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Bragging Rights: Stickball Stories Marks 20 Years at Bronx Music Hall
- Damian Ali
- 19 hours ago
- 2 min read
The photo "NYC Stickball, Jun 2014 - 36" shows a local athlete during a game, on the street known as the "Stickball Hall of Fame Place," at 109th Street and Third Avenue in East Harlem. Image by Ed Yourdon via Flickr
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, while parents gathered around the television to watch I Love Lucy, teenagers across New York City headed into the streets with little more than a sawed-off broomstick and a rubber ball, turning stickball into a neighborhood pastime that brought divided communities together.
The 2006 documentary Bragging Rights: Stickball Stories, created and directed by Sonia Gonzalez-Martinez, is an account of how "a poor man's game" helped communities mend racial tension and create lifelong friendships in neighborhoods like Harlem and The Bronx. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the sports documentary will screen on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, at 7 p.m. at Bronx Music Hall.
'Bragging Rights,' which aired on PBS in 2006, explores how the game became more than a pastime for New Yorkers growing up during a deeply divided era in the city's history. Through personal stories and interviews, the documentary highlights how neighborhood rivalries often turned into friendships that lasted decades.
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In an interview with BronxNet, Gonzalez-Martinez explained that preserving this chapter of New York City history became one of the driving forces behind the film.
"Bragging Rights is a film that I made some years ago to preserve a certain part of the history of New York City that is very particular to Nuyorican. Not only did the New York street-style baseball game impact Puerto Rican neighborhoods, it also had an impact on racial tension in New York City," Gonzalez-Martinez said.
She added that while many neighborhoods remained segregated during the 1950s and 1960s, stickball created rare opportunities for communities to interact peacefully through competition.
"When stickball was big in the 1950s and the 1960s, the different New York City neighborhoods were segregated by race, so people couldn't go into each other's different neighborhoods without violence, without getting beat up, except for Sundays when they would go into each other's neighborhoods to compete for stickball," she said.
Beyond documentary filmmaking, Gonzalez-Martinez is also known as the co-creator of Your Chill Tias, a comedy and lifestyle short-form video series geared toward Gen X audiences.
Located in the South Bronx, Bronx Music Hall was developed as a community-centered arts venue dedicated to preserving and celebrating the borough's cultural legacy through music, film, and live performance. Doors for the screening open at 6:30 p.m. at 438 E. 163rd St.
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Your Chill Tias
Bronx Music Heritage Center
Bronx County Historical Society
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