The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League by Ed Breslin (Sports Publishing/Perseus, 2014, 224 pages, $24.95) contains Breslin's oh too detailed and lifeless account of his season spent following the Yale basketball team through the 2011 – 2012 basketball season. At the beginning of the book, Breslin is introduced to Yale at the John J. Lee Amphitheater of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium (the Yale gym, referred to throughout the book as JLA) where Assistant Coach Jamie Snyder-Fair points out a “dark blue rug with a big white Y in the center” and admonishes him, “Whatever else you do here, don't step on the Y.” This is one of the few pieces of dialogue found in this story, heavy on X's and O's and rather dreary accounts of scoring throughout the more than twenty game schedule. Breslin manages throughout the book not to step on the Y both metaphorically and physically, but in so doing, he manages not to generate any real excitement or interest.
Breslin
asserts at the beginning that his book is a memoir, not a report.
Born of a lifetime of love of the game and a sneaking suspicion his
life as an editor/publisher has been largely wasted, he wanted to
participate as an observer, shadowing each of the games Coach James
Jones and the team played during the season. He was given unusual
access to the team, able to attend locker room sessions, interview
coaches and players, and given prime seating for all home and away
games. He seems at his best when describing the basketball venues
themselves, which is perhaps fitting, because his previous book
concerned railroad station architecture. His early descriptions of
the art of defense and offense are not only clear, they set up
further narrative to use in description of the games to come. The
importance of intensive practice and careful planning in coaching
become obvious. Incidents in the book recall Breslin's childhood and
youth as a “Philly guy,” including a delightful episode in which
his family constructed a basketball playground in a deserted lot, attracting the attention of players, fans, and even vendors only
to be torn down by the Philadelphia Electric Company. His love of the
fabled Big Five of Philadelphia, and particularly University of
Pennsylvania's wonderful gym, the Palestra, is palpable. Such
incidents and events give the book whatever life it has. Sadly, the
book falls into the trap of pass-pass-pass...shoot-shoot-shoot too
often. By choosing the personal George Plimpton approach to sports
book writing over the more distanced and nuanced invisible narrator
in John Feinstein's wonderful sports books, he misses
opportunities to take a season of Yale basketball and fit it into the
larger context of basketball as a uniquely American sport, without antecedents in formerly British sports such baseball and football.
Throughout
its history, basketball has been the most urban of sports, dominated
for the past half century or more by a series of quite amazing
African-American players, and more recently coaches, who, through
their spectacular athleticism and drive have transformed the game
from Naismith's peach baskets hung at the ends of the gym in
Springfield, Massachusetts. Since basketball is played in shorts and
armless shirts, the dominance of black players in the game is even
more evident than it is in other sports. By choosing to follow a
season of Ivy League basketball, Breslin had an opportunity to
examine factors of race and class in the most elite league and one of
the most storied universities in that league with unusual access.
Perhaps in his zeal to “not step on the Y” he fails to open this
door, which would have made it into a piercing and insightful volume,
perhaps approaching the importance of Samuel Freedman's Breaking
the Line, which I also
reviewed in my blog. The book that might have been includes the
transition from urban high schools, to a year of prep school, to the
elevated and elite academic and athletic world of the Ivy League.
Also missing is any account of the life journey of thirteenth year
head coach James Jones or his brother Joe, now coach at Boston
University. Jones stands as a remarkably able role model as well as
basketball technician in the book, but nothing tells of his
development into the admirable man he is. Finally, the interviews
with players and glimpses of their families don't come close to
touching the real men who have come to Yale to play basketball as
well as to be serious students. The story of Isaiah Salafia, a 6' 3”
guard from Cromwell, CT, who drops from the team, is only hinted at,
but could have become a door to a deeper understanding of the role of
race and elitism at Yale and in basketball.
Breslin
refers to himself as “being attached to the players” as a fan,
but the reader doesn't come to know them as people at all. Not
present are the insightful interviews that might have turned this
book around. Absent are the background profiles and interviews of players and
coaches that would have rounded them out and provided a lively
context for the games and travel of the long and demanding season.
Perhaps a real basketball fan would revel in the game descriptions,
but for me they became a lengthy and repetitive compilation of
antiseptic games. Where is the sweat, effort, pain, and jubilation so
evident in watching college basketball at its best?
Ed Breslin
Ed
Breslin is a former
editor and publisher who spent two decades in the book business. He
is the author of Drinking with Miss Dutchie
and America's Great Railroad Stations,
and coauthor of Sherman: The Ruthless Victor.
The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League
by Ed Breslin (Sports Publishing/Perseus, 2014, 224 pages, $24.95)
presents a season of Ivy League Basketball that hangs practically
lifeless between the pages. Perhaps, by not “stepping on the Y”
he has deprived the reader of an interesting and valuable story that
would have made a difference. As published, however, it is a
pedestrian and frequently repetitive effort appealing almost
exclusively to fanatics interested in the details of particular games
and the sad musings of a wannabe basketball player and coach seeking
a year of personal fulfillment. The book was provided to me as an
electronic galley by the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle.
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