A few times a generation, a book comes along that is so revered, so respected, that copies of it become heirlooms. The physical objects become mementos of joyful reads as well as signs of status and conversation pieces. Many more times a generation, a book comes along that is so overprinted, so unnecessary, that copies of it are stashed in the corners of warehouses for a decade until they are donated in bulk to Goodwill.
On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon is one of those books. Yeah, it’s one of the second kind of books.
So, when one of my friends managed to score five copies of it in a Yankee gift swap (along with matching Captain Picard and Commander Riker commemorative plates and three bags of Chocolate Reisen), it seemed doubtful anyone would read it. But here at Overthinking It, doubtful doesn’t stop us. We specialize in taking the doubtful and making the dubious.
Plus, there were those two words at the top: “Matt Christopher.” If those words don’t make you cry out in joy, read on to find out what you’re missing.
More on the Dream Shake as rite of passage, the mid-90s perception of Islam, and the zombie Tom Clancy of Little League Baseball, after the jump!
Respect the Ancestors
Before we delve into our pseudo-fictionalized, 111 page hero’s journey from Dream Shaken to Dream Shaker, a brief word on Matt Christopher. I am among the class of overthinkers who nowe Mr. Christopher a special alleigance. There are more of us than you think – four or five other yankee swap participants were at least as excited as I was to see his name on the book; this is a greater degree of excitement than is reserved for a more straight-up famous writer for a similar audience, like R.L. Stine.
At some point, an elementary school teacher or librarian approached us and said, “Here, read this book. You’ll like it. It’s about sports.”
It’s about sports.”
There’s so much subtext here – so much unspoken. We are immediately subsumed into a certain gender-normative reality, of course, but let us cast down our buckets where we are for the moment. As boys, books of apparently require mitigating factors in order to attract our interest. We are assumed to be bored and alienated by books, and yet would benefit so much for reading. So, there’s an exclusion.
But, in the way of Pandora’s Box, the box of troubles comes with it a note of hope – just as “It’s about sports” speaks to how reading and literature alienate us (and does it not, for so many, even now?), the same statement says, “There is something here for you.” “This is a book on equal standing with the other books in this elementary school library that invites you to be yourself and like what you like.” even “Books are about things. Some books are going to be about things that matter to you.” There is a lot of wisdom in handing a sports book to a young kid – boy or girl, provided of course it is something they identify with and like personally.
And you simply don’t do sports books for children without Matt Christopher. Matt Christopher wrote more than a hundred short novels/novellas for youngsters on almost every sport in existence in a career that spanned from the mid-50s to the late-90s. My own elementary school library was not the only well-stocked with them – I know there are others like me among the readership who have read the likes of Little Lefty, Soccer Halfback, Dirt Bike Racer, Catcher With a Glass Arm, Johnny Long Legs, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers or any number of a number of others.
In calling upon us to hone academic and intellectual skills for the enjoyment of things we choose to enjoy rather than those things we believe we ought to enjoy, Matt Christopher is one of the greater ancestors of overthinking.
You may expect sports books to read something like an NFL Films reel – terse drama and layered intensity loaded into every moment. Describing the sweat dripping off the hurdler’s nose as he waits in the starting blocks. The strain of muscles. John Elway leaping over the defense in the super bowl is a half-step slower than an angel coasting over the surface of the primordial, unformed earth. So much of sports cinema ventures into this baroque Henry James-esque world of overwrought intensity. That’s what you’d expect, anyway, and you get that in some sports. But you sure don’t get it from Matt Christopher.
Matt Christopher’s style reads like Ernest Hemingway, except you replace all the discomfort with the human condition with a sincere love of the surface details of sporting events. Short declarative sentences. Brisk experience portrayed briskly.
This man uses declarative sentences. That's it.
Of course, this is a book for children, so simplicity is important, but did Matt Christopher write the way he did because he was a children’s writer, or was he a children’s writer because he wrote the way he did? The evidence I’ve read would imply the latter – that he tried a few different types of books, and this was by the far the one at which he was most succesful. This is an important note about form and function – it is a familiar practice to look at a hole and try to figure out what peg fits in it, but sometimes harder to look at the peg and figure out which hole it belongs in. But enough about that; this is a children’s book!
Take this passage from Johnny Long Legs (my first Matt Christopher book). The book is about basketball, but, like most Matt Christopher books (and, unsurprisingly, like in On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon), there’s a fair amount of buildup before the main character actually plays the sport shown on the cover, at least in the way it is meant to be played.
The boys pulled the toboggan across the snow-packed road to the hill, climbed all the way to the top of it, and then rode down, Johnny sitting behind Toby. The wind lashed against their faces, the sound of the runners sang in their ears.
