March Madness Hits the KPR Bookshelf -Andrew Malin Milward Encore

kansas history play basketball and the complicated relationship between the two that the focus of jay hauck or on history home and basketball by enter mail and lowered interest thank you so much for taking the time with the bike a pr today things are having me and will come back to lauren salazar is great to be that your book opens the way if one of jay hughes biggest basketball heartbreaks the two thousand ten laws against the university of northern iowa what was it about that that served as a catalyst or jumping off point for you yeah it is i should say yum o i'm a fiction writer i am and i didn't set out to write a nonfiction book but this experience that you're mentioning kind of was was so sort of confounding you know after this last summer has as my presence here today indicates i'm a diehard jay hauck fan and so i'm always up certainly lose but that particular loss was was i felt a real sense of despair after that and that was kind of confounding to me because

at that time there were a lot of far more important world affairs going on and some of which had given a lot of thought and political energy to whether it was around the wars or the debate on health care the earthquake in haiti things that were in my rationale mind i knew were way more important and yet the thing that some in the greatest depth of feeling was my hometown basketball team losing end of that was kind of strange and confounding and so i wanted to understand why i had that reaction and that meant trying to understand my relationship to the game and i didn't as i said i didn't quite set out to with the real intention to write this it was more that this problem or this question a rose and i wonder i understand my love for the game and i think eventually and i want to learn how to honor that love for

the game but also look at how my love for basketball gets sort of compromising complicated by all sorts of things and i tried to not write this book but it just kind of made me they knew what they wanted to be written yet they wouldn't let go of me dancing till i taught finished so here let's go back to two thousand ten can i have you read an excerpt of your feelings right after that loss against the university of northern iowa panthers sure this is the end of the first chapter in the book elbows on the bar i drank beer and watch basketball and felt nothing still under the compulsion to understand the game's hold on me i began making more notes on what soon became a stack of napkins though i would not realize it for a long time i was in the terminal stages of writing a book i had no intention of setting out to write

one is taking me all this time since then to complete because i kept trying to find reasons in excuses not to write it to devote their time and energy it takes to compose an entire book about my relationship to basketball felt at times anyway just as a wrongheaded in frivolous as the time and energy has been thinking and caring about the game itself more so even and yet i came around to it unable to let the books day just an idea existing only in the form of disparate notes scattered across years of no books devoted largely to other writing projects i did so because i i came to see that our obsessions whatever they maybe are interesting and worthy of exploration since they're rarely only ever about the object of obsession they encompass so much more whether we realize it or want to acknowledge it and this was certainly the case for me the impact of the northern iowa last marked a turning point in my love of the game and did not make me stop caring about basketball

even when i tried to swear off i always came back as i continued to teach new season what it did was make me more aware of my phantom more inquisitive about its roots in origins more willing to take a look at it with a colder i in the year that followed which much of this book details i found myself beginning that process of understanding but i didn't know that then that day it skips tavern scribbling on napkins that would only come much later on that day i simply watch the entire slate of games before heading home in the early evening to do something i swore i wouldn't scroll past the front page headlines of important world affairs in favor of the sports pages so that i could read the online post mortems of the previous day's loss and the lawrence journal world and kansas city star that's andrew mail and no word he's reading from j harper on history home and basketball and are you can buy your love of basketball quite

naturally you played as a kid in high school in college and buy your own admission you were pretty dead how is that experience on the court translated into your experience as a rabbit to huck finn yeah well i really i was born in lexington kentucky and raised in lawrence kansas in you know live i'm sort of geographically predisposed to be a lunatic fan for the two winningest best college basketball programs and live in the countryside and actually grew up in an in places where where that phantom was was sort of the norm and so i am yeah it was only natural not only liked the game and love it i feel like there would've been kicked out of either state if i didn't but come but i've been i played a game to and i am playing the game was a great experience for me and i think it's interesting now being at this point i'm getting ready to turn forty in a couple weeks and i

think back on it you know the first twenty years of my my life was so dominated by basketball my love for it my ability to play it at a high level and harm i did as you mentioned went to play at western connecticut state not nearly good enough to play at a place like a year or anything but i was but i was pretty good and i am and while i was there i sort of at the same time i was falling out of love with the game i was falling in love with writing in and for the first time in my life enjoying being a student and i was so much of my day and he was bound up in the body and the physical be able to do this one thing really well that i am it wasn't until you know i was twenty in college that time you know i really started to find a life in the mind and i ended up leaving quitting the team in and transferring schools two years in

arizona or my father's a professor and you know these these twenty years since then i have i've kind of you know lead a life that was led by this passion for language and literature and writing and it's interesting you know i think sometimes these two halves of my life as an athlete and as a writer sometimes you know people are kind of thing it's kind of an eye grocers a little unique are strange and i think for a long time it had to it was i think some of my artist friends are a writer friends wolf to feel slightly novel on that i have this athletic background but calm you know i think in the last three years i really only start to understand that in a strange way playing basketball at a serious level really prepared me for what it takes to be an artist and a writer and the discipline it takes to drive you know are as hard just like playing basketball on at a high level so so yeah basketball tom you know it was nice to put it it was something i did you know those things as a

younger person am i don't play anymore and i am still obsessed ugly game and i do a gratitude to it for for as i say the summer preparing me to be a writer in a strange way you think about it did you experience playing basketball in for army your experience as a fan yeah i think that's a great question yet playing basketball i think it made me change my experience as a fan in some sense because it well i'm i knew the game experientially and intimately in a way that a lot of fans early some fans don't and so i watched games probably a little bit differently than that and some people i also there are parts in this book where'd i'm obviously talked about the experience of being a famine and sometimes i think my resentment towards other fans can it comes through even though i know i'm exactly the

