Three-tenths of a second. It all came down to three-tenths of a second.
That’s how long Kelley Suminski had Sunday, when she took a pass from her Stanford University teammate Nicole Powell and, with the score 55-54 in favor of the Vanderbilt Commodores, coolly nailed a three-point basket to win the Midwest Regional Semifinal in the Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament.
You can’t, as they say, make this stuff up.
Which may be why, when it comes to fiction, basketball hasn’t resulted in the same caliber of work as that inspired by baseball and football. Basketball — the most intense, distilled version of which resumes this weekend with the women’s and men’s Final Four — has yet to produce its Bellow.
“The drama is inherent in the game — the real game,” says Rick Telander, author of an acclaimed non-fiction basketball book and sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. “So to add to the drama with fiction is like carrying coals to Newcastle. The game is its own fiction.”
But, you say, hold on there just a second — or three-tenths of a second, as the case may be.
Aren’t other sports dramatic as well? How about a two-out, bases-loaded homer in the bottom of the ninth? Or a touchdown pass on fourth-and-long?
Aren’t those pretty nerve-racking realities?
Absolutely. But as many observers point out, something about basketball seems to limit its potential as fiction. Unlike baseball, basketball does not arise out of our national nostalgia like a ghostly shortstop from an Iowa cornfield. Or perhaps, as some believe, you can chalk up the deficit to the fact that basketball is associated instead with a new and more troubling national mythology: the statistically improbable notion that big-time sports are the ticket out of dismal life situations.
Basketball’s perverse reality, that is, may have outrun and outgunned fiction.
Two years ago, Sports Illustrated published a list of what its editors dubbed “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.” Of the hundred, only 17 were fiction; and of those 17 novels, none was about basketball. (The breakdown among fictional subjects: football, six; baseball, five; boxing, three; soccer, fishing and golf, one each.)
“I can’t think of a single great basketball novel,” declared John Rossi, history professor at LaSalle University, who has taught the history of sports for more than four decades.
“It’s a question I’ve thought about from time to time,” mused Bill Littlefield, host of the National Public Radio program “Only a Game,” which explores the sports world. “Writing fiction about basketball is hard because it would be hard to make it sound like it was fiction. The truth is stranger than fiction.”
Littlefield was referring to the topical elements now surrounding the game, most notably race and riches. Basketball has become the star upon which the black urban underclass makes its wishes, allegedly constituting the pre-eminent route into big money and out of poverty, out of places where “failure is commonplace, like a shrug, and heartbreak the order of the day,” as Darcy Frey wrote in his gritty, candid chronicle “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams” (1994).
Gripping non-fiction
Frey’s work illustrates another essential truth about basketball books. While the sport may lag in the fictional realm, the non-fiction produced about it has been eloquent and gripping, from Frey’s account of the odyssey of four athletically talented kids — including current NBA star Stephon Marbury — from Coney Island to “A Sense of Where You Are,” John McPhee’s account of Bill Bradley’s career at Princeton University, which has never been out of print since its 1965 publication.
Also notable are “A Season on the Brink” (1989), John Feinstein’s description of the fiery tutelage of former Indiana University Coach Bob Knight; Sam Smith’s “The Jordan Rules” (1992), an unblinking look at the Chicago Bulls’ championship run by the Tribune sports columnist; and Telander’s lyrical, closely observed “Heaven Is a Playground” (1976), a study of the basketball dreams of gifted young players in Brooklyn.
Admittedly, basketball has figured significantly in novels that are not, at heart, about the game. There are a number of terrific individual basketball scenes, such as the opening of John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run” (1960) or the tense father-son confrontations on the court in Pat Conroy’s “The Great Santini” (1976).
But no novel with basketball as its single, overarching theme has yet to achieve the kind of fame and stature as novels with baseball at their core — modern classics such as Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” (1952), Mark Harris’ “Bang the Drum Slowly” (1956) or W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” (1982). Or football and its blue-chip roster of novels such as “North Dallas Forty” (1973) and “The Franchise” (1983) by Peter Gent, and “Semi-Tough” (1977) by Dan Jenkins.
Could it be, as Telander and Littlefield suggest, that basketball is so naturally dramatic that it makes fiction seem . . . slow? Bumbling? Sluggish? In really, really bad shape?
Could it be that basketball’s rip-roaring reality just blows right past fiction, leaving it in the backcourt panting and gasping and bending over to grab its shorts, while reality streaks to the basket for a tomahawk jam?
“If you have a team win on a last-second shot in fiction, it’s corny,” Telander said. “In real life, it’s thrilling.”
McPhee, revered for an unadorned, matter-of-fact prose style that has graced the pages of The New Yorker and many books for more than a quarter of a century, agreed that roundball seems to fall short in the classic-literature lineup.
