Home Stand

In this memoir set in the 50s and 60s, James McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote, and his fashioning a life during and after basketball.

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If he hadn't fouled out, maybe Washington State's centre, James McKean, might have held Lew Alcindor to only forty points. It was 1967, a transition year for college athletics in a dramatic time for those coming of age.

In this memoir set in the fifties and sixties, McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote, and his fashioning a life during and after basketball. Driven by the energy and spirit of athletics, the language in Home Stand lights up McKean's wonderfully odd work - the aunt who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his last run as a misguided drag racer, his playing basketball for a washing machine factory in Bologna, Italy, or against the prisoners in Walla Walla State Penitentiary - all seen in the context of turbulent times. Needless to say, Lew Alcindor scored his points and UCLA won, which they did every game that season. What James McKean took home was five fouls and a good story.

Home Stand delivers a lyrical, thoughtful reflection of what it is to be an athlete - inside as well as outside the game - and how one man's love of basketball evolved into a love of poetry, "good turns of speech", writing, and teaching.