Mar 9, 2005
All That Hoopla
New Book Tells All About B-Ball In Hoosier Nation
Indiana is not famous for cranking out cultural luminaries, though the ones it has sired are as random as anything an iPod might spew. In politics, there's native socialist son Eugene Debs and, uh, duh, Dan Quayle. In music it's John Mellencamp and the Jackson Family Empire. In letters, Ernie Pyle and Kurt Vonnegut. As for sports, well, there's basketball and there's basketball.
In Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip Hop, (Putnam, New York) L. Jon Wertheim (Sports Illustrated) claims the significance of hoops in Hoosier land is nearly impossible to overstate. It's no accident, he writes, that nine of the 10 largest high school gyms in America are in Indiana. This is a place where it is culturally acceptable for grandmothers to snatch up the discarded water cups of teenage players as souvenirs.
Transition Game is marketed as a "season in the life of" an Indiana high school team. As such it's been likened to H.G. Bissinger's enduring classic Friday Night Lights, which exposed the cult of high school football in West Texas (and was disgraced in a recent film adaptation.) While it's less epic than Bissinger's opus, Transition Game is a compulsively readable book that's somewhere between a series of profiles and a b-ball travelogue spiced up with polemical garnishing. (For instance, there's a delightfully rational defense of high school players bypassing college for the NBA.)
Unfortunately, the team Wertheim chooses to follow, his alma mater of Bloomington North High School, is not that interesting. Their season goes well, but not spectacularly so. More significantly, there's no tension between players, coaches or the school's predominantly middle class college community. In short, there's nothing to transform this story into something larger than zone defense and free throws.
Fortunately, Wertheim doesn't try to manufacture what's not there. Thus we're left with reporting that's not dull, but not compelling. The team's coach Tom McKinney is the sort of stolid Midwesterner who speaks in the nauseating patois of jock shibboleth: "Don't embarrass the program." "Do a few things, but do them well." The players are ordinary kids; none are virtuosos. They play ball, listen to hip hop and eat fast food. Their biggest win of the season is celebrated with a Playstation2 sleepover party. Oh, the depravity!
But all is not well in Hoosier Nation. Indiana has seen the enemy, and its name is "class basketball." If the high school game is the manna of hoopsmania, then the state tournament is the World Series, the Oscars, and the state fair rolled into one. Since 1998, Indiana's high school athletic association has stratified teams into "classes" based on size [Georgia, too]. Instead of a single team holding a definitive championship title, four teams do.
"Affirmative action on the hardwood," Wertheim calls it. Only the racial politics are reversed. According to many Hoosierati, the switch to "class" ball is, at least in part, rooted in lily white teams' inability to deal with being served by more, ahem, diverse teams. Having talked to coaches, players and b-ball junkies statewide, Wertheim concludes that the issue is not really controversial: everyone hates the class system except the board that instituted it. As that body is an unelected assemblage of school principals, resentment simmers.
The foibles of Bloomington North's 2003—04 season are no more than narrative fuel, but that's okay because Wertheim understands that even though Indiana lays claim to the sports' grass roots, basketball can't be discussed within the borders of a single state, or even hemisphere. With high schools increasingly serving as an NBA farm league, not to mention the rise of the WNBA, basketball's borders are in a state of flux.
Wertheim has a knack for summarizing points anecdotally. After barraging us with stats on how the NBA is as global as Starbucks (more than half its website hits come from outside the United State; of the 58 players in the 2003 draft, 20 were from overseas), he hammers home the point by recounting the story of a young boy in Beijing, who asks if he can practice his English. After mentioning that he's from Indiana, the boy shouts, "I rike Reggie Miller!"
Transition Game won't convince you that basketball has really gone hip hop, at least not in a way that can earn props from 50 Cent or Eminem. The crowds at NBA games are too full of investment bankers to claim any sort of street credibility. If anything, Wertheim furthers the idea that basketball is now a global commodity. It's a notion that might take some getting used to in Hoosier Nation and beyond. As the author deftly asks: Will a culture that prices a Lebron James jersey at $120 be willing to pay as much for names like "Milicic" or "Tskitishvili?"
We can only wait and see.
John Dicker
John Dicker is a writer based in Denver.
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