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Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love – A Pittsburgh Memoir from the Blacktop, Scholarly to Streetwise
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.
242 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
8 people are currently reading
194 people want to read
About the author
John Edgar Wideman
95 books409 followersA widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000 he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal.
In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award.
His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.
He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award.
His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.
He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 20, 2010
One of the surprises of my life in the last few years is falling back in love with sports. I thought I had given them up, filed them away as philistine nonsense, juvenile and macho posturing, another example of the bread and circuses the gatekeepers of our society toss out to the enthralled masses.
I never really gave up on baseball, to be truthful. The love went too deep, back to my earliest memories, hours and hours spent playing pick up games, over the line, or just solitarily throwing a ball against a chalked in strike zone over and over again. But football I had savagely expunged from my life. I had encountered too many dunderheads whose sole range of conversation consisted in talking about football as if contained grailic importance and talking about women as if they were appendages only. But I loved the game itself, the complexity and beauty and yes indeed the savagery of it. And it was the only game I was consistently good as a kid, I had a damn accurate arm and could move with guile and grace. Until I stopped growing at fifteen and fell under the spell of dope, beat literature and bad girls I excelled at it. So I returned to it too, as a spectator of course, and my sons along with me, and it is a great shared joy we have, one of the few we love equally. I have not yet instilled my love of books in them, my love of nature and of long walks they only seem to latch onto intermittently. My prayer life and meditative practice they find hokey and embarrassing.
Basketball too has returned to my life. It is a sport I never was particularly good at, but the watching of it and the listening to it has now become such a spirit expanding exercise, such a totemic grant of increased personal mojo, that I am convinced I will never set it aside again in some mistaken, elitist purge. I love the swirling speed of it, the joyous abandon of it, the god-like leaps(really-can a human do such things) and body bruising thump of it. On television I have seen things that have struck me silent, sent me up whooping from my couch or made me laugh with delight. Emotion baby, lots of it, and if it is vicarious, surely it is no more so than novel or a book of essays.
Of course I’m a Lakers man, born and bred in Southern Cal. as I am, and it follows from that the human being who has been the source of much of my delight and periodic exasperation is Mr. Kobe Bryant, formerly of Lower Marion High, equal parts artist, working man and to his unlucky opponents, Lord High Executioner. Sure he’s probably a prick in real life, but so many people who are transcendentally great at one thing usually are. Some sort of compensatory balancing I suspect. They honed their skills in one area to such a degree that other attributes suffer. Some great writers have been like this too. Me, I’ve never had the nuts.
While television is the preferred method of imbibing basketball(of course I can’t afford actual tickets) I have experienced a new and weird form of joy listening to Lakers games on the radio on my commute home from work. This may seem both archaic and horribly lacking in the primary sense element(sight) needed to experience the flights of rhapsody involved in pro hoops but there is something wonderful to it to. In a radio broadcast the announcer is forced to explain every minute detail of the action and at such tongue-tripping speed as to constantly teeter on the edge of incomprehensibility. To me this gets more than anything the wonderful, jazz-like, improvisational free-flow that is basketball. Also there a wonderful cadence, an incantatory rhythm, a poetry to the voice work that both captures the games essence and is a pleasure in its own right.
Which brings me roundabout and finally to John Edgar Wideman's wonderful memoir of growing up and playing ball in Pittsburgh, Hoop Roots. Like a good radio announcer Wideman gets to the game he has loved, breathed and bled for all his life. His prose swoops and jives, fakes and pivots and finds only net over and over again. As a stylist the man has got Kobe level game. He also plays(writes) with grit, tenacity and heart is full of what sports junkies know as ‘the intangibles’, the will to win, the willingness to dominate, the down in his bones necessity to be the best player on the court.
And there is more to this wonderful book too. While Wideman gets right at why playing sports makes men out of man-children and conversely can stunt their emotional growth too(there is some wonderful riffs here how balling can drive a man from women and some good ones too on how the courting of a woman can find apt metaphor on court) he also uses a wider lens to talk race, poverty and sex in bug fuck inner city America as one Century has collapsed into the next. He mediates on the oft noted difference between white mid-west ballplayers developing smooth jump shots in farm towns vs. the urban warfare chest against chest drive to the hoop style of the average African-American player.
