Hoop Dreams

Author: Ben Joravsky

Category: First time I’ve read this.

My thoughts: Every few years, I become a little obsessed with basketball (I grew up watching my brother play). And 2015 was one of those years. It started with watching an excellent ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about Christian Laettner , which brought back memories of watching early ‘90s basketball (I remember when Duke and UNLV were powerhouses in college basketball). Then I started listening to Jalen Rose’s podcast. All of this pretty much led me to read Hoop Dreams.

Full disclosure—I’ve never seen the documentary on which this book is based. Which is a shame, since I love documentaries. I will rectify this soon. But I really enjoyed the book. Hoop Dreams is the story of William Gates and Arthur Agee, adolescent basketball stars in inner-city Chicago who are offered enrollment at tony St. Joseph’s High School, the alma mater of Isiah Thomas. The background of the players’ families reminded me of the greatest book of all time—The Warmth of Other Suns. Both Arthur and William’s families have Southern origins. Hoop Dreams is ostensibly about William and Arthur, but Isiah Thomas is sort of a third protagonist. Like I said before, Isiah went to St. Joseph’s, and serves as an inspirational figure to William and Arthur. I vaguely remember Isiah Thomas’s basketball career—but truth be told, my brother was more into Michael Jordan, so that’s who I was more familiar with. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate scrappy point guards like Isiah Thomas, Bobby Hurley, John Stockton, and Memphis’ own Mike Conley. Actually, Isiah Thomas’ mother herself migrated to Chicago from Mississippi. Seriously, The Warmth of Other Suns rings so true in so many ways, literary and otherwise.

The fortunes of the two young men take different paths, and eventually Arthur has to leave St. Joseph because his parents failed to pay the tuition. William, however, shines at St. Joseph and at one point goes to a summer basketball camp with three members of the Fab Five —Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, and Jalen Rose. The city of Chicago also functions as a character in Hoop Dreams. In that instance, the book reminded me of the There Are No Children Here. Like There Are No Children Here, Hoop Dreams takes place in Chicago in the 1980s, when gangs struck fear in people and ruled with brutality and drugs ran rampant—Arthur’s father, Bo, was a drug addict at one point. William and Arthur both see basketball as a means to escape their bleak surroundings. At the time, their choices were limited—as the Notorious B.I.G. famously said about getting out of the ghetto, “Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”

Speaking of documentaries, there are two great ones that I came across while reading this book. One is another documentary from ESPN’s excellent 30 for 30 series, about Isiah Thomas’ tenure with the Detroit Pistons. The other one is about the Robert Taylor housing projects in Chicago. After watching the former, I wondered how the Pistons got away with so much pushing and shoving. After watching the latter, I wondered what happened to the family in the film. 


Great passage (which explains William’s feelings when he found out he’d be a teenage father): William had the opposite reaction: instantaneous joy. He had intentionally stopped using condoms because he wanted to make Catherine pregnant. He wanted to create life. William knew so many people who had been murdered. Death was becoming routine as gang wars erupted again around Cabrini-Green. He had nightmares of his own death—another innocent victim caught in the line of fire. “If I die without leaving behind a baby, it’s like I never existed,” he told Catherine.