Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn [Hardcover]

Larry Colton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

Counting Coup is the story of the girls basketball team of Hardin High School in Montana. Larry Colton shows readers the hardscrabble existence of a rural small town beset by racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence, and in so doing produces a touching, heartfelt, and beautifully written true story that will leave readers cheering for the girls they have come to know.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Colton arrived in Crow, Mont., ready to write a book about a season of boy's high school basketball in the Crow Indian community. But when he saw graceful Sharon Laforge shooting hoops, he was drawn to her athleticism and fascinated by the dichotomy between her on-court focus and her off-court distractedness. To get closer to Laforge, Colton tracks her senior year on the Lady Bulldogs, from the first practice through tournament play. He rides the team bus, assists at practice, wins a spot as an "honorary seventeen-year-old girl," and is eventually adopted into the tribe by Laforge's family. In Laforge, Colton finds a young woman in distress; as she attempts to fulfill her own and her family's hopes, she struggles with the uglier legacies of her community: alcoholism, domestic abuse, abandonment, shortsighted tribal politics, fierce racism and misogyny. In search of a happy ending, Colton follows as Laforge sticks it out with her abusive boyfriend, raises two boys and struggles toward her high school and college degrees. To his credit, Colton effectively employs his position as an outsider to explore the group's culture, and his long-term perspective allows him to convey the drive Laforge needs to survive. However, by centering his focus on one person, he misses opportunities to reflect on larger questions. (In particular, he seems unaware of Ian Frazier's writing about Sharon Big Crow, a basketball star and hopeful who juggled similar pressures on a Lakota reservation in South Dakota.) Nonetheless, Colton's love of basketball and caring insights deliver a sad but ultimately hopeful sort of Hoop Dreams, complete with the struggle for maturity, a community's collective dream and the athletic grace that can momentarily hold the world at bay. Author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

On many Indian reservations, high-school basketball has become a popular venue for expressing the pride of Native Americans. Yet for all the promise these young Indian athletes exhibit, few are able to overcome the negative forces--poverty, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, poor education--that surround them. Colton, a former professional baseball player and veteran author, spent 15 months on the Crow reservation in Montana observing the Hardin High School girls' basketball team. He focuses on the players--especially talented Sharon LaForge--and their relationships with their teammates and coaches, but he also explores the social conditions that affect the players' lives. Alcoholism is a reservation plague, but drug abuse, domestic violence, shoddy education, and low personal expectations also help prevent these children from ever reaching their potential, on and off the court. But Colton also finds joy, humor, and ethnic pride among the reservation populace. Similar in tone to Kareem Abdul Jabbar's recent A Season on the Reservation , Colton's book tells an inspirational story but one firmly grounded in reality. There are no Hoosier-like state championships and no soaring personal triumphs. Sharon LaForge doesn't get a college scholarship; she ends up pregnant, and she quits basketball. But she also enrolls in junior college and is doggedly pursuing her education despite long odds. On the rez, victories are not recorded in scorebooks or by sweeping social reform, but by proud people taking control of their lives inch by hard-fought inch. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 420 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books; First Edition edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446526835
• ISBN-13: 978-0446526838
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,924 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Basketball and life on the Little Big Horn, November 25, 2000

By 

Mary G. Longorio "Texasbookgirl" (Eagle Mountain, UT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn (Hardcover)

Larry Colton travels into Montana's Crow country in pursuit of a story of how young men on the reservation (the rez) are using basketball as a way to regain hope and honor. A chance sighting of a graceful and instinctive female player in a pickup game changes all that. After seeing Sharon LaForge, Colton switches the focus of his quest and becomes a shadow of the Hardin High Lady Bulldogs, in their quest to make it to the Montana high school championships. He is allowed unlmited access to the team, their practices, invited into some of their homes, tutored by some of the locals in the ways of the rez, and the delicate relationships between whites and Indians. This is a glimpse into a world I have not known much about. With unemployment, alcoholism, physical abuse as the norm, it is easy to see how a community can pin its hopes for redemption and validation on the slim shouldres of high school girls....and Sharon's family is expecting victory to redeem them from tragedy and scandal. Counting Coup is at its heart a great sports story, it reminded me of the documentary Hoop Dreams. It gives an honest and compassionate look at high school athletics, those who play, those who coach, those who watch and all those who pin their dreams on victory. It also is the story of a young girl trying to find her place in her world, and the dreams claimed and lost along the way.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cautionary Tale That Will Break Your Heart, September 12, 2000

By 

Lorraine Berry (Ithaca, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn (Hardcover)

This book is a multi-layered tale that will take you on a roller coaster of an emotional ride. If anyone is looking for evidence that racism continues to have a profound impact on the way that we relate to one another as human beings, look no further than this tremendous book.

Larry Colton spent 15 months with members of the Crow Indian tribe in Montana. He followed the fortunes of the Hardin High School girls' basketball team, a team comprising an almost equal number of white and Indian players. Despite the immense talent of Sharon LaForge, an Indian, it is clear that the deck is stacked against her being recruited to play Division I basketball. But, Colton makes clear that this is not a simple case of prejudice that prevents Sharon from succeeding, it is an environment where she is worshipped as the savior of her family and team on one hand, but constantly held to lower standards by the school. Not surprisingly, while she shines on the basketball court, off the court she's completely lost and unable to find her way.

Colton works hard to admit his own prejudices as a white person. He questions whether he is trying to impose Eurocentric standards on an independent, proud culture, but he also asks himself whether some of the beliefs of the Crow culture don't in the end defeat its people. They are tough questions, and really, there is no answer. There were times when I found Colton presumptuous, but I asked myself whether I wouldn't have wound up in the same position--he knows that there is another life outside of the reservation, a life where it is possible to become someone else. He comes to care deeply for Sharon and wants what he thinks is best for her, but what he feels would be best for her is to get her off the reservation and out into the rest of America. Who's to say if that is really the best choice for her? And, when she does make the choices that she makes, what are we, the readers, to make of them?

The fact that Sharon is never approached by a college coach is really quite unbelievable. The only conclusion that one can draw is that coaches are unable to take a chance on an Indian basketball player. Why?

This book will stay with me. It forced me to acknowledge that I know next to nothing about life on the reservation and nothing about what challenges face the women there.

The grinding poverty of the reservation also has a horrible effect on the relationships between men and women, and the horrifying aspect is that these young teenaged women are making the same poor choices that their mothers and grandmothers made before them.

Finally, this book should be required reading for any potential college athlete who doesn't understand the connection between academics and athletics. 'Nuff said.

This book would make a great selection of a book club. I find myself wanting to discuss this book with someone else who has read it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary book, September 30, 2000

By 

gary blackwood (Carthage, MO, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn (Hardcover)

Larry Colton tries hard to remain objective and detached in writing his account of life on the rez, and of Sharon LaForge's attempts to transcend it by excelling at basketball. He fails miserably in his attempt--getting caught up in Sharon's struggle, telling us about his own life, injecting his opinions about how the coach should be coaching--and the book is infinitely better for it. An objective, detached account would not have been nearly as effective and affecting. We really come to care about Sharon, as Colton did, and root for her, and are crushed when things don't work out in the heartwarming way we've come to expect from innumerable sports movies. You don't have to love basketball, or even like it particularly, to love this book. It's as well written and dramatic as the best of novels, but it's far more memorable than most novels because it's true.