But for all his intelligence and incisiveness with the big picture, it’s the smaller, more intimate details of this book that are the real heart breakers. Wideman writes as well about the scathing and self-lacerating gauntlet that is male adolescence as well as anyone I’ve read in the last several years. He writes about the pockets of isolation and miscommunications that can develop in a family that no pick up game or heavy sweat can heal. He writes about how a loving relationship can devolve into bitter recrimination with neither party willing to make any pacifying or healing gesture to bring back sweet to the bitter.
But always he loops back into the game. Wideman played until he was 59, until his knees were so gimpy and ground down that he could play no longer. Then he wrote this long letter, this urban sonnet, this bellow of fire.
This is a great book for any one interested in fine memoir, for anyone interested in this particular grace-filled and sometimes exasperating game. It’s a great book too for those who are interested in the American Urban experience at a certain time and place, of those are comfortable with wounded and wounding families. Finally, it’s a great book for readers who are willing to listen to the lessons of the human body as it soars, dips, dares great things and then sputters, breaks and falls into middle or old age still cursing the dying of the light.
I never really gave up on baseball, to be truthful. The love went too deep, back to my earliest memories, hours and hours spent playing pick up games, over the line, or just solitarily throwing a ball against a chalked in strike zone over and over again. But football I had savagely expunged from my life. I had encountered too many dunderheads whose sole range of conversation consisted in talking about football as if contained grailic importance and talking about women as if they were appendages only. But I loved the game itself, the complexity and beauty and yes indeed the savagery of it. And it was the only game I was consistently good as a kid, I had a damn accurate arm and could move with guile and grace. Until I stopped growing at fifteen and fell under the spell of dope, beat literature and bad girls I excelled at it. So I returned to it too, as a spectator of course, and my sons along with me, and it is a great shared joy we have, one of the few we love equally. I have not yet instilled my love of books in them, my love of nature and of long walks they only seem to latch onto intermittently. My prayer life and meditative practice they find hokey and embarrassing.
Basketball too has returned to my life. It is a sport I never was particularly good at, but the watching of it and the listening to it has now become such a spirit expanding exercise, such a totemic grant of increased personal mojo, that I am convinced I will never set it aside again in some mistaken, elitist purge. I love the swirling speed of it, the joyous abandon of it, the god-like leaps(really-can a human do such things) and body bruising thump of it. On television I have seen things that have struck me silent, sent me up whooping from my couch or made me laugh with delight. Emotion baby, lots of it, and if it is vicarious, surely it is no more so than novel or a book of essays.
Of course I’m a Lakers man, born and bred in Southern Cal. as I am, and it follows from that the human being who has been the source of much of my delight and periodic exasperation is Mr. Kobe Bryant, formerly of Lower Marion High, equal parts artist, working man and to his unlucky opponents, Lord High Executioner. Sure he’s probably a prick in real life, but so many people who are transcendentally great at one thing usually are. Some sort of compensatory balancing I suspect. They honed their skills in one area to such a degree that other attributes suffer. Some great writers have been like this too. Me, I’ve never had the nuts.
While television is the preferred method of imbibing basketball(of course I can’t afford actual tickets) I have experienced a new and weird form of joy listening to Lakers games on the radio on my commute home from work. This may seem both archaic and horribly lacking in the primary sense element(sight) needed to experience the flights of rhapsody involved in pro hoops but there is something wonderful to it to. In a radio broadcast the announcer is forced to explain every minute detail of the action and at such tongue-tripping speed as to constantly teeter on the edge of incomprehensibility. To me this gets more than anything the wonderful, jazz-like, improvisational free-flow that is basketball. Also there a wonderful cadence, an incantatory rhythm, a poetry to the voice work that both captures the games essence and is a pleasure in its own right.
Which brings me roundabout and finally to John Edgar Wideman's wonderful memoir of growing up and playing ball in Pittsburgh, Hoop Roots. Like a good radio announcer Wideman gets to the game he has loved, breathed and bled for all his life. His prose swoops and jives, fakes and pivots and finds only net over and over again. As a stylist the man has got Kobe level game. He also plays(writes) with grit, tenacity and heart is full of what sports junkies know as ‘the intangibles’, the will to win, the willingness to dominate, the down in his bones necessity to be the best player on the court.
