Hoop: A Basketball Life in Ninety-Five Essays

Brian Doyle

oct 2017 · University of Georgia Press

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Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?"

“‘Why don’t you write one?’ said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase."

And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

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BRIAN DOYLE (1956–2017) was the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of twenty books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, including Chicago, Martin Marten, The Plover, Children and Other Wild Animals, Mink River, and The Wet Engine. His other writings have appeared in Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, the New York Times, Harper’s, the American Scholar, and the Atlantic.