Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff. Readers of my other weblog will no doubt be thrilled to know that the basketball content will be extending to the book log as well. What can I say, I'm a hoop junkie.
As noted a while back, there seems to be some inverse correlation between the pace of a sport, and the quality of the literature surrounding it. A good example in support of this would be the fact that there aren't really any great novels (that I can think of) about basketball (though Bruce Brooks's The Moves Make the Man is a pretty good YA-ish book).
The game has, however, produced some very good non-fiction books. John Feinstein's A March to Madness, describing a season in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and his The Last Amateurs, about a season in the smaller Patriot League, are examples of good writing about a great game. Feinstein's prone to repetition-- you can never really lose sight of the point he has in mind for one of his books, as he repeats it every three pages or so-- but as sports writing goes, they're excellent books.
Into that same category, I'd insert Big Game, Small World. A hoop junkie like myself, but a journalist by trade, Wolff set out to investigate the state of basketball around the world, visiting sixteen different countries, from Canada, where Dr. James Naismith (the inventor of the game) was born, to Bhutan, where the king has a daily pick-up game with the Royal Guards, to Angola and Bosnia, where the games go on in spite of bloody civil wars.
Given that context, it was particularly surprising to find a mention of my home town, when Wolff visits a Gus Macker 3-on-3 tournament in Florida:
Trolling through the courts, I found a team to follow. The Whitney Point Eagles came from a town of about 1,000 on the southern tier of New York State. They'd qualified for the nationals by winning the 11- and 12-year-old girls' division at the Macker in Norwich, New York, back in July. To fund their trip, the Eagles had spent the intervening months raising more than $3,000 with car washes, bake sales, and raffles, and "by returning a lot of bottles and cans," according to one of the girls' moms, all of whom had made the trip. (The dads were back in Whitney Point, making do with delivered Domino's.)
(I have two quibbles with the last aside: first, as far as I know, Domino's won't deliver to Whitney Point, and second, there's better pizza available in town...)
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