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TRANSIENT, ABIDING STRUCTURES John Wideman's new memoir of loving basketball

by Steven L. Beeber ’85, '95G

"THE GAME HAS BEEN HERE" - author John Wideman at a Manhattan playground. (For larger view of photo by Jean-Christian Bourcart, click in right navigation.) ONCE WHILE I WAS IN the UMass MFA program, John Edgar Wideman told me how he became a writer. “I didn’t get picked in the first round draft,” he said. “So I went to the University of Iowa instead.” We were standing outside a seminar room in Bartlett Hall, where 12 other students and I had been listening to the celebrated writer explain why he liked a certain image in a story. It was one of my stories, I think, which was probably why I was lingering after class. “Oh,” I said feeling honored that John had shared this bit of information with me. And embarrassed too, because I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. Was that how it worked in 1960s? You had to wait to find out your draft status before you could decide whether or not to go to grad school? ONLY QUITE A BIT LATER did I realize, with even deeper embarrassment, that he’d had been talking about first round draft picks in the NBA. A stupid white kid from the suburbs with no understanding of sports – much less of the sorts of choices a young black man like John must have faced – I had completely missed the point. Of course, I knew John had worked his way out of poverty in his native Pittsburgh, earning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an All-Ivy forward in basketball and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. That he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Cambridge — only the second black American to do so — and a Kent Fellowship to the Iowa Writers Workshop. I knew that before coming to UMass in 1986 he’d won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Sent For You Yesterday and a National Book Critic’s Circle Award nomination for his memoir Brothers and Keepers. That in the ’90s came — among other honors — a second PEN/Faulkner, a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and the O. Henry Award for Best Short Story. BUT IT WASN'T UNTIL I began reading Hoop Roots, John’s recent, basketball-centric account of a lifelong attachment to the sport, that those feelings of embarrassment came back to me. Part novel, part essay, part sociological study, the point hammered home by Hoop Roots is the one that went right past me that day in Bartlett Hall: To this author, basketball is an art form fully as valid as the art of writing.

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Abiding structures

STRUCTURES: larger image

HOOP ROOTS: an excerpt