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.
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!
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