Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood (Sports and American Culture)

by Fred Hobson

“Why should a particular game, played with a round ball by twenty-year-olds in short pants often hundreds of miles away, mean so much to me, since I seem to have so little to gain or lose by its outcome?” Fred Hobson thus begins Off the Rim, his narrative of college basketball and society, of growing up and not growing up. He seeks the answer to this question by delving into the particulars of his own experience.

            Growing up in a small town in the hills of North Carolina where basketball was king, he became a rabid UNC basketball fan (like many others) at the tender age of thirteen during the Tar Heels’ “magical” 32–0 national championship season in 1956–1957. He starred as a high school basketball player and lived a dream by “walking on” the highly successful 1961–1962 Carolina freshman team. That was also the year Dean Smith was elevated to head coach of the Heels. Hobson observed firsthand Coach Smith’s difficult early days before he became the winningest coach in college basketball.

            Forced to find a substitute for his beloved sport after not making the varsity his sophomore year, Hobson turned to the romance of books, both reading and writing them. Changing his major to English, he discovered the joys of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, and H. L. Mencken, and made a career teaching American literature.  

            This is a book about basketball that is more than a book about basketball. It is, in the beginning, a depiction of a part of the South that departs from the usual idea of Dixie, a look into the culture, religion, and politics of the Carolina hills. It is a portrait of the people who made up the South, including the author’s parents, who both were and were not conventional southerners. Finally, in some respects, it is the story of a boyhood that never ends, relived each year during basketball season in the frantic, tortured life of a fan.

            Although Hobson’s story is largely about the Tar Heels—and about other things related to growing up in the South of the 1950s—what he says about basketball, childhood, and adulthood also holds true for those who find themselves in emotional bondage to Hoosiers or Bulldogs or Ducks, to Wolverines, Gophers, Badgers, and various other species of Upper Midwestern low-lying ground fauna, to Blue Devils or Blue Demons, to Tigers, Wildcats, Cougars, and all other breeds of cat.

Genres: Nonfiction, Basketball, Sports

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Dr. Fred Colby Hobson Jr. is an English scholar whose wor focused on the U.S. South. He is a retired Professor of English, most recently at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Hobson received his A.B. in English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, his M.A. in History from Duke University, and his Ph.D. English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1972. Before joining UNC in 1989, Hobson taught at the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University.

Hobson's work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has written numerous books on American literature and intellectual history.

Reviews

[Bibliomama · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a TarHeel born and bred (or “bread” as the author’s little daughter understood it), this book was like comfort food (bread maybe 🙂). There was a little too much about ballgames and players I didn’t remember, but I did enjoy reading about how he came to be a writer (Mencken) and how he became a committed reader at the relatively advanced age of 20. Addressing his stuttering was also quite poignant. I wish he had spent more space writing about one of my moral heroes, Dean Smith. Some of his recollections of casual and flagrant racism were jarring but accurate.

But the paragraph that sealed the deal for me was the one that invoked both my favorite English professor, the venerable Hugh Holman, and my favorite basketball player, Dick Grubar. Sometimes wishing actually works.

[Agatha Donkar Lund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hobson pulls together two of my favorite things -- Carolina basketball and books -- together in his memoir. It gets a little repetitive in places, especially when he's rehashing his year on the Carolina freshman team with Billy Cunningham, but it's an easy read and he's an interesting guy, and I really enjoyed the way he tried to overcome his basketball obsession (to no avail) and the way he turned to books when he couldn't play anymore.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood by Fred Hobson (University of Missouri Press 2006) (796.323) (4026).

This is a satisfying memoir about growing up a basketball fan in hoops-crazed North Carolina. Author Fred Hobson has his bona fides in order. He grew up in a small town in North Carolina, he played basketball at UNC for the Tar Heels freshman team as an uninvited walk-on in the 1960s (in the days before freshman were eligible for varsity play), he is a retired UNC English professor, and he has never lost his childhood fixation with college basketball. He remained a lifelong diehard Carolina Tar Heel fan - even though he earned a graduate degree at (ahem) Duke University, which as any college sports fan knows, is UNC’s hated archrival.

Though basketball figures prominently in this tale, Hobson’s account is as much the memoir of a small-town Southern writer and educator as it is a book about sports.

I purchased a used PB copy in good condition on 12/1/24 for $2.00 from McKay’s Books.

My rating: 7/10, finished 2/28/25 (4026).

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[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book b/c Hobson is a relative of a relative of mine. And because my husband--a sports fanatic--was loving it. I didn't think I would; but I was wrong.

It's a fun read. Yes, I love the Tar Heels, but anyone who cheers for any sports team can relate to Hobson witty and (even) touching relating of his own fanaticism. Even anyone who grew up in a rural area would likely, as I did, appreciate Hobson's eloquent rendering of his hometown in NW NC.

Hobson teaches English at UNC, so there are also numerous passages about his love of reading, references to great books, and the like. For all these reasons, I resoundingly recommend this read.

[Moises · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is about Chris who is in his school basketball team. Who does not start sits in a bench and is taking some tips from a girl name Greta. Who is in the basketball team.