A Basketball Poem

BASKETBALL'S DREAMY MARRIAGE WITH literature returns as a theme to The Weekly Rader. Last time, it was the Tournament of Books with its Final Four-March-Madness-Head- to-Head seeding of books and writers.

Today, though, in honor of the NBA playoffs, we're going simple. Just a regular poem by a regular guy, Sherman Alexie, who sent ESPN's Henry Abbot a poem Alexie wrote about playing pickup basketball with former NBA forward James Bailey.

Face
Let me sing an honor song for James Bailey,
A pro hoopster who is mostly forgotten,
But for me will always be contemporary.
Nearly seven feet tall, clad in white cotton

And new hightops, he once rose and blocked my shot
Off the court and down the pavement walkway,
Bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, and rolling on a hot
August day until it splashed into Green Lake,

Maybe seventy-five yards away from the court.
That spectacular play shut down the game.
After that humiliation, who can keep score?
One guy asked me, "What's your name? What's your name?"

Because he wanted to get all the details
"Correct." Two other brothers just ran away
And never returned. I supposed I failed
In some basketball sense, by thinking my lame

Spin move running jumper could ever succeed
Against a player like Bailey. But I had game
In those days. Skinny and mean, I could compete
On any court. Or so I thought. How strange

To know, now that I'm old and broken, how young
And foolish I used to be. James Bailey
Was only a decent pro, but I was a runt
In his presence. I'm still a serf, puny

And contrite: "Mr. Bailey, I'm so sorry
I tried to sneak that garbage into your house.
But, damn, that block of yours was so pretty,
Epic, and canonized by the adoring crowd,

That my embarrassment felt like a blessing,
Like a parable teaching me this lesson:
When we hoopsters look into our interiors,
We learn we can be gorgeous and inferior."

Not enough people write about the poetry of basketball, especially the blue-collar workaday poetry of pickup basketball in which so much of what happens is, like a poem, a kind of groping for elegance and beauty. Most who write are, like Bailey in the NBA, competent, decent. What I like about Alexie's poem is his ability to find beauty in that which is not-stellar.

March Madness . . .for Books?

THE NCAA COLLEGE BASKETBALL tournament is my favorite sporting event of the year, and to me, the most democratic, the most American of the high-profile sports pageants. Imagine my joy when I discovered two of my great loves now love each other!

That's right; the good folks at The Morning News have finally brought brackets to books:

It's a great idea, and I'm very sad The Weekly Rader didn't think of it first, though we may launch something similar in the near future.

The brackets get everything right from the drama of head-to-head competition to the seedings. Just as in the actual tournament, there is potential controversy surrounding this year's seedings, but of the books that qualified for tournament play, there is no doubt that Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is the book to beat. However, fans will be pulling hard for Junot Diaz's widely reviewed and soundly loved first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

This year, the actual NCAA selection process came under fire when a few teams (Arizona State, Ohio State and others) with solid records and good wins were not invited to the Big Dance. Well, the Tournament of Books (which we may dub "The Big Read," but we're not sold on that moniker) has that feature in spades. For instance, where is The Post-Birthday World? A Thousand Splendid Suns? Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union?

For me, the biggest omission was Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, which may have been the best novel of 2007; so I was looking forward to pulling for it against weaker rivals and overblown blockbusters. We wonder about the Tournament of Books' selection committee, but we praise the committee for giving us even more to second-guess. It's what keeps us and Dick Vitale in business.

BOOKS TO WATCH
The first round is barely over, and already there is a big upset. The Savage Detectives (which was seeded too low) lost to the underdog Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, in what appears to have been a hard-fought scrap of a contest. However, the most shocking upset came when the upstart, Remainder, that even the most loyal fans had written off as a flash-in-the pan, toppled the UCLA of the book world, Ian McEwan and his foamy On Chesil Beach. The reverberations are still being felt throughout the book world. When asked for a comment outside a Border's, the sweaty, jubilant Remainder quipped, "We fought hard. We stuck to our plan. We just wanted to come out here and be a good read. All the credit in the world goes to Chesil. It's a great book. But, this is the best feeling in the world. I'm so glad Jesus loves us more."

THE PREDICTIONS
The best part of any bracket discussion is the predictions. Enough said.

The Weekly Rader will go out on a limb and pick its Final Four:

Tree of Smoke vs. You Don't Love Me Yet (winner, Tree of Smoke)
Oscar Wao vs. The Shadow Catcher (winner, Oscar Wao)

Though Wao brings the wow factor, in the end, I think Tree of Smoke's 2,500 pages edges out Wao in the stamina and girth departments. In the final, look for Tree of Smoke to emerge as the victor in the 2008 Tournament of Books, an accolade that should get it one of those special gold stickers for the book cover. I'll talk to the folks at TMN to see if that's in the works.

If your office pool has a special category for dark horse candidates, put your money on either Remainder or Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, both of which could make a push for the Final Four.

Until then, a special thanks to TMN and to Chris Haven at Grand Valley State University for the tip-off (that's a little basketball humor).