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She’s Got Next: A Story of Getting In, Staying Open and Taking a Shot
By Melissa King
Mariner Books (Cover: $13; Amazon: $10.40)


Melissa King’s small, quiet memoir about playing pick-up basketball has got to be a hard sell compared to the more masculine sports books currently muscling their way onto the literary scene. With the likes of Lance Armstrong, Boris Becker, golf’s Peter Jacobsen and Louis vs. Schmeling taking up shelf space, King probably won’t get much of a chance to compete. But I imagine by now, after years of trying to get into decent street games almost always ruled by men, she’s sorta used to that.

And, anyway, King’s MO is to clear out of the way of better games. "I know I’m just an average type of player," she writes in "She’s Got Next." "I don’t even wear that great of shoes or flashy sports clothes, because I never want what I’m wearing to be better than I am. I mean, I don’t want to look like I don’t know how good I’m not." Still, that doesn’t keep her from challenging on plenty of courts where the old, the young, and the short-on-talent gather to play some hoops and test themselves on a near-daily basis. All too often they don’t measure up, but once in a while a game rises above the usual hustle-n-grind and the frailties of each player, and it’s these moments that drive King to return again and again to the rec centers and playgrounds wherever she is. Ultimately, for a time, it’s what she lives for – and why she’s written the book.

And King has been living this way for quite a while, looks like. "Next" is an outgrowth of an essay she wrote in 1999 for the Chicago Reader – a piece that eventually caught the attention of volume editor Richard Ford for the year’s Best American Sports Writing collection. At 27, fed up with her dead-end job at home in Nowhereville, Arkansas, King begins her pick-up journey by literally picking up and moving to Chicago. No reason really, except ennui. And what could be further from blahs and despair of an Arkansan lower-middleclass upbringing and culture than the vibrant, colorful and sometimes dangerous streets of the Windy City? King finds a job working in a natural foods store, but her main job quickly becomes scouting the city for games.

"I’d get up on Saturday mornings knowing my apartment needed to be cleaned or something, but then I’d find myself in my car, cruising for a game," she writes early on. "I’d start shooting around, tell myself I was only going to stay for a few games, but more often than not it was close to dinner time before I went home." The same routine rules her workdays, too, though night games are often limited to women’s rec leagues or two-on-two games with rec center staffers.

While the episodes of games in various places, whether Chicago or Los Angeles or Arkansas, and the drama of people thrown together willy-nilly make for somewhat interesting reading, King has – to put as she might – somewhat of a bigger intention. This is her journey, after all, according to the book’s subtitle. She’s jumped out of the necrotic slumber she’d slipped into at home and into a life full of various choices and different people and situations. And King does "stay open," as being open for her means finding a way of life designed by her, not by social norms and cultural constraints.

To this end, King interacts with all sorts of people on the basketball courts she visits that playas wouldn’t bother with. She lets herself get sucked into a game with a drunk old guy she calls "Park Dude," whom she eyeballs cautiously when young girls come in and join them. She shoots around with brash 10-year-old boys who’re still too small to get into games with teenagers, and she tries to tempt prepubescent girls into taking the game seriously when all they want to know is whether some nasty boy likes them. She joins a women’s league in which players won’t call fouls, fully expecting players to police themselves – even when some participants don’t know how to play the game. At some point it struck me that King learns how not to live as often as she gets in games that are not transcendent – that is, most of the time. As rare as a game in which she shoots lights-out are those moments when she finds a life-nugget she can use.

Not that she doesn’t keep looking. But as far as the reader is concerned, King doesn’t look far enough outside the next 94 feet to see where all that learning might take her. Rarely do we get a glimpse of her other lives in the 10 to 12 years we’re invited to follow her through. Once she moves to Chicago, she tells us in the most obscured way that she’s got a job in a natural foods store – but we don’t hear enough about this job to even put a title to it. Has she made worthwhile friends there? Does she socialize with her co-workers? How has what she’s taken from the playing court related to the choices she makes on the job? And what about her family back in Arkansas? She mentions that she used to play hoops in her driveway with her dad and brother – the brother appears once King moves back to Arkansas from Illinois, but leaves again all too quickly, and her father never steps on the stage. Are we to assume he’s dead? And where is a mother?

King’s secondary obsession, after her drive to play, is figuring out who she is as a woman, and how that relates to finding a man – a feat far more difficult than finding a good game. At third and closing in quick (tick, tock) is King’s attentiveness to children. Though she never says so, she wants them desperately -- so much so she takes girls under her wing throughout the book, though they slip all too easily away, quick as an errant pass. Finally, near the book’s end, once she’s found a boyfriend (who’s not interested a whit in basketball), King stops playing and starts coaching 4th-grade girls. And, sure, the story of her team’s season is interesting, with its requisite personalities, dysfunctions, and small victories.

But what I find more interesting is all King’s not telling us while she’s yak, yak, yakking about basketball. Here’s a book in which basketball is King’s metaphor for other parts of her life, and yet the symbol is all we get, not what’s being held up to scrutiny. Readers are left to make what they will of King’s life.

For what it’s worth, I saw King’s basketball as a way for her to avoid coming to terms with her life off the court. Why the dodge, I don’t have the first clue. But, step by serendipitous step, life ends up coming to her: She finds a nice and smart man, then a "good marketing job" (which she doesn’t tell us she finds meaningful, something she’d earlier said was important to her) then by the end of the book she has a son. And with each successive step, King moves further away from the hoop – so far in fact that she no longer feels hunger for the game, only nostalgia. At some point in "Next," you get the feeling you’ve been watching the wrong game while the real game was being played on another channel.

For all King’s talents as an observer and short-story teller, as well as her gift for capturing the locutions of urban and Southern dialects, she hasn’t got the narrative here to hold up the theme. Now that she’s finally got "Next" out of her system, I hope she’ll take her sweet writing chops and use them to tell others’ stories – because it strikes me that in this so-called memoir, King was always less interested in telling us about her life than in showing us the life she saw in others.