Hoop Roots
From Hoopedia
Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003
While presenting a memoir of discovering basketball, novelist Wideman (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) reveals much about the origins of black basketball in the US.
A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, Hoop Roots brings "a touch of Proust to the blacktop" (Time) as it tells of the author's love for a game he can no longer play. Beginning with the scruffy backlot playground he discovered in Pittsburgh some fifty years ago, Wideman works magical riffs that connect black music, language, culture, and sport. His voice modulates from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, in describing the game that has sustained his passion throughout his life.
"You whisper the secret of who you are, who you want to be, into the ear of the game, and once it knows your secrets, it plays them back to you and you must dance to them, the sense, nonsense, and music nothing less than revealed and revealing truth — your song of self the game makes real . . . For a moment on the court you can play at that level of seriousness. Those are the stakes of the playground game."
John Edgar Wideman is one of our nation's preeminent literary and social voices, praised by the Los Angeles Times as the "most powerful and accomplished artist of the black urban world" and called "one of America's premier writers of fiction" by the New York Times. With Hoop Roots, Wideman turns his attention to basketball, a game that has shaped his life since he played his first game of "hoops" on a playground in Pittsburgh as a boy. Critically acclaimed when it was published in hardcover last year, Hoop Roots is now available as a Mariner paperback for a new generation of basketball-loving readers.
Growing up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, young John Wideman often escaped the watchful eyes of his grandmother, aunt, and mother to play ball with the white workers at a rundown nearby factory. It was here that he took his first shot:
"I could say the ball felt enormous in my hands, because it probably did . . . I could tell you how great it felt then to pat the ball for the first time, feel it rise off the asphalt back to my hand, the thrill of lifting the ball with both hands, sighting over it at the hoop, trying to get all my small weight under it . . . Could say any damned thing because I don't recall what happened, only that it happened, my first shot in that exact place."
Later, one hot summer as he cared for his dying grandmother, Wideman occasionally sneaked out to play ball with the men and boys of his neighborhood. It was on this court that the style and power of the game took hold of him. Wideman went on to become an All-Ivy League forward at the University of Pennsylvania, and later, as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, often slipped away to play pickup games with his classmate Bill Bradley, future New York Knick and U.S. senator. Wideman passed on his love of the game to his children; his daughter, Jamila Wideman, played basketball at Stanford and later in the WNBA.
More than a personal narrative, Hoop Roots tells the story of the roots of black basketball in our culture, a story inextricable from that of racism in America. Wideman explores the ways in which the sport — both on the playground and in the big leagues — reflects issues of race and masculinity, taking as a case in point the rivalry between Larry Bird — basketball's "Great White Hope" — and Magic Johnson:
"Never mind that Magic's grin and Bird's tight-lipped Yankee stoicism were both masks disguising many identical features. Never mind that both were the products of endless hard work, ruthless determination, love of the game, supreme court intelligence and vision . . . Never mind that both men constantly learned from each other. What played in the media was the masks. Showtime versus lunch-pail ethic. Pleasure versus duty. Ego versus teamwork . . . Bird as bedrock symbol of mainstream values and Magic as the wild hair."
Working magical, jazzy riffs that connect black music, language, culture, and sport, Wideman is by turns nostalgic and outraged, scholarly and streetwise, defiant and unmitigatedly joyful in describing the game that has sustained his lifelong passion. Full of insight, emotion, history, folklore, and an unabashed love of the game, Hoop Roots is the work of an artist both on the page and on the court.
