The Playmaker

by Curtis Kent Bishop

Craig Townsend had carefully figured out all the angles. Recently Discharged from the Air Force, he enrolled at Belmont Junior College to upgrade his academic average and to win a basketball scholarship from a large college. It took some time for his coach to realize that Craig was notjust a good basketball player, but a calculating young man bent on achieving his personal objectives. The Playmaker is the fast-moving story of the selfish scheming of a shrewd ball-handler who wanted to call all the shots himself and fit other people into his pattern. For Craig Townsend, the ace playmaker, the lessone he had to learn about sportsmanship and cooperation were hard to master.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Curtis Kent Bishop was born in Bolivar, Tennessee in 1912 and moved to Texas with his family while still a child.

He attended Big Spring High School while working part time at the Austin American-Statesman, and after graduating in 1934 he went to the University of Texas where worked on the student magazine the Ranger as the editor and the student newspaper, the Daily Texan as a sports reporter.

After earning his bachelors degree, he went to work as a reporter for the Austin Tribune and made his job at the Austin American-Statesman a permanent position where he wrote a column called "This Day in Texas" which was syndicated throughout the state.

During World War II Bishop served with the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service in Latin America and in the Pacific Theater.

When he came back to Texas he continued his writing career and became known for his books rather than his newspaper reporting.

He wrote about sports and life in the American West. Several of his westerns were even made into motion pictures.

Sometimes using the pseudonyms "Curt Brandon" and "Curt Carroll", Bishop wrote more than fifty books and several hundred magazine articles for youth concerning sports and western lore, as well as several hundred magazine articles for youth readers, like Half-Time Hero (1956), and Dribble Up (1956), The First Texas Ranger: Jack Hays (1959), and Lots of Land (1949) which was written with James Bascom Giles.

Bishop was married to Grace Eyree, and they had four children. He died of a heart attack on March 17, 1967, in Austin and was buried in Austin Memorial Park.

Reviews

[Rodney Haydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not a basketball fan, but I am a big fan of juvenile sports stories and this was a good one. You can’t help but root for the singly focused playmaker who is “too cool” for his own good.

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book as a preteen in school, 40 or so years ago. The author wrote several of these sports books for a target audience of adolescent boys. I remember liking it and it being popular with the other guys in school. It was probably because it was a story about a basketball player in our basketball crazy state. I decided to read it for nostalgia sake, I didn't remember much about it. Unfortunately I should have let this one stay in the past. It has not aged well. It even throws in the n-word once, in a very outdated phrase. It was written in 1960, definitely set in a pre-integrated world. The story also ends very abruptly, like a spaghetti western. I was wanting a little more of a conclusion, hoping to see the main character to grow as a person. I didn't really see that. He did come around a little, but even then he wasn't very likable. This book doesn't offer much for a modern reader.