A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, John Edgar Wideman’s 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.

Hoop Roots

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By John Edgar Wideman

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2003 John Edgar Wideman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618257756

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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 can"t be final. If I"m patient,
hang around, give myself a little time to heal, to get right, I"ll be
back out on the court again, won"t I.
If I knew the answers, I probably wouldn"t need to write the
book, or the something like a book I"m pushing for, would settle for,
anxious it may be less but also hoping for more than a book. No
answers sought here. No book. My need enough. My desire to lose
myself in doing something like playing the game.
Growing up, I needed basketball because my family was poor
and colored, hemmed in by material circumstances none of us knew how
to control, and if I wanted more, a larger, different portion than
other poor colored folks in Homewood, I had to single myself out. I
say if I wanted more because if was a real question, a stumbling
block many kids in Homewood couldn"t get past. It"s probably accurate
to say that anybody, everybody wants more. But how strong is the
desire. How long does it last. What forms does it take. How many
young people are convinced they deserve more or believe they possess
the strength required to obtain more or believe they actually have a
chance for more. The idea of race and the practice of racism in our
country work against African-American kids forming and sustaining
belief in themselves. Wanting more doesn"t teach you there are ways
to get there. Nor does it create the self-image of a deserving
recipient, a worthwhile person worth striving for. You need the
plausibility, the possibility of imagining a different life for
yourself, other than the meager portion doled out by the imperatives
of race and racism, the negative prospects impressed continuously
upon a black kid"s consciousness, stifling, stunting the self-
awareness of far too many. Including black kids not poor. Imagining a
different portion is the first step, the door cracking between known
and unknown. A door on alternative possibilities. If you want more
and you"re lucky enough, as I was, to choose or be chosen by some
sort of game, you may then begin to forge a game plan. If you believe
you"re in the game, you may be willing to learn the game"s ABCs.
Learn what it costs to play. Begin making yourself a player.
I figured out early that hard, solo work the only way to get
certain things about hoop right. Every chance I got I practiced alone
the shooting, dribbling skills other kids had somehow mastered. Fear
part of it. Fear of failure. Of humiliation. Love just as important
as fear. Unconditional love from my family. A sense someone cared,
someone rooted for me, someone expected me to do well. I didn"t want
to let those folks down nor behave on the court in a fashion they
might be ashamed of. If I wanted more, I must risk failing, and it
helped immeasurably to know that somebody somewhere supported my
effort to play well. Would support me if I didn"t play well. If no
one cared, why bother. Why beat myself up. Set myself up for
disappointment. Love helped me imagine I possessed the power to
invent myself, make more of myself, become a player.
Fear and love, love and fear raised the stakes of the game.
Engendered the beginnings of a hunger, the hunger driving the serious
players I admire most, who never seem satisfied no matter how well
they perform, players who consistently push themselves as if more
hustle, more speed, more brawling competitiveness is never too much.
Players who refuse to settle into a comfort zone, who won"t accept
limits, who attack the game with the same unstinting voraciousness as
the game when it attacks them, consuming the best of their bodies and
spirits.
The pampering and privileges I received because I was male
and the oldest child in the various households of our extended clan
certified love in abundance and also stimulated my desire for more.
The slightly larger share my mother sometimes tried to slip me when
she divided a cake or pie under the hawk eyes of my siblings I took
not only as a sign of love and eldest status, as they did. The tiny
bit extra also reinforced a sense of entitlement. Without exactly
knowing it, I was beginning to single myself out, practicing in the
interior world of daydream and fantasy, where no one could eavesdrop,
how it might feel to exercise power and authority, fire and a voice I
had almost no reason to anticipate my material circumstances —
colored and poor in Homewood — would ever grant me.
Growing up in a world where adults heaped love on kids in any
and every fashion they could manage, the women lavishing daily, close-
up care and attention, the men leaving the house at dawn to line up
on the corner where work might or might not arrive, men gone from can
to caint, splicing multiple, piecemeal jobs into a precarious living
wage, where delicious meals were scraped together from cheap cuts
beaten and boiled to tenderness, from government-surplus cheese,
powdered milk, and canned, ground, jellied, mystery meat, from
chicken"s feet, necks, gizzards, beef neckbones, pig"s feet, a world
in which piles of shiny new toys appeared miraculously once a year at
Christmas, the holiday when grownups spent themselves silly, diving
deeper, more hopelessly into debt as if one morning of glittering
extravagance could erase all the empty-handed ones, in this world of
abrupt change, boom and bust, feast and famine where love on one hand
acted as a steadying, stabilizing force and on the other hand could
exert no control whatsoever over the oppressive economic environment
in which both kids and adults were trapped, without that love I would
have been a lost soul, but love also created a desperate hunger for
more, far more than the people who loved me could provide. Love bred
a dark fear of its absence. Because if love disappeared, what would
remain. Wouldn"t the point be I didn"t measure up, didn"t deserve
love.
As a kid, did I think about my life in terms of wanting more.
More of what. Where would I find it. Did I actually pose similar
questions to myself. When. How. Why. Looking back, I"m pretty sure
about love, an awakening hunger for the game, and not too sure of
much else. The act of looking back, the action of writing down what I
think I see/saw, destroys certainty. The past presents itself
fluidly, changeably, at least as much a work in progress as the
present or future.
No scorebook. No reliable witnesses or too many witnesses.
Too much time. No time. One beauty of playground hoop is how
relentlessly, scrupulously it encloses and defines moments. Playing
the game well requires all your attention. When you"re working to
stay in the game, the game works to keep you there. None of the
mind"s subtle, complex operations are shut down when you play,
they"re just intently harnessed, focused to serve the game"s complex
demands. In the heat of the game you may conceive of yourself playing
the game, an aspect of yourself watching another aspect perform, but
the speed of the game, its continuous go and flow, doesn"t allow a
player to indulge this conscious splitting-off and self-reflection,
common, perhaps necessary, to writing autobiography.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Hoop Roots by John Edgar Wideman Copyright © 2003 by John Edgar Wideman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are Hoop Roots and The Island: Martinique. He teaches at Brown University.