FULL COURT: STORIES AND POEMS FOR HOOP FANS,
edited by Dennis Trudell
Full Court encapsulates a sweet basketball jones -- oops, I mean reverie -- for the converted. But this intrepid collection of stories and poems is no less accessible to those with no exposure to the game.
A benchload of all-stars like Sherman Alexie, John Sayles, Quincy Troupe, John Updike and John Edgar Wideman check in to hoist up their literary money shots. But this book's real beauty lies in the simple fact that its myriad tales come from disparate 'hoods where hoops rituals are devoutly observed.
Ball-crazy nun
In these pages there's agony, ecstasy, burning, learning and perseverance.
Like the WNBA commercials declaring "We got next!," women get equal time. There's Sister Bernadette, a ball-crazy nun with an inner-city edge in Stephanie Grant's Posting-Up; a tomboy suspects her new curves probably signal an end to her playing days in Nancy Boutilier's To Throw Like A Boy; and in Jonathan Baumbach's hilarious Familiar Games, a mother still sporting house slippers and rubber gloves regularly kicks both her sons' asses on the court.
Trash-talking, posturing and lying about sexual escapades are expected, but not a character like Doc, who is blind, yet sinks free throws at a clip Shaquille O'Neal would kill for -- or the youngblood Victor, in Geoffrey Becker's offbeat chiller El Diablo De La Cienga, who hunts down the devil incarnate looking for a showdown of skills.
And never mind Michael Jordan acting goofy with cartoons in the movie Space Jam. True lunacy ensues in George Alec Effinger's From Downtown At The Buzzer, when the bruthas at a military installation hook up with the "little blue men" from a galaxy unknown.
From the fantastic to the mundane, the game is never merely dangled as an artifice in the midst of some other story line.
Hoops fan or not, the Full Court press is on!