The field was long. The boys coasted nearly to the edge of it, close to the fence, and then started to pull the toboggan back up again. One hundred feet away two guys were cruising along briskly on a snowmobile.
‘Am I glad my dad and your mom got married,’ said Toby. ‘I was getting tired of Grandpa’s cooking. Potatoes, hamburg, and hot dogs. You get tired of that after a while.’”
The book doesn’t just use sports to describe other sorts of human experience, it also uses characters and storylines to explain how sports work. The toboggan has metaphorical qualities, but there’s also a degree to which the characters are present to support the description of tobogganing. And then it seamlessly flows into fairly heavy discussion of classic childhood problems.
My favorite, trademark Matt Christopher style point is how many times he makes sure to inform you of the specific score of the game being depicted. You may not learn much about a particular game, but you will learn that the Bobcats or what have you won it 61-52. You don’t know anything about the “two guys,” but you do know they are precisely one hundred feet away, and that they are riding a snowmobile.
On the Court . . .
I bring all this up for two reasons:
1) Matt Christopher’s writing style is well-established, and people familiar with his work know what it feels like when he tells the story of fictional sporting events.
2) On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon reads exactlylike a Matt Christopher work of fiction, except all the people are real, and we have every reason to believe that events that were at least somewhat like the events mentioned in the book all really happened.
After procuring it from my friend’s gag-gift stocking, I actually read On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon in one sitting – took me about two hours or so. But it was so comfortable, it felt so familiar – it was even in the same comforting medium-sized serif font I immediately recognized from my own old Matt Christopher books.
You would think the story of a real person would require stylistic departure from the description of fictional people, but this is not how Matt Christopher’s writing works. If you wanted to be dismissive, you could say that Matt Christopher is primarily concerned with the surfaces of things and doesn’t really plumb their depths. This would certainly be true, but probably also unnecessary. If you wanted to be more positive, you could say that maybe there is a way the play of sport already exists in a form of discourse that communicates with reality and with fiction equally well, and as long as the sports story is solidly grounded in sports themselves – sporting events, played with a sense of fun and a drive to win – the experience of reality is very similar to the experience of fiction.
After all, there are only so many things that can happen in a basketball game, and yet the games each lend themselves to their own accessible narratives. This is part of why sport is such a phenomenal entertainment. It’s less that sport requires story to sustain it, or that sport has an aspect of story – if I were building a classic Greco-Roman pantheon of cultural, allegorical demigods, I would case sport and story as close brothers or sisters that share much of the same body, speaking with the same mouth, but from different faces. Sport is more than just fake war, and sportswriting is more than just forcing narrative on some actions of chance. It’s all part and parcel of play.
It's not like Vulcan forged his glass arm, after all.
On one hand, war is real and sports are false.
On the other, the consequences of sports are very real. They have their own rules and lessons, but the victory and defeat of sports matter to people just as much, if not more so, than the victory and defeat of war. So, on this second hand, sports accomplishes most of the good stuff war accomplishes and almost none of the bad stuff, making a much better, more legitimate human endeavor and a smarter way in general to spend your time and energy.
When reading passages like the following:
NC State took advantage of the strategy. They forced a couple of turnovers and tied the game at 52.
With only seconds remaining, the Wolfpack looked to take the last shot. But the Cougars dug in and kept them away from the basket.
Down low, Hakeem watched the shot arc toward the basket. He saw the ball was going to fall short. He knew he could easily catch it, but was afraid the referees might call him for goaltending, giving the Wolfpack two points and the game.
The ball did fall short. But as Olajuwon reached for the rebound, NC State forward Lorenzo Charles snuck in, grabbed it, and dunked the ball just as time expired. Houston lost, 54-52!”
It’s interesting how literally and straightforwardly Matt Christopher describes the action while still forming pleasant sentences and keeping a narrative flow and tempo to the passage. The basic facts of the game, which would be excluded from most serious considerations of form and meaning, do most of the job of telling most Matt Christopher stories.
My favorite instance of this in On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon is how Matt Christopher uses the Dream Shake in the piece. He describes the training Hakeem underwent to first learn and perfect his spinning fadeaway jumper in the summer after his freshman year at college, and then trots it out as a key shot in a very important game about twelve years later.
Now, of course Hakeem Olajuwon used the Dream Shake more than a few times in his life. It was his signature moveset in every game he played from the mid-80s through the end of his career, and the man played a lot of games. But Matt Christopher picks and chooses when to talk about it in order to provide the narrative with shape. So, there is method to the madness.
