From the Cleveland Plain Dealer
July 10, 2005

Gifted writer's got game, doesn't score enough
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Chris Sheridan
Plain Dealer Staff Writer

The best books about bas ketball fall into one of two categories. The first, including John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are," are propelled by writing so elegant we savor each successive sentence. The second, exemplified by Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot," succeed on the strength of sharply drawn characters whose fates we are driven to discover.

"She's Got Next," Arkansas writer Melissa King's entry to the genre, includes flashes of lyricism and glimpses of memorable players. In the end, however, she offers too little of either to lift this collection of essays into the realm of roundball literary legend.

King surely can turn a phrase. She describes the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly in which some of her essays about basketball first appeared, as "the forefront of the possibility trade," where you found the people, the jobs and activities "that could change the rest of your life, or at least the rest of your weekend." For King, a transplanted Southern twentysomething seeking community in the big city, the newspaper pointed the way to fellow hoopsters - and in turn launched her on a yearslong search for life's meaning within the confines of a basketball court.

King learns plenty in her travels. She disdains pricey gear - "I never want what I'm wearing to be better than I am." Men have the same attitude when confronted with a smaller basketball - "like it was a tampon or something." And the power of being coach shrinks in the face of willful fourth-grade girls: "All I could do was beg, and they knew it, the little hussies."

It is here, in the chapter about coaching, that King's writing becomes most compelling. After flitting from one character to the next - like an adorable 5-year-old blossoming under his mother's love, or a teen who confides a recent rape, or players she names "Meter Guy," "White Guy," "Double-Pump," "Dreadlocks" - King finally invests herself in the relationships, and in the process connects us to her story.

She worries over the girls who sabotage their own games and friendships - made a little crazy by the "understanding that under any circumstances, they were expected not to be ordinary." She delights in the progress of her star player, believing that her father's "watchful, laissez-faire bemusement was part of what allowed Beth to find her own talent, then flourish." And she works to persuade the painfully polite young ladies that it really is OK to steal the ball from the other team.

"It was a subversive gospel," she explains, "trying to convince ten-year-old girls that nice wasn't all they were made of."

In another chapter, King tells of a session at the Never Too Late basketball camp, where she struggles to execute moves the coach has ordered: "Thinking about how to do something I did all the time, I couldn't do it." Too much of this book reads like that drill, so self-consciously aiming for eloquence that the missed shots are all the more obvious.

Still, King clearly has the makings of a gifted writer - perhaps she needs just a little more practice before her work between the pages appears as effortless as those magic moments beneath the rim.

Sheridan is an associate editor of The Plain Dealer.