Kirk's review
Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball
by Tom Graham
Kirk's review
Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball by Tom Graham
Kirk's review
rating:
bookshelves:
essential-reference
I picked this up last Monday (4/21) at a great bookshop in Shelbyville IN called Three Sisters---only a partial tribute to Chekov given that the store is indeed owned by three sisters. Getting Open won the Best Books of Indiana Nonfiction Award in 2007, and it's a well-deserved reward: the book recounts the story of late 40s/early 50s star basketballer Bill Garrett, who took Shelbyville to the state champs and then was one of the first black players for the U of Indiana. Garrett died in 1974, and his legacy has been lost to all but a handful of central Indiana folks like Tom Graham, who grew up just north of Shelbyville on a farm (probably only ten miles from the farm where my mother grew up) and who followed Garrett's career as a child in the 50s. As my good friend and uncle (a couple times removed) Dan Kendall, Chapter 2 offers one of the best overviews of a small Northern town divided by de facto segregation you're going to find. If the succeeding accounts of basketball games...more
