The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League Author: Ed Breslin Rick Telander | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EBO2E9G | Format: EPUB
The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League Description
The Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League describes a season spent as a virtual coach in the Ivy League. Shadowing head coach of Yale men’s basketball James Jones and bird-dogging his team from first practice to final game, Ed Breslin fulfills every college basketball fan’s fantasy of being an NCAA Division I coach.
It’s sports journalism in the tradition of George Plimpton. But above all, it’s a celebration of basketball, of participation in life, of gifted mentors and coaches, and of the proper approach to collegiate athletics.
And all this in the throwback Ivy League. Where lofty academic requirements merge with high athletic standards. Where every game is an intense and ancient rivalry. Where no league tournament renders the regular season meaningless. Where nearly all league games are played two-a-weekend. Where back-to-back games and five-hour bus trips make for weary legs and heartbreaking upsets. Where coaches have to be teachers and mentors first and foremost.
Over the course of the season, Breslin comes to understand that it’s coaches like James Jones, their priorities in order, who realize that lessons learned in sport are often enduringly important, and transferable to other areas of life. They know that the game of basketball, invented in a YMCA gym to vanquish winter blues and channel excess energy, is a divine template for teaching and mentoring. They know that mastery of a demanding skill in youth, and of one’s self, often leads to mastery in adult life: in the arts, in the sciences, in the professions, and in business.
The author experienced all this, and more, firsthand. But the most important lesson he learned is that if you ever visit the Yale locker room, whatever else you do: Don’t step on the Y.”
- File Size: 1563 KB
- Print Length: 224 pages
- Publisher: Sports Publishing (February 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EBO2E9G
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,764 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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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