So, when you read On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon, you read about 34 years of a man’s life mostly in the form of a POV play-by-play of a number of basketball games, where things like which hand he is dribbling with at any given time or the specific person guarding him are important to how the book works.
Whistle, hold up, 3 second violation
Oh, you know what, it occurs to me that some readers may not know who Hakeem Olajuwon is, and why Matt Christopher would bother to write a biography about him for children.
TELL THE PEOPLE!
Hakeem Olajuwon is a Nigerian-born American citizen who almost won the NCAA tournament a bunch of times in college and went on to be one of the best NBA basketball players of all time. Why is he not more famous? His name, mostly, but also because he played at the same time as Michael Jordan. Hakeem Olajuwon did manage to win back-to-back NBA championships with the Houston Rockets, but he did it during that crazy time when Michael Jordan was playing baseball.
But yeah, Hakeem is one of the best basketball players ever, and he retired about 7 years ago. He’s about 6’10” and was really quick, agile and a good shooter for a player his size who could also move to the basket as effectively as anyone ever. He blocked a whole lot of shots. He had a signature move, the “Dream Shake,” (it was really closer to a custom moveset that included 20 different moves that he could transpose into at will) which was nearly unstoppable and a beautiful thing to watch.
Bottom line, though as great as Hakeem was, Michael Jordan was better. If it’s important to remember basketball at all, as those who remember age, I think it’s important to remember just how frickin’ amazing at this game Michael Jordan was.
Oh, and why did Matt Christopher write a book about him? The answer is pretty simple – Matt Christopher is credited with biographies of more than 30 sports stars across a whole mess of sports. The “On the Court with . . . “/ “On the Field with . . . “ / “On the Bike with Lance Armstrong,” etc. series didn’t have to be that discriminating in whom it chose to profile.
Although, to be fair, Hakeem does have a cool life story, and he was a clean-living, disciplined guy. Some of the strangest, funniest moments in the book are when Matt Christopher gets really worried and borderline panicky in his writing style when Hakeem’s teammates do things like get busted for cocaine. It’s clearly not a world he is prepared to live in, so Hakeem is a good guy to write about – a somewhat unreligious kid who became a devout Muslim back as an adult when public concepts of Islam in the United States were very different (think more the African version of a conservative Christian, who doesn’t drink and wears long robes).
Fear the Zombie Ancestor
But how could Matt Christopher justify writing so many disposable books? As repetitive as his more well-known fiction was, you got the sense he thought it all was special.
On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon was published in 1997, the year of Matt Christopher’s death. So, it’s possible it was one of the very last works Matt Christopher wrote. And yet you don’t get the sense reading it that it is particularly important or written by anybody in ill health.
On the Field with . . . Albert Pujols must have been particularly hard for Matt Christopher to write, because Albert Pujols didn’t start playing Major League Baseball until Matt Christopher had been dead for four years.
Wait . . . what?
Chicanery!
Yeah, Matt Christopher is the Tom Clancy of sports books for kids – his name is slapped on all sorts of books he didn’t actually write. He is listed as the sole writing credit on On the Court with . . .Hakeem Olajuwon, but on the Pujols book, there are additional credits like “text by [RANDOM DUDE],” and “Matt Christopher(R) is the property of Catherine Christopher.”
So, yeah, he never wrote a book about LeBron James, unless he WALKS THE EARTH!!
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, Matt Christopher may or may not have actually written this book, which may or may not accurately reflect the events of the life of NBA Great Hakeem Olajuwon, and may or may not be formally equivalent to a work of fiction independently of whether it happens to be accurate or not.
But what is certain is the book is an engrossing, nostalgic read. The section about frickin’ John Starks blowing the NBA Finals for the New York Knicks, as heroically as it is framed from Olajuwon’s perspective, was just as agonizing during my reading as when I was watching it at age 14. It’s really cool to read about games I still remember watching. And the themes of persistence, getting close to success time and again only to fall short and persist because of your focus and love of the game – and the opportunities it provides – well, those themes are positive.
And it’s a pretty funny book, too.
All in all, I’d say it’s well worth it’s price on some used book Web sites of $0.01, and if I had the opportunity to buy five of them at Goodwill for a dollar and use them as a gag gift in a future yankee swap, I would almost certainly do so.
If you got a gag book in a yankee swap or secret santa situation this year, I strongly encourage you to read it. You never know what you’ll find. Gag books can be kind of amazing.
Although it’s hard to argue with those Picard and Riker commemorative plates. They are pretty frickin’ awesome.
I like the serving trays I ended up getting, sure. But sometimes the weird stuff is the stuff really worth checking out.