Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508250043
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY BOB WILLIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Alan Lelchuk. Baskerville. $23.
You like diversity, ethnic and otherwise? You got it. Dr. Sydney Berger, son of Italian and Jewish immigrants, is adjunct history professor at an Ivy League college named Conway. Named basketball coach three weeks before another dismal season is due to start, he pieces together a team that includes a reformed druggie, an upcoming Rhodes scholar, a Puerto Rican, a Native American, a minister's son and a Russian Jew.
Where does he recruit them? He tracks them down in person: Most left school the previous year, disgusted with the overbearing elitist who preceded him as coach. Neither Berger nor they quite fit in at Conway, but he believes they deserve the chance that privileged youngsters accept as their birthright. Plus they have loads of roundball talent.
Berger gives them a bit of academic help on the side, flirting with National Collegiate Athletic Association sanctions. On the court, he coaxes and cajoles them into a competitive whole, stressing fundamentals such as passing that he feels the run-and-shoot game neglects. To him, the game is a transcendent art.
But the team doesn't really jell until he switches to a kind of Zen basketball, junking pep talks in favor of his favorite readings: from Parkman, Whitman, Audubon, Emerson, etc. From there it's only a matter of time until they reach the NCAA finals.
If you care to suspend disbelief that long - and such suspension is nowhere more difficult than in how he bungles a budding affair with a new girlfriend - and if you like basketball, you'll enjoy this book. Lelchuk will make you like his characters. But be prepared for a letdown that's probably not of the sort you expect.
Wild and Outside.
By Stefan Fatsis. Walker and Company. $22.95.
How Baseball Began.
Ron McCulloch. Warwick Publishing. $18.95.
This reviewer is not among those offended by millionaire baseball players. If owners agree to pay ridiculous salaries, players are fools not to accept.
But it's hard not to be nostalgic for a pristine era when the game itself seemed more important than the money. That was also a time - a couple of generations ago - when the minor leagues were more than proving grounds for players owned by major-league teams: when there still were home-owned clubs that hired their own athletes, forged ties with their communities, entertained the fans and wanted like hell to win.
It was a time when a minor leaguer might, as always, be a youngster dreaming of The Show. But he might also be a perennial busher wanting another grab at the ring or a former major-leaguer not yet willing to pack it in. They just wanted to play. And home folks wanted to see them in their own ballyards.
The Northern League is a throwback to those times. It was revived in 1993 by a group of small businessmen who loved the sport and wanted their own clubs, close to the grassroots, without ties with the majors. The season of 1994 was pivotal because everyone could see the big-league strike coming and, perhaps wistfully, saw a redeeming quality in the Northern League.
Stefan Fatsis tells a riveting story of how each club got started in the league's six Midwestern and Canadian cities and how it fared. For some owners it was a joyous experience, for others disillusioning. Much the same can be said for the players.
Simply holding the league together against the disintegrating forces of economics and personalities was a challenge. Fatsis introduces you to these personalities - owners, field managers, players - and tells you what makes each of them tick. Who cares about the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks, the Sioux City Explorers, the Duluth-Superior Dukes? If you read this book, chances are you will.
To call ``How Baseball Began'' mediocre is being generous. McCulloch, a Toronto-based producer of television documentaries, wants to debunk the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the game in 1839. That's been done many times, most recently in Ken Burns' own TV documentary, which McCulloch alludes to.
He campaigns for greater recognition of Alexander Cartwright's contributions and tosses in some other baseball history to fill out his account. The writing style is pedestrian, with many run-on sentences and misspellings - perhaps the most egregious the repeated insertion of an extra m'' in the name of Charles Comiskey.
Bob Willis is a retired associate editor of this paper's editorial page.
by CNB