Shoot the Breeze

This is a basketball novel, the way that Moby Dick is a book about whales. It's late in the Seventies. Principal narrator Rashid Stokes, the "first black, professional-basketball-destined, top drawer student-athlete, California Key Scholar up from not-quite ghetto dog," narrates the story of Mystic Williams, his New York Knick teammate. Mystic, actually Richard, arrived in the NBA and let his play do the talking for him, a pose reminiscent of the early Larry Bird. From the outset, Mystic's strawberry blonde wife Fran makes an impression on Rashid. After several years in the NBA, wunderkind Mystic has a monstrous accident. Here's Rashid's description: "After his scoring hand brushed the rim Mystic located himself looking down at the basket, nothing new, but this time, floating lazily backwards, his feet above his head, the floorboards with their waxy golden wood gleam below his surprised eyes, and coming up fast. His head had struck the rim lightly on the way down, and every fan in the arena sucked in a collective breath." Mystic recovers, but are his skills intact? He's now strangely transformed; he's writing poetry, and it's important to him. The basketball star begins to examine experience according to his eccentric, newly discovered Verve Theory. Is this guy crazy, or is he seeing more? Is there something happening on the court that's beyond basketball? Can management handle it? Rashid tells the story while flying to Africa, "to catch up with-or was it rescue? --Fran and 'Mystic' Williams." He's not sure. He is deeply involved emotionally and philosophically in Fran and Mystic's story, and he recounts the athletic inner and outer lives with passion throughout. We travel from New York to Philadelphia and San Francisco, to Spain and Greece, shooting hoops and searching.