“There’s not a lot of hall-of-fame fiction about basketball,” said McPhee, who teaches at Princeton, in an e-mail. “Somebody said that science, with careful inference, carries fact beyond the competence of invention. Basketball is a science.”
`Hoosiers’ not a novel
McPhee, like others, cited the film “Hoosiers” (1986) as high-quality basketball fiction. Trouble is, “Hoosiers” was an original screenplay by Angelo Pizzo; it was not based on a novel.
Thus the Great American Basketball Novel still is waiting to be written. There have been noble attempts: John R. Tunis’ 1954 book for young adults — “Go, Team, Go!” — is earnestly instructive; and Nina Revoyr’s “The Necessary Hunger” (1997) is a savvy, up-to-the-minute look at the racially charged world of women’s basketball.
But they haven’t resonated with readers over the long haul in the same way that novels about baseball or football have — which may not be the writers’ fault at all, but rather differences inherent in the games themselves.
“Sports like basketball aren’t as deeply a part of the American character,” said Rossi. “As a result, you have very good non-fiction about basketball, but it hasn’t generated the literature. In the longer frame, it might.”
Littlefield, who wrote a novel about baseball, “Prospect” (1989), believes it may be a matter of velocity and locale. “Some say sports that give people leisure for observation tend to be more conducive to thoughtful writing. There’s so much time in baseball.
“And in baseball,” he continued, “place is important. Venues differ. In basketball, a court is a court. And place is a huge presence in fiction.”
Telander pointed out that the pastoral nature of baseball — it’s played outdoors, except for those newfangled domed stadiums — may be better suited to the rhythms of fiction, to the making of connections between the cycles of seasons and the cycles of human life, than is basketball.
Still, the game isn’t over, said Telander, author of “String Music” (2002), a basketball-themed novel for young readers: “Great [fictional] sports books are waiting to be written.”
It could be, as some have said, that not only is basketball too fast for fiction — rushing past traditional niceties such as dialogue and character development in a blur of action — but also may have evolved too quickly within the culture. Basketball forces conversation about so many urgent, controversial issues — about race and class, about educational opportunity, about fairness, about exploitation — that to slow down long enough to render it in fiction, to make up names and dream up phony-but-plausible-sounding teams, can sometimes seem like a silly frill.
A changing game
As Frey wrote in “The Last Shot,” basketball “is changing in ways that have rendered it almost unrecognizable, now that the enormous interest generated by college basketball during the 1980s has trickled down to the high school level.” In what Frey called the “urban-lunar landscape” of the blighted, inner-city basketball courts with the cracked asphalt and the rusty, netless rims, “the possibility of transcendence through basketball — in this case, an athletic scholarship to a four-year Division I college — is an article of faith.”
The blunt, racially infused fact of basketball in American culture is so crushing, so immediate, that maybe it doesn’t need fiction in the way that baseball, with its slow-motion ways, with its hidden dramas and delicately closeted subtleties, needs it.
Who cares about fiction, after all, when you have games such as Tuesday’s?
Two days after Suminski’s last-second bucket won the semifinals for Stanford, the team faced the University of Tennessee in the regional finals in Norman, Okla. With 1.7 seconds left in the game — and a trip to the Final Four on the line — Tennessee’s Tasha Butts scored to put her team on top, 62-60.
Stanford All-American Powell snared the long inbounds pass and, as the horn sounded, put up a three-point shot to win the game.
The ball smacked the rim. In that infinitesimal slice of a second, the ball seemed to hesitate, almost as if it were making up its mind whether to drop in or bounce out.
An eternity passed.
It bounced out.
– – –
‘That old stretched-leather feeling … ‘
While the Great American Basketball Novel still is waiting to be written, several novels include great basketball scenes:
“Rabbit, Run”, by John Updike (1960)
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches. . . . The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. . . . That old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings. It feels like he’s reaching down through the years to touch this tautness.
“The Great Santini”, by Pat Conroy (1976)
He shot his two-hand set in a soft, spinning arc that, when true, snapped through the net in a swishing voice that is the purest music of the game. Even when he missed, the spin on the ball made it die on the rim and it would often bounce once or twice between the rim and the backboard before falling in. . . . Like all good shooters, the pattern of Bull’s shooting did not deviate; in fact it was unconscious, buried in instinct, and rooted in long hours of boyhood practice.
“The Necessary Hunger,” by Nina Revoyr (1997)
She was fluid, but there were a few small breaks in her movement, as if she were a river interrupted by rocks. She could dribble low, behind her back, through her legs, do a perfect crossover, but it wasn’t the fancy stuff that made her such an effective guard. It was that the ball seemed drawn to her hand, as if by some invisible force, always returning to it no matter what direction the rest of her body was going.
