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JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and the story collection God’s Gym. He is the recipient of two PEN/ Faulkner Awards and has been nominated for the National Book Award.

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Hoop Roots

Mariner Books

Excerpt

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We went to the playground court to find our missing fathers. We
didn"t find them but we found a game and the game served us as a
daddy of sorts. We formed families of men and boys, male clans ruled
and disciplined by the game"s demands, its hard, distant, implacable
gaze, its rare, maybe loving embrace of us: the game taught us to
respect it and respect ourselves and other players. Playing the game
provided sanctuary, refuge from a hostile world, and also toughened
us by instructing us in styles for coping with that world. Only
trouble was, to reach the court we had left our women behind. Even
though we"d found the game and it allowed us, if not to become our
own fathers, at least to glimpse their faces, hear their voices, the
family we"d run away from home to restore would remain broken until
we returned to share the tales of our wandering, listen to the women
tell theirs.

No book. Only a wish I can make something like a book about a game
I"ve played for most of my life, the game of playground basketball I
love and now must stop playing. At fifty-nine I"m well past the age
most people would consider the natural, inevitable time to give up
what"s clearly a young person"s sport. According to this conventional
wisdom I"ve been stealing for years, decades, stretching unreasonably
my time on the court, lacing on sneakers, abusing my body, running up
and down as if it never has to end. My three kids are grown and I
have a granddaughter in North Carolina old enough to chatter with me
on the phone and as I write these words a horrifically bloody century
has just ended, my marriage of thirty-plus years has unraveled, and
each morning my body requires more coaxing, more warming up to
maneuver through the thicket of old aches and pains that settle in
during sleep. Still, for some reason basketball feels important. I"m
not giving it up willingly. I dream about it. I"m devoting passion
and energy to writing a basketball book. Writing something like a
book, anyway, because for me what"s more important than any product
this project achieves is for the process to feel something like
playing the game I can"t let go.
So this writing is for me, first. A way of holding on.
Letting go. Starting a story so a story can end. Telling playground
basketball stories, and if I tell them well they will be more about
basketball than about me. Because the game rules. The game will
assert its primacy. I need the game more than it needs me. You learn
that simple truth as a neophyte, an unskilled beginner enthralled,
intimidated by the unlikely prospect that you"ll ever become as good
as those you watch. Learn this truth again, differently, the same
truth and a different truth as a veteran observing the action you can
barely keep up with anymore and shouldn"t even be trying to keep up
with anymore. You play for yourself, but the game"s never for you or
about you. Even at your best, in those charmed instants when the ball
leaves your hand and you know that what"s going to happen next will
be exactly what you want to happen, not maybe or wishing or hoping,
just the thrill coursing through your body of being in the flow, in
synch, no fear of missing or losing or falling out of time — even in
those split seconds which are one form of grace the game delivers,
the game is larger than you, it"s simply permitting you to experience
a glimmer, a shimmer of how large it is, how just a smidgen of it can
fill you almost to bursting. When you were born the game was here
waiting, and the beat will go on without you.
I think of this game and see my first son, Dan, best ten-year-
old free-throw shooter in Wyoming, slowly bowing his head, his knees
nearly buckling, eyes filling with tears, looking suddenly so tiny
out there alone on the foul line in a cavernous Nebraska high school
gym when he realizes his best is not going to be good enough that
particular day to win the eleven-and-under regional-free throw
contest. His brother, Jake, at thirteen sinking two sweet, all-net
jumpers in a row from the corner to win a tough, tight pickup game in
the university gym when finally both my sons are old enough to hold
their own and play with me on the same team against college kids. See
their sister, my daughter, Jamila, leading her Stanford University
women"s team, number one in the country, into an arena packed with
14,000 fans, a huge roar of rooting for and against them greeting her
and her teammates as they trot onto the court, then the eerie quiet
two and a half hours later, two and a half hours of some of the most
riveting hoop I"ve ever watched, as Jamila, totally exhausted,
collapses into her mother"s arms after performing heroically and
losing in overtime her final college game.
Whatever you make of this book, I need it. Need it the way
I"ve needed the playground game. Need it like I needed this rain
softly falling now, finally, after a whole day so close to rain I
found myself holding my breath till dark in expectation of the first
large, cooling drops. A sweltering June day I climbed a steep trail
up a mountain and hiked through woods surrounding two small
reservoirs where people skinny-dip and sunbathe naked, as if the
summer of love never ended. Rain in the air, in the sky, on my mind
all day. Gray heaps of clouds drifting in, gradually trumping what"s
been mainly blue. Then the sky scrubs itself stark blue again. The
threat of rain never going away, however, even in the brightest
streaming down of sunshine, and I can"t stop needing it, daydreaming
cool rain breaking through. Need to write something like a book
because last week back home in Pittsburgh, in the morning I visited
my brother Robby who"s serving a life term in Western Penitentiary
and in the afternoon of the same day visited in a VA hospital the
body of my father whose mind has been erased by the disease Robby and
the other prisoners call old-timers. Need it in this season of
losses, losses already recorded in stone and imminent losses, virtual
losses, dues paid and dues still to pay heavy on my mind, never far
from my thoughts whatever else I might find myself doing in this
transitional time, season to season, epoch to epoch, century to
century, young to old, life to dying, giving up things, losing things
I never believed I"d have to relinquish.
Playground basketball only a game. Why, given my constant
struggling and juggling to fit a busy schedule into days without
enough hours, does basketball sit there, above the fray, a true and
unblemished exception to the rules, the countless hours committed to
it unregretted. Why was basketball untouchable over the years as I
devised and revised blueprints for making the most profitable use of
my time. Why am I missing the playground game, yearning for it now
even before it quite slips away. Why when I know good and well it"s
time to stop play-
ing hoop, time to reconcile myself to the idea of moving on, why do I
continue to treat these ideas as unacceptable. Why can"t I shake the
thought that this break from the game...