My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball

by Dave Kindred

Overview

In this poignant memoir, a legendary sports journalist writes about the team that changed his life: the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team.

Dave Kindred has covered dozens of Super Bowls and written about stars like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. But a high-school girls basketball team—the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois—stands apart from the rest.

In this moving and intimate story, Kindred writes about his rise to professional success and the changes that brought him back to his hometown late in life. As he dealt with personal hardship, his urge to write sustained him. For years, he has recapped the games of the Lady Potters, including their many runs to state championships. He attended game after game, sitting in the stands and making notes, paid nothing but Milk Duds. And the team and their community were there for him as he lost a grandson to addiction and his wife to long-term illness. 

Tender and honest, Kindred’s story reminds readers what sports are really about. He trades in the exhausting spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday for the joy of togetherness, the fire of competition, and the inexhaustible hope for victory tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541702226
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	821,376
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Dave Kindred has been a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National Sports Daily, Sporting News, and Golf Digest. Kindred is the author of several books including Heroes, Fools and Other Dreamers: A Sportswriter's Gallery of Extraordinary People, Around the World in 18 Holes, Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post The Fight to Keep a Great Newspaper Alive, and Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship.

Kindred is one of only two writers who have earned sportswriting's three highest honors: the Red Smith Award, the PEN America ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He also has won the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's Curt Gowdy Award (for outstanding media contributions) as well as a National Headliner award for general-interest columns. He is a member of The National Sports Media Hall of Fame. He lives in Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

Revered sports journalist Kindred…shares his own story, from his roots in Illinois to stints at newspapers like the Washington Post to a return to his hometown, where he enthusiastically and generously volunteers to cover the Morton High School women's basketball team, the Lady Potters, a commitment that brings him joy and carries him through difficult times. Admirably, Kindred avoids self-pity whether he's writing about personal losses or professional setbacks. Instead, he cites the inspiration of other legends, like earlier sportswriter Red Smith, and the camaraderie among contemporary sportswriters.” —Booklist, starred review

“What must the 16-year-old point guard have thought as this bespectacled septuagenarian doddered down to speak to her after the game, asking her about that pick-and-roll she ran in the third quarter as if he were interviewing Muhammad Ali after a championship fight? How could she have guessed that he had in fact done that very thing in his life . . . but now felt that this game, that she, was more important? One of the many wonders of the sportswriter Dave Kindred’s memoir My Home Team: A Sportswriter’s Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball, is that by the end of the book, not only will that girl understand exactly why her game is more important, but so will the person holding the book.”
 —Wall Street Journal

“An iconic American sportswriter returns to his Midwest roots and finds his greatest story…An enjoyable, poignant, meaningful memoir.” —Kirkus

“For those of us who followed his career as a columnist and reporter, this book brings back memories of some of his most memorable stories, interviews and experiences… It provides great insights into the life of a sportswriter at all levels and the trials and tribulations of family life and aging in a changing world.”—Eric Sondheimer, The Los Angeles Times

Dave Kindred told me not to read this book. I ignored him and so should you. Gorgeous and searing, My Home Team is the story of a big time sports columnist, the envy of every American male: the guy sitting at the 50-yard line of every Super Bowl. The guy invited under the covers by Muhammad Ali. The guy, of course, is Kindred, who having seen it all, and written it all better than anyone could, grew tired of it all, and took his high school sweet heart home to the heartland where life turned as cruel as the rural Illinois winter. When loss piles upon loss, Kindred finds a new story and a new love in a girl’s basketball team that saves his life—Jane Leavy, New York Times-bestselling author of The Big Fella

Dave Kindred has been a hero and a mentor of mine for more than 40 years. He can write funny or sad or smart. He does all of the above in My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small Town Girls Basketball. This is a brilliant example of why Dave is Dave and why anything he writes is superbly done. You will laugh, will cry and you will be very glad you took the time to read this book.—John Feinstein, author of Feherty

Spectacular.—Joe Posnanski, bestselling author of The Baseball 100

From the Publisher

Longtime sportswriter Dave Kindred narrates his memoir, which canvases his 80-plus years--from growing up and covering sports in a variety of places to retiring in the plains country of Illinois. His retirement "job" is covering a high school girls basketball team. When Kindred's wife becomes ill, covering the team becomes a catharsis. His voice and words suggest sweetness, sadness, and a gentle manner, which are appropriate as he details his wife's illness and their love story. A polished narrator could have done this, but Kindred knows how to beautifully string along sentences, and his inflections are genuine. By the time the listener finishes this audiobook, it's tough to imagine anyone else narrating this wonderful story of a life well lived. M.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2024 - AudioFile

2023-06-02
An iconic American sportswriter returns to his Midwest roots and finds his greatest story.

How did a much-decorated sports columnist and author who chronicled some of the most epic athletic events since the 1960s end up writing for a high school girls' basketball team's website in exchange for Milk Duds? In this fast-paced, endearing memoir written in three acts, Kindred chronicles a circuitous route to his hometown and what could be his most important and personally meaningful subject: the dominant Morton High School Lady Potters hoops squad. The author, who wrote nationally recognized sports columns for publications such as the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Golf Digest, recounts his idyllic upbringing, the rapid changes in the newspaper business during his career, juggling work and family, and his success in emulating his sportswriting heroes and gurus, particularly Red Smith. Kindred has an elephantine memory and sharp eye for detail, talents that distinguished his columns and add flavor to his descriptions of his unique relationship with Muhammad Ali; his coverage of the 1996 Olympic Park bombing (and beating a libel suit by exonerated suspect Richard Jewell); and a panoply of Super Bowls, Kentucky Derbys, and Masters tournaments. Kindred often zigzags in and out of his memories of events and all involved; this may be dizzying for some, but a completely chronological recitation would be ill-suited to this book. The narrative is also an ode to his wife, Cheryl, his high school sweetheart and all-everything partner, whose health problems precipitated their move back home once Kindred left full-time work. The author writes candidly of personal heartache, loss, and the solace that the no-frills, community-oriented world of small-town high school athletics brings. His profiles of the Lady Potters and what the team meant to him during difficult days are every bit as compelling—if not more so—as the famous athletes he covered in thousands of columns. "When the wages are Milk Duds,” he writes, “it's everything else that matters."

An enjoyable, poignant, meaningful memoir.

Kirkus Reviews