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A burned out basketball coach takes a job in Ireland and is surprised by what he finds.
Why would a successful college basketball coach walk away from a lucrative job in America's most glamorous sport? The burned out Rus Bradburd, enamored with Ireland and its music, took a job coaching in the lowly Irish Super League, but was unprepared for what he found. Perplexed by the small town Tralee's Frosties Tigers--a cast of misfits and underachievers more concerned with their day jobs, Gaelic Football, and Guinness--he turned to traditional Irish music for wisdom and solace. Paddy on the Hardwood is partly Rus Bradburd's story of his struggle to transform Tralee's Tigers. But it is also the tale of a man making peace with his own life and career. "No reader will come away from this ...
Dave Meggyesy had been an outside linebacker with the St. Louis Cardinals for seven years when he quit at the height of his career to tell about the dehumanizing side of the game?about the fraud and the payoffs, the racism, drug abuse, and incredible violence. The original publication of Out of Their League shocked readers and provoked the outraged response that rocked the sports world in the 1970s. But his memoir is also a moving description of a man who struggled for social justice and personal liberation. Meggyesy has continued this journey and remains an active champion for players? rights through his work with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). He provides a preface for this Bison Books edition.
An inventive novel, Make It, Take It sneaks the reader past the press conferences, locker rooms, and huddles of college basketball. Without judgment or sentimentality, Rus Bradburd lays bare the web of conflicts between players and coaches, blacks and whites, revealing the complex humanity of a team’s inner circle. Here, every choice has a very real cost. Steve Pytel is an assistant coach and top recruiter for a university basketball program. His goals are simple. He wants to keep his job and be a head coach someday. Keeping his wife barely makes the list. The team staggers; everyone’s days are numbered. Pytel was responsible for landing prized recruits Leonard Redmond and Jamal Davis. P...
Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.
“A deeply moving account of amnesia that . . . reminds us how we are all always trying to find a version of ourselves that we can live with.” —Los Angeles Times On October 17, 2002, David MacLean “woke up” on a train platform in India with no idea who he was or why he was there. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. He could remember song lyrics, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he was told he loved. The illness, it turned out, was the result of a commonly prescribed antimalarial medication he had been taking. Upon his return to the United States, he struggle...
Jack Henderson, a star basketball player, has it all. Loving mother, Mary Lou, is a great musician, father, Sam, a local hero. But when Jack starts high school, Mary Lou disappears. Diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, she spends Jack's adolescence on the run, escaping imagined tormentors. Confined to a mental hospital, then released home, she skips her medication and the cycle repeats. By Jack's senior year, love of music and basketball intertwine as mother and son seek solace within the transcendent moments yielded by their twin passions. Set in the late 1970's in basketball crazy Illinois, "Transcendental Basketball Blues" brings to life the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate days where racial integration took tentative first steps, stagflation simmered, disco fever raged and Top 40 radio ruled. Yet the themes of love, forgiveness, humor in the face of hopelessness and acceptance of others for who they are ring true for readers from all eras.
In 1997, Dave Ridpath walked onto the campus of Marshall University as a sports-loving athletic administrator with a career on the rise. Less than five years later, Ridpath's quest to reform one of the most corrupt athletic departments in college sports, while simultaneously standing up to the behemoth governing body that is the NCAA, had all but destroyed that career. While serving as assistant athletic director for compliance and student services at Marshall University from 1997 through 2001, Ridpath unearthed violations of several NCAA rules. These violations included overt academic fraud and impermissible, booster-devised employment for members of the Marshall University football team a ...
Six Days. Five Inmates. One Guard. Traversing the vast, serene wilderness in Northern Saskatchewan, a group of prisoners sets out on a six day canoe trip. Quinn, an inmate trustee, has been recruited for the pilot project meant to physically and emotionally challenge a small set of inmates about to be released after long terms inside for violent crimes. Their leader, Leggett, only thinks he’s in charge. Inviting along a new parole officer, Martha, and her teenage son, Brian, is just the first of his mistakes. An insect plague of biblical proportions has taken over the north country, and the inmates have always had a secret plan. The river quickly becomes a place of reckoning. Except for Qu...
Set in the American Southwest, Casey Gray’s ambitious tragicomic debut novel follows a group of customers and employees through the twenty-four hour work cycle inside a classic American institution—The Superstore. With a cast of characters including Ernesto, a local gang member struggling to choose his day job over a desultory life as a drug dealer; Wilma, a grandmother working double shifts to support her family; and Keith, a high school student with a penchant for filmmaking, Gray offers a humane and contemporary portrait of life on the suburban fringe. Discount is a triumphant and big-hearted novel you won’t soon forget.