NOW I’VE SKIPPED OVER a lot of the basketball books, a lot of the sports books, partly because they so often rehearse the same old dorkball bootstrap capitalist Darwinist fantasies, they suck I’m saying, they are brutal I mean, so I’m actually nothing like an authority, let me never be, let’s get that out of the way. But as far as books about sport, I’ve never read anything even close to John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots, 1 published a hundred years after Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, which Wideman did on purpose to give us an idea of how serious he considers basketball to the soul of the nation. We must contend with hoop, he’s telling us.
It’s classic Wideman: storytelling, history, theory, analysis. Better than any writer I know, he articulates the fiction of race and the material conditions that fiction has wrought. Better than any writer I know—okay, Morrison, yup—he studies the murderous lie of race the way you might study someone’s game: dude always goes left, but he’s shifty in traffic, so heads up; also, he doesn’t miss open shots, so get a hand up, but stay on your goddamn feet because he’s good with his fakes, best I’ve ever seen, pump fake so crisp you don’t even know you’re going for it till you sail by and he’s stepped in for an easy fifteen-footer, and boom, you’re dead.
Wideman was a very good college player at Penn, and he stayed a bona fide baller decades beyond that, but you can tell he loves the game in a special way (à la DeBarge) by what he sees, which is not probably what you or I see, which I guess is testament both to love and vision, and by the words he chooses to say it with. By which I mean to say, though I love this game, I no sooner would’ve likened someone dribbling back and forth behind the back a few times to them toweling