And there is more to this wonderful book too. While Wideman gets right at why playing sports makes men out of man-children and conversely can stunt their emotional growth too(there is some wonderful riffs here how balling can drive a man from women and some good ones too on how the courting of a woman can find apt metaphor on court) he also uses a wider lens to talk race, poverty and sex in bug fuck inner city America as one Century has collapsed into the next. He mediates on the oft noted difference between white mid-west ballplayers developing smooth jump shots in farm towns vs. the urban warfare chest against chest drive to the hoop style of the average African-American player.
But for all his intelligence and incisiveness with the big picture, it’s the smaller, more intimate details of this book that are the real heart breakers. Wideman writes as well about the scathing and self-lacerating gauntlet that is male adolescence as well as anyone I’ve read in the last several years. He writes about the pockets of isolation and miscommunications that can develop in a family that no pick up game or heavy sweat can heal. He writes about how a loving relationship can devolve into bitter recrimination with neither party willing to make any pacifying or healing gesture to bring back sweet to the bitter.
But always he loops back into the game. Wideman played until he was 59, until his knees were so gimpy and ground down that he could play no longer. Then he wrote this long letter, this urban sonnet, this bellow of fire.
This is a great book for any one interested in fine memoir, for anyone interested in this particular grace-filled and sometimes exasperating game. It’s a great book too for those who are interested in the American Urban experience at a certain time and place, of those are comfortable with wounded and wounding families. Finally, it’s a great book for readers who are willing to listen to the lessons of the human body as it soars, dips, dares great things and then sputters, breaks and falls into middle or old age still cursing the dying of the light.
March 13, 2019
This book leaves a lot to be desired.
I'm willing to concede that it could just be me, because this is not the first memoir I've read and didn't like. However, for a book whose title implies that it is going to be about basketball, only about 25% of the book is actually about basketball. Or, maybe more accurately, the chapter starts talking about basketball, but then wanders so far off from the initial topic that you forget that it was even talking about basketball in the first place.
Wideman's description and writing are good - I do believe he is a good writer. It's just that this book is so disorganized and jumps all over the place and maybe errs on the side of over-describing that anything good gets easily lost, because by the end of the chapter, you can't remember where the chapter started or what it was even about because so much gets crammed into it that you can't absorb it all. Plus, like I said, you think it's going to be about basketball but most of the time it really isn't.
I also will say I admire Wideman's honesty and vulnerability in writing this - he leaves nothing out. But the thing of it is, I think in parts it errs on the side of imprudent sharing. There are things in there he is brutally honest about that the reader did not need to know and didn't really add anything to the story.
Overall, I would not read this book again and would not recommend that anyone read this book. I think it has some potential, but as it stands currently, it was a painful and difficult book to read, and not the good kind of pain or difficulty.
I'm willing to concede that it could just be me, because this is not the first memoir I've read and didn't like. However, for a book whose title implies that it is going to be about basketball, only about 25% of the book is actually about basketball. Or, maybe more accurately, the chapter starts talking about basketball, but then wanders so far off from the initial topic that you forget that it was even talking about basketball in the first place.
Wideman's description and writing are good - I do believe he is a good writer. It's just that this book is so disorganized and jumps all over the place and maybe errs on the side of over-describing that anything good gets easily lost, because by the end of the chapter, you can't remember where the chapter started or what it was even about because so much gets crammed into it that you can't absorb it all. Plus, like I said, you think it's going to be about basketball but most of the time it really isn't.
I also will say I admire Wideman's honesty and vulnerability in writing this - he leaves nothing out. But the thing of it is, I think in parts it errs on the side of imprudent sharing. There are things in there he is brutally honest about that the reader did not need to know and didn't really add anything to the story.
Overall, I would not read this book again and would not recommend that anyone read this book. I think it has some potential, but as it stands currently, it was a painful and difficult book to read, and not the good kind of pain or difficulty.
June 26, 2016
At the beginning of the memoir, John Edgar Wideman is finally succumbing to the idea that his body is too worn out to play basketball anymore. Instead of playing, has written a series of memoir-essays on playground basketball, especially his childhood self playing in Homewood, a black, lower class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Wideman's prose is observant, lush, and self-aware, and his loving attention to the details of playground basketball launches into deeply insightful essays on black culture, class, masculinity, racism, and love in America. His willingness to write the truth, even when the truth is unflattering or painful, make it a hard-hitting memoir.
