The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League Author: Ed Breslin | Language: English | ISBN:
161321636X | Format: EPUB
The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League Description
Review
If John Feinstein set the standard in covering a college basketball campaign in his landmark A Season on the Brink . . . Breslin still animates the form with this account of Yale University’s 201112 team. . . . Breslin offers especially insightful and detailed breakdowns of the team’s practice sessions and vivid play-by-plays of each game. If Feinstein gives readers an unvarnished look at an NCAA powerhouse, Breslin shows how beautiful— even, yes, divine— the college game can be away from the national spotlight.”— Booklist
About the Author
Ed Breslin is a former editor and publisher who spent two decades in the book business. He is the author of Drinking with Miss Dutchie and America’s Great Railroad Stations, and coauthor of Sherman: The Ruthless Victor.
- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Sports Publishing (February 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 161321636X
- ISBN-13: 978-1613216361
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Have you played some basketball? Did you watch your kid or grandkid play ball? Did you play horse with your brother in the driveway? Do you coach a kids team? Or do you just love watching college basketball? If any of those apply, or if you really just want to read a good book about a man with a passion, get this book.
Ed Breslin heads out on quixotic venture to be an almost-coach of the Yale basketball team. The fact that he has never coached before, has spent years as a publisher and writer, and has no connection to Yale doesn't faze him. The man loves basketball and that love infuses his narrative. Soon enough, Breslin not only loves the game, but he also loves the coach, the team, the Ivy League--all the trappings of a wonderful, competitive, sport full of real scholar-athletes that he has fallen into.
Breslin is a graceful, revealing writer, generous with his insights about basketball, college sports, the people around him--and himself. Breslin learns much from the players and coaches, from the nights on the road, the highs that follow the wins and the troughs that follow defeats, and he shares all of it. Some of his opinions may surprise you--he is one of Bobby Knight's great defenders--and he views the Palestra as the most beautiful building in the world. But in a world full of writers who write safely, who do not want to say a damn thing that might upset the slightest apple on the applecart, Breslin tells of his passions, his successes, and failures with admirable clarity and elegance.
So sit on the bench with Breslin and you'll go on the roller-coaster that was a fine Yale season--the great comebacks, the injuries, the blow-outs, the exceptional coaching.
The Divine Nature of Basketball by Ed Breslin (Sports Publishing/Perseus, 2014, 224 pages, $24.95) contains Breslin's oh too detailed and lifeless account of his season spent following the Yale basketball team through the 2011 – 2012 basketball season. At the beginning of the book, Breslin is introduced to Yale at the John J. Lee Amphitheater of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium (the Yale gym, referred to throughout the book as JLA) where Assistant Coach Jamie Snyder-Fair Points out a “dark blue rug with a big white Y in the center” and admonishes him, “Whatever else you do here, don't step on the Y.” This is one of the few pieces of dialogue found in this story, heavy on X's and O's and rather dreary accounts of scoring throughout the more than twenty game schedule. Breslin manages throughout the book not to step on the Y both metaphorically and physically, but in so doing, he manages not to generate any real excitement or interest.
Breslin asserts at the beginning that his book is a memoir, not a report. Born of a lifetime of love of the game and a sneaking suspicion his life as an editor/publisher has been largely wasted, he wanted to participate as an observer, shadowing each of the games Coach James Jones and the team played during the season. He was given unusual access to the team, able to attend locker room sessions, interview coaches and players, and given prime seating for all home and away games. He seems at his best when describing the basketball venues themselves, which is perhaps fitting, because his previous book concerned railroad station architecture. His early descriptions of the art of defense and offense are not only clear, they set up further narrative to use in description of the games to come.
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