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THE ASSIST

Name: THE ASSIST
Author: Neil Swidey
ISBN: 978-1-58648-469-9

HOOPS, HOPE, AND THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES

by Neil Swidey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2008

A noble debut with its heart in the right place, but lacking the substance of its spiritual cousin, Hoop Dreams.

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Friday Night Lights meets Boyz n the Hood on the mean streets of Boston.

Obsessive basketball coach Jack O’Brien was a beloved mainstay at Charlestown High School, leading its team to multiple championships. What made his accomplishments so impressive was the fact that his team was comprised of young men from the projects who were bussed into school. During the 2004-05 season documented here, Charlestown was led by Jason “Hood” White, a cornrowed guard who, when he was three, was run over and almost killed by a crackhead on her way to get a fix. As important as it was for O’Brien to take another title, it was just as vital that his players get into college or, at the very least, survive the streets. If that meant helping Hood navigate his way through the Massachusetts court system, so be it. Award-winning Boston Globe Magazine staff writer Swidey comes from a hard-news background, which proves a double-edged sword in executing this hoops-in-the-hood book. His straight journalistic chops infuse the legal proceedings and the player profiles with a higher-than-expected level of gravitas, but his depictions of the games are less than gripping. Since basketball was the primary raison d’être for O’Brien and his brood, the lack of fire in the sports reporting diminishes its significance. (Swidey could take some lessons in suspense from Jack McCallum’s Seven Seconds or Less, 2006.) Perhaps the author seeks to emphasize that basketball should enhance people’s lives, not overwhelm them—a fair sentiment, but it doesn’t make for the kind of book that will resonate beyond a niche audience.

A noble debut with its heart in the right place, but lacking the substance of its spiritual cousin, Hoop Dreams.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-58648-469-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007

Categories:

EDUCATION | SPORTS & RECREATION

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DREAMS OF GLORY

A MOTHER'S SEASON WITH HER SON'S HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL TEAM

by Judy Oppenheimer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1991

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A new convert to the game of football, Oppenheimer (Private Demons, 1988) decided to observe, record, and analyze the daily activity of her son's 1988 Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School team. Like the team's season, the results are mixed. Toby, senior offensive lineman in only his second year, didn't like the idea: ``What seventeen-year-old wants his mother hanging around a locker room?'' The BCC Barons and head coach Pete White, meanwhile, felt there was reason for optimism despite going 5-5 in 1987, their best record in years. ``Win 8 in '88 and go to state!'' was the battle cry. The talent at this ethnically diverse, affluent suburban school included a 300-lb. center, a 5'-6'' Korean linebacker, a swift Jamaican running back, and an assortment of blacks, Asians, and white kids more inclined toward soccer. It wasn't always a comfortable mix. As Oppenheimer follows their progress, she scrutinizes their attitudes toward one another and the coaches, toward winning and losing, their sex lives, and their use of drugs and alcohol. Fighting off her own anxieties—``Zen and the art of football parenting''—about her son, she rarely inserts herself in the picture but allows the boys to speak in their own, often inarticulate, tiresome way: But I'm, like, okay, so I go, and he goes.... There's a disappointing opening game; a racist coach (``black kids...were more arrogant, tougher, meaner''); a bitter, injury-rife, one-point loss to rival Einstein; the boys' cockiness following the homecoming victory; and, finally, the season-ending trouncing at the hands of ``mammoth, untouchable, abandon-all-hope'' Gaithersburg. The annual banquet, despite the 4-6 record, would toast individual achievements and look toward next year. At times self-conscious and shrill (the locker room, ``a place for the ancient rites of grabass'') and at other times perceptive, but Oppenheimer never quite puts it all together. Rather like missing the point after.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-671-68754-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991

Categories:

SPORTS & RECREATION

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THE GRASS OF ANOTHER COUNTRY

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORLD OF SOCCER

by Christopher Merrill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 1993

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An engaging journey through, as poet Merrill puts it, ``the enchanted lands of soccer.'' When, in 1990, the US team qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years, Merrill (an avid amateur soccer player) followed the team through preliminary games stateside and then to Italy for the month-long tournament. The Americans were 500-1 underdogs, given little chance to do more than make a brave showing, especially with Bob Gansler at the helm, a coach so conservative and defense-oriented that his own players had sworn to scrap his game plan. In the opening game, Merrill says, Czechoslovakia ``outclassed'' the US in ``skill, speed, strength, tactics, and creativity,'' but in the second game—largely through the play of New Jersey goalie Tony Meola—the Americans scored a moral victory against heavily favored Italy, to whom they lost by only one goal. The third game, though, against Austria, was an ugly loss marred by ineptness and fighting. As Merrill progresses through the World Cup play (finally won by West Germany in a brutal match against defending champion Argentina, signaling the imminent downfall of superstar player Diego Maradona, whose drug and prostitution connections would bring him to disgrace and banishment), he offers lovely and knowing passages on the art, architecture, and ambience of Italy's cities and provides deep historical background and understanding of the game of soccer itself. Of particular interest are his insights into why ``the world's most popular game'' has never caught on in sports-mad America. The rarity of goals, Merrill contends, has ``doomed'' soccer in a country ``hooked on instant gratification'': Americans want to see lots of scoring but, ``like poetry and jazz, soccer is a subtle art, a game of nuance.'' An intelligent and literate work that could broaden American interest in soccer in time for our 1994 hosting—for the first time ever—of the World Cup.