Inspired half-time readings of Thoreau, Emerson et al., carry an Ivy League basketball team to the NCAA playoffs.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
While he does add several interesting twists to the standard rags-to-riches sports novel, Lelchuk's (American Mischief) saga about a team of Ivy League basketball misfits that lands in the NCAA Final Four ultimately falls victim to a combination of florid rhetoric and a conceit that stretches credibility well beyond the breaking point. Sydney Berger, a desultory, 50-ish assistant coach and history professor at moribund Conway College in Vermont, takes the reins in midseason after the team's head coach bolts for a better job. Bucking the status quo, the new leader forms a fresh lineup that consists primarily of his own recruits, a collection of mismatched players whose ethnic diversity? they are black, Native American, white, Latino?makes them a veritable jump-shot melting pot. Berger's gamble raises the ire of his ivory tower colleagues, and his team takes a pounding in the early going. But the players come together, largely because of the coach's odd halftime pep talks, which draw freely from Emerson, Thoreau and other prominent literary and historical figures. As Conway cops the Ivy League crown and rolls into the postseason national tournament, Lelchuk presents several compelling versions of the many moral dilemmas faced by coaches and players. But there's a gee-whiz, feel-good shallowness to the characterizations of this minority-representative squad; and that simplicity undermines a reader's confidence in Berger's rambling soliloquies, which mix basketball theory, historical analysis and passages from literature. Instead of organic flow (justly celebrated in some of the basketball passages), we get a studied exercise in the universal applicability of Big Ideas, a well-told heartwarmer cooled by too much pseudo-purist dogma.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The sports novelist has a built-in problem; call it the Rocky syndrome, though it really goes back to Cinderella. Once an underdog sets foot in the ring or on the court, the action is predestined: the comeback, the championship game, the ultimate triumph, or occasionally, the defeat/moral victory. Lelchuk, author of Miriam at Thirty-Four (1974), can't change the pattern, but he manages to work some tantalizing variations on it. As Syd Berger, egghead basketball coach, takes his Ivy League misfits on their long march to the Final Four, quoting Emerson at halftime, we feel our resistance gathering. Remarkably, though, he wins us over just as convincingly as he converts his inner-city charges to the glories of the passing game and the wisdom of the Transcendentalists. Partly it's those terrific Emerson quotes, but mostly it's what happens on the court: Lelchuk pays such close attention to the architectonics of the game ("five young men on the floor in swift motion, held together by the basketball, dribbling, passing, shooting, and wired by a precise timing" ) that we're willing to suspend our disbelief as a quintet of unlikely Cinderellas try on their glass sneakers. Bill Ott
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