Hardwood : A Novel About College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play (Paperback)

Hardwood is a comedic contemporary novel narrated by Jimmy Tribeca, the story's protagonist and a white point-guard from Brooklyn, N.Y., playing for an otherwise all-black Lewis & Clark College basketball team. Through a fluke, the college shocks the collegiate basketball world by recruiting one of the nation's most sought after high school graduates, a scoring machine named Trevor Windgate who brings national attention to Lewis & Clark and its men's basketball team. Tribeca is a psychology major battling the persistent Portland rainfall and a nasty case of Seasonal Affective Disorder — as well as an aberrant relationship with his on-and-off girlfriend, and a relationship of questionable closeness to his mother. Tribeca's curriculum includes brutal and revealing therapy sessions with a German émigré named Meghan Himmler, a decorated psychologist who Tribeca both admires and resents. The standoffish Windgate is a nature-loving country boy (hence, his decision to attend Lewis & Clark to study its heralded environmental law program) who has more in common with Tribeca than his black "brothers" from America's inner cities. One militant teammate starts a mail correspondence with Louis Farrakhan and decides to join the Nation of Islam at mid-season and insists on changing his name, setting off a fresh round of tumult just as the Lewis & Clark Pioneers are in hot pursuit of an undefeated Immaculate Season. The team's head coach, Roman Hoyt, is prescribed a cocktail of anti-depressants to endure the mounting pressure, a situation exacerbated by threats of dismissal from the college's Athletic Director if Hoyt does not finally win the Northwest Conference Championship — especially after the department bent recruiting guidelines to get Windgate's letter of intent. The story reaches its madcap crescendo when two catastrophic events imperil the season and several careers.