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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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