CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Homeless Hold Court at Top Gym : In a temporary social experiment, San Diego’s basketball hot spot is transformed nightly into a shelter.

Byron Fuller, 39, a computer programmer who stays fit by playing a take-no-prisoners brand of basketball several times a week, surveys the incongruous scene and decides that it’s working out fine.

“We play ball and they watch,” Fuller says. “Nobody gets rowdy and nobody crowds anybody.”

Joe Frazier is also pleased. He is on the other side of the social equation: 27, an unemployed cook, homeless these past few years.

“This is an acceptable situation,” he says. “It’s not ideal. But it’s something that everyone can live with.”

What Fuller and Frazier are talking about is an ad hoc social experiment in which as many as 500 homeless people have been given temporary refuge at the Municipal Gymnasium in the city’s treasured Balboa Park.

At 5 p.m. each day, basketball players leave and hundreds of thin blue mattresses are spread on the hardwood floor. Lights are out by 8 p.m., and by 9 a.m. the next day the homeless must either leave the gym or move to the out-of-bounds area so that basketball play can resume.

There are other basketball hot spots in San Diego, but Muni Gym is the place to hone and test your competitive skills. If the movie “White Men Can’t Jump” had been filmed in San Diego, it would have been filmed in Muni Gym.

Bill Walton, who attended high school in suburban La Mesa, and who starred at UCLA and in the pros, was a regular at Muni Gym. Even as a pro, Walton would stop by Muni occasionally; regulars still remember the day when Walton and Boston Celtic teammate Larry Bird went to Muni to challenge all comers.

Until the homeless incursion broke the rhythm, Muni’s three full-size courts were in use from morning until near midnight, seven days a week. A sign warns: “NO DUNKING. Court Subject to Closure.”

Pickup games still continue during the morning and afternoon, and workers from downtown high-rises dash over at lunch for some exercise. But nighttime leagues, including one exclusively for attorneys and certified public accountants, have been displaced for the time being.

*

Until March 31, the homeless are being allowed to sleep in the gymnasium at night and lounge around the courts during the day, their shopping carts and bedrolls parked at one end of the gym. It was a stopgap taken by city officials during the merciless rains of early January.

Around that time, the homeless had erected a tent city on a parking lot in Balboa Park, in the shadow of downtown. Police, as they had done to a similar tent settlement in August, were poised to remove the tents and roust the occupants.

Minicams at the ready, television crews had staked out the parking lot. A fledgling newsletter for the homeless was covering the drama in breathless detail. The city’s new mayor, Susan Golding, had her first crisis.

To defuse matters, City Manager Jack McGrory opened up Muni Gym to the homeless and contracted with a private charity to provide supervision, hot meals and showers. The gym--adjacent to the Automobile Museum, Starlight Theatre and Aerospace Museum--had previously served as an overnight shelter only when the temperature dipped to 40 degrees, or to 50 degrees if rain was expected.

Although the clash between police and the homeless was averted by McGrory’s action, what happens after March 31 is anybody’s guess. Last year the City Council turned down a plan to place homeless shelters in neighborhoods throughout the city because homeowners had reacted angrily.

“That’s been a concern,” Ross McCollum, the city’s director of community services, said of the fate of the homeless once they are turned out of the gym. “That’s why we keep saying it’s only a temporary solution. I don’t know what will happen after March 31.”

McGrory is at pains to emphasize that the Muni Gym experiment is a onetime thing. “This is it as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “We are not using any other part of the park, and it (the Muni Gym) is being very closely monitored by the police.”

*

Among those keeping an eye on the coexistence is Forrest Curo, owner of Aardvark Bookstore and publisher of an irregular newsletter for the homeless, HABITA (Homeless Americans, Business & Individuals Taking Action). “We’ve been organizing and rabble-rousing for about a year,” he said.

Curo prints several thousand copies of HABITA and strives to include breaking news (“Homeless Banished From Camp,” and “New Mayor’s Aide Listens”) and public service announcements (“Good News on the Port-A-John Circuit”). He predicts another confrontation in the parking lot after March 31.

“We have to go back to that parking lot, with or without city approval,” Curo said. “It seems to be the only place in the park that there is no rational objection to us using. It’s a natural.”

Actually, there is objection aplenty to allowing the homeless to establish a tent city in the parking lot. It comes from the parking lot operator who fears loss of business and increased liability.

But that argument means little to the homeless, who have their stories to tell as they settle for another night at Muni.

“We don’t think of ourselves as homeless,” said Frazier, who wears “Barbara Boxer for Senate” gym shorts. “We think of us as homes unto ourselves. We have the focus and the discipline to be at home wherever we are.”

Frank Curry, 40, who had been roaming downtown streets until the Muni shelter opened up, figures that he is part of a rich tradition.

“Look at your American history,” Curry said. “The cowboy would roam and wherever he decided to sleep, that was his home. Now government is making too many rules to restrict your movement.”