A Season on the Reservation: My Soujourn With the White Mountain Apaches [Hardcover]

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Author), Stephen Singular (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2000

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has always been fascinated by history-nineteenth-century American history in particular. Tired of L.A., restless and looking for new adventure, challenge, and discovery, he decides to go live among the Apaches he's read about.

He encounters a complex reality. The kids on the Alchesay Falcons team don't easily embrace what he's trying to teach them on the court. Gradually they begin to learn from him as he begins to learn from them. He teaches them to push out of their comfort zone and try new things, both in sports and in life. They give him something he didn't quite expect: a way to reconnect with his passion for basketball.

This is a story about the qualities we have in common and the things that still divide us in terms of race, culture, and history. Along the way, we get to know the kids, the coaches, the town of Whiteriver and Alchesay High, the tribe-but most of all, we get closer to Kareem, a man well into middle age who wants to pass along his knowledge and experience in basketball and life. Kareem gives something back, and in so doing receives more than he ever imagined.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nearly a decade after leaving professional basketball, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar decided to return to the sport he loved by becoming the assistant coach of the Alchesay Falcons--a high school team composed mostly of White Mountain Apaches. But in A Season on the Reservation, he may have actually learned more than he taught.

An outsider at the beginning, Abdul-Jabbar found ways to learn more about his athletes and the tribe. He discovered cultural traditions that made it difficult to coach the team (discomfort at being singled out for criticism, for example) and became more sensitive to the special challenges faced by young Native Americans. As Abdul-Jabbar notes, by working with the students he moved from a historical appreciation for the White Mountain Apaches as a people to an understanding of them as individuals. That said, Abdul-Jabbar can't quite seem to shake his romantic image of the young Apaches: "Sometimes I would glance his way and imagine him sitting astride a paint pony two hundred years earlier, ready to ride off into the mountains and hunt."

Through his players, Abdul-Jabbar finds himself getting caught up in the competition--his passion for basketball obviously rekindled. Readers may find the end of the Falcons' season rather abrupt, but perhaps that's the nature of high school sports. They also may be a bit put off by Abdul-Jabbar's occasional arrogance, especially when talking about his professional days ("The 1985 Lakers would have taken [Jordan's Bulls] in a championship series.") or when dissing later NBA stars such as Shaq ("He's publicly referred to the way I used to play as 'old man's basketball,' which it may have been, but it earned me six more rings than he's got so far."). Overall, however, A Season on the Reservation is infused with an obvious love of the White Mountain Apaches, their land, and the sport of basketball. --Sunny Delaney

From Publishers Weekly

More contemplative than action-packed, this is the account of a season Kareem spent working with the Alchesay Falcons, a high school basketball team on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Whiteriver, Ariz. Guiding the young men to the state tournament, Kareem reflects upon his own life and on the state of the game, as well as upon present-day professional players and aspiring youth ("Athletes need to stay in school until they have graduated from college"). Throughout the account, he explains basketball moves, but his focus is on more abstract matters, like his philosophy of teaching. The games themselves are straightforwardly recounted but lack dramatic punch, mainly because the season ends with a loss. But drama for Kareem lies elsewhere--in his learning about the social, cultural and economic hardships faced by the boys, who live in one of the poorest counties in the nation, and in the boys learning to push beyond the comfort zone of their community. As he has demonstrated in his previous books (Giant Steps; Black Profiles in Courage), Kareem has a passion for history, which he shares when, as part of his effort to motivate the team, he relates elements of the Native American past and attempts to link it to African-American history. At the end of the season, Kareem leaves with a feeling of having found a second home. TV and radio satellite tours.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 209 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688170773
• ISBN-13: 978-0688170776
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #623,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A decent read, March 18, 2000

By 

Jon Eric Davidson (Redmond, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Season on the Reservation: My Soujourn With the White Mountain Apaches (Hardcover)

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has proven to be not only a great athlete, but a very intelligent and thoughtful writer. His book "Black Profiles In Courage" is outstanding. This book, while not in the same genre as "Black Profiles...", doesn't quite meet up to expectations, even though in its own right, it is a good read.

The story of Abdul-Jabbar going to the White Mountain Apache reservation to be an assistant high school basketball coach was truly one of the more compelling sports stories of the last several years. It was only fitting that with all the media attention that followed, he should write an account from his perspective.

However, in the attempt to document his experience, I think Abdul-Jabbar got caught in a literary crossroads of sorts. It seemed to me that he couldn't quite decide whether this was to be a social-historical book about the Apache as a whole, or a work about the sport end of it. In places, he managed to weave the two perspectives well, because some of his coaching experiences did indeed warrant historical perspective. However, in other places, the historical and social background seemed more of a disjointed distraction from the central theme of the book.

While the specific theme of his coaching experience made for a good read, it seemed that he could have fleshed it out some more. I would have liked to see more description of his work with the big men he kept referring to as vital pieces of the team. I would have also liked to have seen some more of what he contributed to the team as far as philosophies and coaching. Instead, he only highlighted about a half-dozen games, and kept repeating some of the same things over and over. Granted, coaching is a repetitive activity, and many things could have been repeated in a more detailed work. But, what we got seemed to be more like another story by a reporter who had only seen a handful of games rather than an assistant coach who had been with the team the whole season.

This is a good read, adequate for addressing some of his experiences on the reservation. However, I don't think it warrants more than three stars because more could have been done with the book. I would hope that at some point, Abdul-Jabbar would write a deeper social-historical book on the Apache people, because it seems that was his ultimate motive here.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Story, December 28, 2004

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Season on the Reservation (Audio Cassette)

This book is a record of Abdul-Jabbar's first season as a basketball coach. When Abdul-Jabbar's mother died, he became quite distraught and didn't know what to do with himself. One of his friends at the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona invited him to come to the reservation to try out coaching by working with the high school basketball team on the reservation for a season. Abdul-Jabbar found the invitation attractive for a number of reasons, and decided to give it a go. Once on the reservation, he had to learn not only how to coach rather than play basketball, but he also found himself trying to lead teenagers who weren't always looking for his directions, all while operating in an unfamiliar culture.

After reading the first chapter of the book, I stopped to re-examine the title and cover page to find out who the ghost writer was. After all, most books by sports figures are "told to" rather than written, especially books whose prose flows as well as this one. I was surprised to find that this volume had no ghost writer listed at all. As I read further along in the book, the reason became clear-unlike many other sports figures, Abdul-Jabbar has a number of academic interests and writes quite well. In reading this book, one finds that Abdul-Jabbar is a thinker, a person who brings his analytical skills to problems and new situations. He tries hard to get kids to appreciate the mental aspects of playing basketball. He is quick to pick up on the cultural characteristics that make the Apache kids react differently than other kids in mainstream America. He is occasionally carried away with emotion at games, but afterwards analyzes his inappropriate actions and chalks them up to lessons learned about coaching. Abdul-Jabbar explains how he happened to make a connection with the reservation, describes the kids on the team and the other coaches, and recounts hoop-by-hoop stories of several key games. In a few places, the tale bogs down a little in detail, but overall, it's well written and very enjoyable to read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, thoughtful book, August 4, 2000

By 

J. Ball (LA, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Season on the Reservation: My Soujourn With the White Mountain Apaches (Hardcover)

Kareem tries to impart the difficulties of introducing a western cultural ideal to a group of young men that are trying to keep their own cultural ideals intact while at the same time competing within the majority culture. This book reflects Kareem's own difficulties in aculturation, and his conflicts in trying to impart his basketball culture on another group. This is a thoughtful though imperfect work, less about basketball than about the difficulties of blending different people in the world today.