Glory Days: A Basketball Memoir

Description

Now a sports columnist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, Bill Reynolds suffered from a common affliction. He was a star athlete in high school and college, but he couldn't quite give up the ghost when his playing days were done. As a young man, he put everything he had into the dreams of his basketball glory days, and suddenly, too suddenly, they were over. Now what? It's the question that haunts this affecting memoir of a man who found it impossible to let go. A decade after the cheering stopped, "I knew," he admits, "my life no longer worked the day the sheriff knocked on my door with a summons to appear in court for an overextended credit card loan." Once he figured out that he could make his obsession work for him--mentally, as a sportswriter; physically, in pick-up hoops--his life began to work, too. What makes Glory Days ultimately work is Reynolds's ability to take his confessional beyond the personal; he skillfully uses his experience as a laboratory for exploring the nation's fixation on its games and the unwillingness of so many American men to grow up and move on.