Glory Days: A Basketball Memoir

by Bill Reynolds

Overview

Part memoir, part inquiry Glory Days asks why can't grown men give up those long-cherished images of gym-class glory and high school heroism?

Bill Reynolds built his youth around sports. As a boy in a blue-collar Rhode Island town, he spend his hours shooting hoops and dreaming of stardom. From his adolescence to high school fame to a scholarship at Brown University, Reynolds enjoyed the perks of athletic glory. But those days soon ended and the onetime star drifted between his past and an uncertain future. Glory Days is a warm, touching, and funny book about what happens when jocks grow older—about getting a life without losing touch with your dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312209667
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/30/1999
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Bill Reynolds is a sports columnist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin and the author of several previous books, including Fall River Dreams and Success Is a Choice, with Rick Pitino. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

[A] thoughtful memoir” —Dallas Morning News

“[An] eloquent testimony...[Reynolds] sees though the scam: Sports is not life, but it almost is.” —Columbus Dispatch

“A bang-up job by Reynolds. For all the failed Little Leaguers and average high school and college jocks this is 'the real story of sports in America'.” —Kirkus Review

“A wonderful book.” —The Chattanooga Times

From the Publisher

This is the story of a man who resisted admitting he had a sports obsession, but who finally decided that obsession was destiny. Reynolds's (Fall River Dreams) problem developed because he was good on the court but never great. Though a high school star, he was a less-than-stellar student who had to spend a year in prep school before being admitted to Brown University, where, according to him, rules were bent to keep him on the team. Before graduating he realized he couldn't succeed in the pros so he spent years batting around, barely surviving as a teacher and freelance writer and finding that his monomania poisoned his relationships with women, including the one to whom he was married briefly. Finally, Reynolds became a sportswriter in Rhode Island and started playing pickup games daily with other aging athletesand found nirvana. His candid observations about himself and the passion for sports in this country raise his memoir above the ordinary. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A high-school basketball star and standout at Brown University in the 1960s, Reynolds came face-to-face with the realization that he wasn't as good an he'd hoped, that, despite all the hard work and dedication, his dream of playing in the pros was just that: a dream. As Reynolds (Big Hoops, 1989, etc.) grew up in Rhode Island, his life was defined by the game of basketball. The 6'3", high-scoring forward believed all the coaches' clich‚s about hard work and persistence. His hometown high-school team lost in the state quarter-finals his senior year, but the adulation, camaraderie of the locker room, and the special treatment followed him through a year at a private academy, where he went in hopes of qualifying academically for college. It worked, despite his flunking his courses: "A kindly man with a soft crinkly face" gave him a "transcript" showing he'd passed. It wasn't long before he was on academic probation at Brown; but that scarcely interfered with playing basketball. Following a terrible loss against Princeton in the winter of 1968, he realized that it was all over, that he had to face life without basketball. But his career as an English teacher and assistant coach at his old school was short-lived. He'd begun to resent the hold the game had on him and that he'd "been naive enough to swallow all of it." Reynolds drifted in and out of the counterculture of the times and from job to job doing freelance reporting. At 33, he was broke, "spending too many nights in bars too many nights telling the same stories." He decided he had to get himself together, to get back into shape by playing pickup gamesþwhere he finally learned to love playing basketball. A bang-up jobby Reynolds. For all the failed Little Leaguers and average high-school and college jocks this is "the real story of sports in America."

Kirkus Reviews