This is the review I wrote for the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row books section.
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The storyline seems the same, only change the sport from football to basketball, and the states from Texas to Kentucky.
Keith O’Brien’s new book, Outside Shot, is the basketball version of Buzz Bissinger’s highly-acclaimed, Friday Night Lights. Much like Bissinger’s book on football in Texas, O’Brien spent a year in a small town in Kentucky, documenting the obsession and at times, the over-exaggerated importance of the local high school basketball team. However, it remains to be seen if Billy Bob Thornton also will play the coach in the movie version of Outside Shot like he did for Friday Night Lights. And let’s not talk about a potential TV series.
Indeed, the comparisons are inevitable between the two books. In O’Brien’s book, there is a sense of “haven’t we heard this story before?” Bissinger’s book, published in 1990, sets a fairly high standard for this category. He also had better material to mine, especially with the star running back who saw his college and pro dreams get shattered with a devastating knee injury. O’Brien’s Outside Shot doesn’t have that level of pathos and emotional pulls.
Yet it’s been 23 years since Lights hit the shelves, and a contemporary account of the high school sports tale definitely merits attention.
O’Brien, a former Boston Globe reporter, tracked the Scott County basketball team for the 2009-10 season. Located in rural Kentucky outside of Lexington, the economically-challenged town doesn’t have much besides basketball and bluegrass. O’Brien weaves in details of industries that have come and gone in the area.
O’Brien writes, “Those living here today will say, simply, that they live in the Bluegrass, as if it is of them, which in a way it is.”
With the famed Kentucky Wildcats, winners of eight NCAA titles, just down the road, basketball has a firm hold on Scott County. The expectations always are high, thanks to coach Billy Hicks, who has led the school to two state championships.
O’Brien portrays Hicks as earnest and dedicated in prodding his team through the long grind of the season. To his credit, he doesn’t go to the extremes in the yelling department, much like other high school coaches who emulate Bobby Knight. Hicks, though, does face charges of “recruiting” players to Scott County to help feed the pipeline. It goes to the extent how important winning is to the program.
O’Brien writes of the pressure on Hicks to succeed: “He was sinking, inching ever deeper into a world where child athletes called the shots and their parents demanded athletic greatness at seemingly any cost, while these fans, this county, longed for the innocence of a not-so-distant past.”
The players also felt the pressure. For them, the ultimate prize wasn’t a state championship, but rather a college scholarship. Dakotah Euton, regarded as the state’s top young prospect as a freshman, had to deal with disappointment as a senior when his talent level failed to match the unrealistic expectations. Ge’Lawn Guyn’s aching knees complicated his ability to show his worth to college coaches. Chad Jackson, the starting power forward, had to deal with an uncertain future in the wake of his father’s death at age 39 from abuse of crack cocaine.
Then there were the players who simply wanted to get precious minutes on the floor. O’Brien writes poignantly of Will Schu, whose intensity backfired on him when he broke his hand in a fit of anger.
Writes O’Brien: “The boy, with no father in his life and few defined plans for the future, sometimes wondered why he had worked so hard, for so long, to end up here: on the bench, watching a bunch of transfers play.”
O’Brien writes a compelling narrative. He makes the reader care about the players and their coach. He also does a nice job with his game accounts of Scott County’s up-and-down season. He creates a vivid picture of what it is like to be in those Kentucky gyms on cold winter nights.
Ultimately, though, O’Brien wasn’t rewarded with the last-second three-pointer to secure victory in the big game. There isn’t the edge-of-seat drama in Outside Shot.
Rather, O’Brien provides an interesting look at a place where high school basketball is taken very seriously, much like football in Friday Night Lights.
Outside Shot isn’t at the level of Friday Night Lights, considered one of the best sports books of all time. However, that shouldn’t be considered a putdown.
O’Brien’s book is more than worthy of standing on its own merits.