Living through the Hoop
High School Basketball, Race, and the American Dream
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
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When high school basketball player LeBron James was selected as the top pick in the National Basketball Association draft of 2003, the hopes of a half-million high school basketball players soared. If LeBron could go straight from high school to the NBA, why couldn’t they? Such is the allure of basketball for so many young African American men. Unfortunately, the reality is that their chances of ever playing basketball at the professional, or even college, level are infinitesimal. In Living Through the Hoop, Reuben A. Buford May tells the absorbing story of the hopes and struggles of one high school basketball team.
With a clear passion for the game, May grabs readers with both hands and pulls them onto the hardwood, going under the hoop and inside the locker room. May spent seven seasons as an assistant coach of the Northeast High School Knights in Northeast, Georgia. We meet players like Larique and Pooty Cat, hard-working and energetic young men, willing to play and practice basketball seven days a week and banking on the unlimited promise of the game. And we meet Coach Benson, their unorthodox, out-spoken, and fierce leader, who regularly coached them to winning seasons, twice going to the state tournaments Elite Eight championships.
Beyond the wins and losses, May provides a portrait of the players’ hopes and aspirations, their home lives, and the difficulties they face in living in a poor and urban area — namely, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, violence in their communities, run-ins with the police, and unstable family lives. We learn what it means to become a man when you live in places that define manhood by how tough you can be, how many women you can have, and how much money you can hustle.
May shows the powerful role that the basketball team can play in keeping these kids straight, away from street-life, focused on completing high school, and possibly even attending college. Their stories, and the double-edged sword of hoop dreams, is at the heart of this compelling story about young African American men’s struggle to find their way in an often grim world.
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In his study of the soaring myths and ugly realities surrounding the world of high school basketball, May (Talking at Trena's) does the math: of the 530,000-odd high school basketball players this nation fielded in 2001, a mere 405 ever played professionally. This works out to a "measly" .001 probability a fact that doesn't keep the kids he helps coach in a mostly black, poverty-stricken Georgia neighborhood from dreaming of the big time. More sociology paper than general interest book, May's work has the kind of on-the-ground raw material that most chroniclers of charged subjects (race, poverty, crime and social advancement) would dream of, yet he seems strangely unable to make much of it. After dividing his book into chapters on race, masculinity, sportsmanship and the like, May marches dutifully through each of them, reporting his findings with the utmost of care, never overstating something he doesn't have hard data for. Given literally a front-row seat to the arena where several of society's most potent stereotypes are played out, May retreats from the fray with his stiff, term-paper prose and cautious mien. However, May's commitment to these boys is clear, as he becomes convinced that even though their fantasies of living the American dream are for the most part a "dirty trick," it still remains about the best thing going in their sadly limited lives.