same way home and you know i think some of my that kind of antipathy towards other fans even though i'm a fan myself is is i'm very protective of the players having been a player so when people criticize players and games i get kind of defensive about people not appreciating how difficult is what they're doing and how beautiful is what they're doing i think sometimes it's hard for people understand how good you know any kind of a lead athlete is but in our case you're talking about basketball as as we are saying you know i've i was a really good yeah was a great high school player scored thirteen hundred points to tie more statement the playing cards but the difference between me and someone is playing a k u and ends and someone is playing in the nba is slight try and understand the different the distance between here and the moon or what a million dollars is when you

make forty thousand dollars a year you can really comprehend it you just sort of let go it's a lot you know and down but i can appreciate how how good that that is because as good as i was i know how great these guys are and how our special is that they're able to do what they do and how hard they work well in that sense of protective vests and your baby identification with the players really comes through when you talk about king you best not clear just selby yeah yeah just selby who you know was a huge recruitment firm for coach self and one of our first you know so called one and done kind of players and i came in with huge expectations have storybook first game where he a couple won the game and pandas and the never quite played another game as good as that and left after one season despite you know not the draft projections that he was gonna be a lottery pick when he first started at you you know had diminished by

that by the end of the year but he went to the league anyway and you know i think what it's i'm also be your you know there's a chapter in there there were i talk about my favorite a talk of all time on donald jackson and you know part of my love for him is is bound up not in just what he did on the court that but also this kind of relationship he has with his mother and so the chapter becomes a meditation not only on my love of darnell but my fire my own relationship with my mother and his relationship with his mother in him i read a quote from your book to harper on history home in basketball lawrence is bathtub upraised and history haunted how your love of basketball and your obvious love of kansas history or were tied up with each other yeah well you know when i am i was faced with this question of you know why am i reacting to the northern

iowa loss this way what's the deal with me and basketball what you know why do i love it this way as i thought about it more and more i realize my love for the game it was bound up in a love for a place and you know i just i would love the game the way i do if i hadn't grown up in lawrence yun might still be a basketball fan but i wouldn't love it in the same way and so i'm to talk about my love of basketball i had to talk about the history of lawrence not just my personal history here which was very significant because this is where my mom and brother night came after my parents divorced and we were trying to figure out how to be a new version of our family and you know went through struggles so it was nighttime and my own history here but i thought i have to talk about the deep history of the state of that of the town and m and that makes the book slightly using credit to nature

because you know it's doing it's it's kind of hybrid in some ways it's not just a straight memoir of you know here's my time playing basketball in although that's in there but it you know it's part memoir it's part reportage and one of the things that you know the year that i end up talking about which is the year after the iraq northern iowa loss is also happen to be this a squeeze into neo for kansas and so there are chapters in there that but talk about me doing all these are going to all these events surrounding the outer and fifty year anniversary of statehood and and yeah so so there is you know is part memoir part reportage part history of a place party history of a culture and sport and i i like that i think the history is really important not to my love just to understanding my love but to talking about this place i think is very special and tom

there are three chapters each one is called yankee town one two and three that that try to tell this history of lawrence using a different historical figure you know one is langston hughes one is the early history that deals with things the contras rate is a minister and then love the last figure is my stepfather a stone back end and that's the point where the historical on the personal can emerge in trying to tell the history of lawrence and tom so yeah the history i knew i had to talk about it and you know it's something that i am in previous work i've explored my last book a book of fiction is called i was a revolutionary and then lose three hundred fifty years of kansas history and even though it's fiction are real historical people bumping up against my fictional characters and i try to trace some of their socio political evolution of of the state which has always been so fascinating here

in fiction so that was that was also you know i've been that's that aspect of history is something i guess i've you know i'm haunted by two and you know that hand to find myself returning to a cause that it's a history that's important not just this kansans but to the country as a whole and it's under known i think that's why i find myself returning to rely on and the thing that andrew naylor no word he's the author of jane hawker on history home and basketball and you don't have read another poem from your book where i would paraphrase of quote from your book for fog allen you competed to win the game for james naismith you competed to play the game and its most artful and meaningful way the relationship between those two men and what that means to us as both a former basketball player and as a fan yeah that was one of the most fascinating aspects of the history you know that would retire out the history of war inside i get

into but the history of the game which obviously if you're k u finishes is significant considering that the father of the game and the father basketball coaching far down our car you know i'm coached here so and you know was interesting a fog was kind of naismith star pupil and but it was fast lane to kind of learn that they have kind of different dick had different approaches to and beliefs about the game and naismith it i came to see him in a kind of saintly light because he really he really berating believe that basketball could you didn't belong to coaches of the university belong to the players you know and done fog of courts you know became a legendary coach in and they had very differing philosophies and you know one other clashes that was kind of interesting to me was once the game started become popular you know they want to sell tickets to lick a basketball games and

niceness was against that is obama's exploitation of the student athlete and an far now and said you know hey you know we can bring a little bit of money in and this can help other sports at the university and you know i think they've in some sense they were both right here was distressing to see these two feature called totems of the game kind of engaging in a hobby wan kenobi versus darth vader fight for the soul of basketball and in what i mean it's a big thing about why in light of the looming sanctions with the basketball team and its relationship with adidas you know we've come a long time from the days of probably ten cent tickets that they were arguing about to the billions and hundreds of millions of dollars that are generated by television contracts and sponsorship deals with apparel companies like adidas and you know naismith

knew what was going on but you know he worried about this he had a speech and you know over a hundred years ago about commercialism and sports always he was very against the game becoming commercial laws stand and and i can imagine now he's probably you know kaling center for goal in his grave that at the amount of money that is in the game and that inevitably corrupt service as workers were singing i've been listening to enter email and no word he's the author of to a hawker on his jerry home and basketball into thank you so much for coming in today thanks for having me really appreciate it