5 Basketball Reads for March Madness

When My Brother Was An Aztec, by Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz, who grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, is currently excelling in her second career as an award-winning poet. Her first job? She was a basketball player, helping the Old Dominion Lady Monarchs reach the NCAA championship in 1997 when she was freshman point guard, and leading them to the Sweet Sixteen for the next three years. After that, she turned pro, playing roundball in Asia and Europe before reinventing herself as a writer. In her moving and intense PEN/Open Book Award–winning debut poetry collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, she writes about “this sun-ruined basketball I haul—rotted gray along the seams—perpetual missed shot.” In “Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball,” she writes, “When Indian ballers sweat, we emit a perfume of tortillas/and Pine Sol floor cleaner that works like a potion/to disorient our opponents and make them forget their plays.” I don’t know about you, but after reading that passage I’ve already forgotten any play I was even considering.

American Masculine, by Shann Ray
Shann Ray is another great hoopster turned writer who played in the NCAA for Pepperdine and professionally in Germany. Basketball appears several times in his lyrical American Book Award–winning story collection American Masculine, perhaps most beautifully in “When We Rise.” Two middle-aged brothers, grieving over the loss of a third brother, challenge each other to a game in which they try to sink the first shot through snow-covered basketball hoops in Montana. One of them thinks, “A sweet jumper finds the mark, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy.”

Bad Haircut: Stories from the Seventies, by Tom Perrotta
There must be something about snow-covered basketball hoops that fuels the creative impulse, because in Bad Haircut, Tom Perrotta’s story collection about a boy growing up in New Jersey during the ’70s and ’80s, the story “Snowman” features two ninth graders who set out to play basketball “outside in 20-degree weather, just two days after the biggest snowstorm of the year.” The narrator’s friend Neil Duffy insists they play in the cold because he wants to provide color commentary material for the future TV announcer covering his hoped-for basketball glory: “You know how bad Duffy wanted it? Duffy wanted it so bad he used to go out after blizzards, shovel off the court, and practice until his fingers froze. Then he’d go home, drink a cup of hot cocoa, and head back for more. Now that’s dedication, Marv.”

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, by Sherman Alexie
Basketball and snow make for good literature, but so do basketball and donkeys. Basketball is a source of strength, connection, and comedy in many of Sherman Alexie’s books, including Ten Little Indians, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and 2012’s Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, in which “Basic Training” tells the tale of a donkey basketball league, a post–World War II amusement that “helped high schools raise money for new football uniforms or new trumpets for the band or typewriters for the business classes.” What is donkey basketball, you ask? It’s basketball played by people riding donkeys around the court. Any mess left by the animal athletes is all part of the fun, of course.

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
If donkeys can play basketball, then why not rabbits? This is how Harry Angstrom, former high school basketball player protagonist of John Updike’s Rabbit books, is indelibly introduced in 1960’s Rabbit, Run:
“Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.”