03/20/2002

Two wonderful new sports books . . .

• ICE TIME: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and Hometown Heroes, by Jay Atkinson.

All politics are local?

So is the essence of sports.

This is the theme that runs through Ice Time as easily as a puck over a frozen pond. The place is Methuen, Mass., a blue-collar town north of Boston, one of those places where kids come of age in the early morning hours on cold rinks, and where hockey culture is as omnipresent as soft ice; one of those places where kids grow up dreaming of playing for the high school team, not realizing that, in all probability, that is where their careers are going to end.

Jay Atkinson once was one of those kids.

Now, in his early 40s, and with a 5-year-old son who already has the hockey bug, he returns to his old high school to spend a season with the Methuen Rangers. It's a memorable journey, part reportage, part memoir, all heart. Atkinson, who teaches at Salem State College in real life, is old enough to realize what the kids he's writing about can't realize yet: That it often doesn't get any better than being 17 and playing for your hometown high school.

"I have often fantasized about going back to high school, to take one shot at that defining period in my life," Atkinson writes. "This book details my return to Methuen High after 25 years in order to discover what it was about my experience there and on the ice that shaped me and my future."

This is a book about adolescence. About living through it. And about remembering it, too. It's also a book about hockey culture, everything from the early morning skates, to the bus rides, to the cramped locker rooms, to the bonds that last a lifetime.

Atkinson knows it all.

More importantly, he knows that, in many ways, the experience only grows in importance as the years ago by. So there's a sense of loss that runs through Ice Time . The impending death of the season. The impending end of the players' careers (only one of whom is going to play past high school). The loss of Atkinson's youth, his realization of just how special his high school years were, a time that goes by in the wink of an eye.

Ice Time captures it all, the heartbreak, the triumphs, the dreams, the inherent drama of a season with a high school hockey team.

A book that shows us why sports matters.

• BIG GAME, SMALL WORLD, A Basketball Adventure, by Alexander Wolff.

If Ice Time is local, Big Game, Small World is global. On the surface, anyway, these two books are very different.

Wolff, who covered basketball for Sports Illustrated for years now, literally traveled all over the world to show us both the growth of basketball and the game's ability to bring different cultures together. That, in itself, makes this book interesting, for it brings us to parts of the world we probably aren't going to see ourselves, and Wolff is a wonderful tour guide.

This is great stuff, and there are some fascinating chapters on such seemingly disparate items as the great Yugoslavian junior team -- which featured Dino Radja, Toni Kukoc, and Vlade Divac -- torn apart by the brutal war between the Serbs and Croatians; the relationship between Michael Jordan and Buzz Peterson; the personal odyssey of former Villanova women's player Shelly Pennefather, who became a cloistered nun; playing pick-up basketball with Pete Carril, the ex-Princeton coach who once said players who move toward the ball simply "feed greed and ignorance."

Interspersed throughout is Wolff's fascination with Dr. James Naismith, the game's inventor. Quirky, idiosyncratic, pious, a man who ended up preaching in small churches in the Midwest, the good doctor went on to live 48 more years after he invented basketball in a Springfield (Mass.) YMCA in December of 1891, back when he was looking for something to keep his students occupied in the winter. He also coached Phog Allen at Kansas, who coached Dean Smith at Kansas, who coached Michael Jordan at North Carolina, just in case you're looking for a little symmetry here.

In a sense, Naismith becomes Wolff's guide as he takes us on his big basketball adventure.

"I would enlist Doc Naismith's sensibility, reflected in comments he made and writings he left behind, as my conscience," Wolff writes.

It's a remarkable journey, in search of this amazing game that not only keeps growing, but keeps reinventing itself, too. And Big Game, Small World is a remarkable book, must reading for anyone who wants to know not only where the game is going, but also where it's been.