Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports - Hardcover

McKean, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0870137492 ISBN 13: 9780870137495

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 2005

Synopsis

If he had not fouled out, maybe Washington State University’s center, James McKean, might have held Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to only forty points. It was 1967, a transition year for college athletics in a dramatic time for those coming ofage. In this memoir set in the 1950s and 1960s, McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University (for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote), and his fashioning a life during and after basketball.
     Driven by the energy and spirit of athletics, the language in Home Stand lights up McKean’s wonderfully eclectic work—the aunt who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his last run as a misguided drag racer, his playing basketball for a washing machine factory in Bologna, Italy, or against the prisoners in Walla Walla State Penitentiary—all seen in the context of turbulent times. Needless to say, Lew Alcindor scored his points and UCLA won, which they did every game that season. What James McKean took home was five fouls and a good story. 
      Home Stand delivers a lyrical, thoughtful reflection of what it is to be an athlete—inside as well as outside the game—and how one man’s love of basketball evolved into a love of poetry, "good turns of speech," writing, and teaching.

About this title

About the Author:

James McKean was born and raised in the Seattle-Tacoma area. As an undergraduate, he played basketball for the Washington State University Cougars, starting at center from 1965 to 1968 in what was then the PAC 8 conference. At the University of Iowa, he completed an MFA and a Ph.D. in English. McKean's collection of essays, Home Stand, won a Pushcart Prize for D/Altered. He has published two collections of poetry: Headlong (New Writer Award from Great Lakes Colleges Association) and Tree of Heaven (Iowa Poetry Award). McKean now teaches creative writing and American literature at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Review:

"Home Stand is that rare achievement, a multi-generational sports memoir that actually takes us into the zone where ball becomes thought, becomes poetry itself in all its wit and force, its accumulating motion. McKean stakes his place out there is the line of fire and, against the odds, nails it, each story more personal, more tellingly banked than the last. In the process he reveals the unwritten sporting lives of mid-sixties working-class America in all their singularity and turbulence."

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0870137492
• ISBN 13: 9780870137495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 196