Playgrounds to the Pros, Legends of Peoria Basketball

This fine book, akin to a provocation as well as evocation, stands out as worthy of serious reading and considerable contemplation. In Playgrounds to the Pros, intended for basketball fanatics, the author devotedly has assembled invaluable narratives.Playgrounds to the Pros might not realize accolades from faint-hearted reading audiences. It chronicles racialized as well as gendered dynamics. In addition to tracking rebounds and three-point scoring, it particularly has to do with the presence of mothers as well as grandmothers vis-à-vis youthful men and varsity-grade grandsons running up-and-down the hardwood. Coaches figure prominently, for the better or otherwise, within motifs of constantly unfolding narratives, some often fraught.Subliminally and overtly, sports-centered journalists—Karzen among them—devotedly observe center court. And their day-after dispatches certainly are consumed by avid fans who readily rush to sports sections rather than editorials or opinions about the wiles of the political class.Sidebar! Growing up in New Jersey, an inescapable climate of supercharged high school basketball remained at center court commemorating a momentous circumstance that had unfolded some one hundred years ago. The Passaic “Wonder Team” compiled an astonishing record of 159 consecutive victories between 1919 and 1925. It's often-celebrated legacy extended over the course of successive decades. (Check that out on the World Wide Web or visit the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA!) Occasionally, when I was in the company of my father—long ago, say during the 1950s—he would readily identify a police officer, US Mail carrier, prominent dentist or judge, sightings that routinely prompted a litany of paternal observation (“They were the center on the ‘Wonder Team.’”)The author of Playgrounds to the Pros, Jeff Karzen, a Peoria-based journalist, unquestionably merits accolades as a keen observer reporting on the dynamics of high school basketball spread over multiple decades. Most of all, the book focuses on basketball's late-in-the-season regional and statewide tournaments as well as the hard-fought championship playoff finales. What it does not focus on enough entails assembled documentation of wins and losses per season. But it became evident to this reader that the author has devotedly assembled a trove of invaluable press clippings with bibliographic citations. Karzen also conducted, face-to-face or via telephone, numerous interviews of much value.Playgrounds to the Pros furnishes readers with compelling, and frequently wrenching, racialized gendered narratives. Seldom is such evidence sugar coated regarding coaches, players as well as parents or fans habituating the bleachers. Also, the dynamics of intimacies lodged vis-à-vis the basketball floor, kitchen tables, and bedrooms enter into its close-up dynamics. Shaun Livingston—“expectation and pressure” in Karzen's terms—ascended from Peoria Central High School to the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Clippers in 2004, playing for multiple teams directly out of secondary school across fourteen years.