronx called Hijos y Amigos de Altamira, which means children and friends of Altamira, a town in the Dominican Republic. Housed in rented space above a bar on Westchester Avenue, the club, which is one of those being scouted by ESPN, is a band of countrymen — almost every member is from Altamira, a small town that prides itself on its crop of baseball and domino players.

"I’ve been playing dominoes all my life, but I never thought I’d see it on TV," said Augusto Montan, 55, one of the club’s members. "We always thought of it as a game to pass the time, but it does have all the elements people love: the competition, the trash-talking, the color, and it’s old school."

The club embodies exactly what ESPN is looking for in a neighborhood domino setting. Young and old men alike sat at domino tables and shuffled a mess of face-down tiles and then picked their domino hands. Members have nicknames like el Natural. Their wives, girlfriends and daughters play bingo and tend to the homemade Dominican food and serve $2 beers from a small bar. The children race around, practicing traditional Latin dance steps and gathering at tables to watch, learn and root.

"Dominoes is the national pastime of Dominican Republic: it’s as simple as that," said one club member, Louis Keyser, 72. "Over there, a little kid gets a bat and ball put in his hand as soon as he can walk, and from the moment he’s tall enough to see the table, he learns how to play dominoes."

The club’s origins go back to 1983, when a handful of men began a regular domino game in the basement of a Bronx apartment building where one of them, Juan Martinez, was the superintendent.

There are now 42 members, mostly from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Dues are $10 a month, and through fund-raising events and contributions the club collects enough money to help members with needs ranging from rent or funeral costs for family members.

Dominoes, which some experts date to ancient Egypt, is played worldwide, and in New York it is popular in African-American, Chinese and Caribbean neighborhoods. But Hispanic players like to stake a claim that the game is truly theirs. Styles of dominoes vary by country — Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for example, generally use seven tiles per player, while Cubans tend to and use nine pieces. Instead of players taking turns making moves in the usual clockwise rotation, some Latin players take turns counter-clockwise.

Read the whole article: NY Times