(I hate sports, and I not only enjoyed this book, I spent a lot of time wondering where my closest basketball court is...)
(I hate sports, and I not only enjoyed this book, I spent a lot of time wondering where my closest basketball court is...)
March 6, 2019
Read for Battle of the Books.
I really wanted to like this book. I tried, but I’m not a fan of what I call “stream of consciousness” writing. And that’s what this is. While main topics like the author’s love of basketball, and his grandmother’s death are recurring, there is no clear story line. The book is, essentially, page after page of feelings and concepts that are strung together in no apparent order.
I really wanted to like this book. I tried, but I’m not a fan of what I call “stream of consciousness” writing. And that’s what this is. While main topics like the author’s love of basketball, and his grandmother’s death are recurring, there is no clear story line. The book is, essentially, page after page of feelings and concepts that are strung together in no apparent order.
December 5, 2022
John Edgar Wideman weaves themes of basketball, racism, and family beautifully in his memoir. At times I felt like I was reading poetry. I loved the stories about his home court. This book is about one man but also a broader commentary on race.
August 20, 2018
per B. Kingsolver recommendation: NO dialogue; vaguely ab. basketball in the early days on a poor man’s court. Not my cup of tea but finished, 2001 hardback via Berea Library, 224 pgs.
July 12, 2022
Mostly a slog with a few good moments/ sections
September 2, 2016
Wideman sees the game of pickup basketball as a metaphor for the challenges, successes and failures of life, as an escape from the poverty and oppression of poor, black neighborhoods, and as a kind of meditative practice of finding the flow, living in the moment. "If urban blight indeed a movable famine, playground ball the city's movable feast. Thesis and antithesis. Blight a sign of material decay, ball a sign of spiritual health rising from the rubble. One embodying apartheid, denial, and exclusion, the other in-your-face, finding, jacking what it needs to energize an independent space." Wideman sees playground basketball as a kind of folk art, loosely linked to improvisational jazz and the dances the slaves brought from Africa. Readers looking for a book on commercial NBA basketball will be disappointed. Wideman decries the commercialization of play. Readers looking for a personal memoir on the power of sport to transform a life will be rewarded.
Wideman uses writing as a tool to examine his own life. The writing is strongly personal, laying open private experiences and emotions, his relationships with people in his past, long gone but still vividly alive in memory. He directly addresses the reader as he shifts across different points of views: from dispassionate narrator to stream of consciousness to meta-analysis of the writing process to reflections on the fluidity of memory. This book is Wideman's goodbye to playground hoops, at least as a player. Readers who, like me, are also adjusting to the realities of growing older, may appreciate Wideman's willingness to share his life experiences.
Wideman uses writing as a tool to examine his own life. The writing is strongly personal, laying open private experiences and emotions, his relationships with people in his past, long gone but still vividly alive in memory. He directly addresses the reader as he shifts across different points of views: from dispassionate narrator to stream of consciousness to meta-analysis of the writing process to reflections on the fluidity of memory. This book is Wideman's goodbye to playground hoops, at least as a player. Readers who, like me, are also adjusting to the realities of growing older, may appreciate Wideman's willingness to share his life experiences.
March 7, 2016
Whatever John Wideman writes is pure poetry. I find myself smiling about how his words resonate in my mind without my even realizing it. Just that it is a total joy to read him. I first heard of him when his book Brothers and Keepers had come out to a lot of critical acclaim, but I have kept up with him and enjoy ALL his writing always. Right now I'm reading "hoop roots" (his title has no upper case)and I have to say I love every page. He can convince me of anything, I'm happy to say.
November 23, 2016
Memoir. Meditation on race. On loss. On love. A feint. A pump fake. A crossover dribble. But, unfortunately, (mostly) not a book about playground basketball. Except in a few wondrous passages, fails to capture or convey the rapture, passion and meaning of playing the greatest game every played.
January 10, 2008
As a former school yard basketball player and a long time fan of John Wideman (the player and writer) this is a must read for me. Race and sports and their relationship to each other are well captured in Wideman's meticulous prose.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews