Enter Your Initials for Record Keeping

by Brian Oliu

In this always-on-fire collection of essays about the classic 2-on-2 video game NBA Jam, Brian Oliu and thirteen Player 2 contributors offer essays that explore the purest love and hatred for the game of basketball. While Oliu tells of his continuous battle with identity-particularly due to the overwhelmingly large shadow of his father's basketball abilities, as well as Brian's own seemingly larger-than-life size as a child-Player 2 authors provide an eclectic balance of comic and tragic stories about the teams that represent them. Player 2 essay contributions Jason McCall, Steve Kowalski, Tyler Gobble, Sal Pane, Barry Grass, Tessa Fontaine, Tasha Coryell, Connor O'Neill, Abbas Abidi, xTx, Nate Harris, Meghan Tear Plummer, Colin Rafferty.

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Brian Oliu currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His publications include three chapbooks and five full-length collections of nonfiction, ranging on topics from Craigslist Missed Connections, to computer viruses, to the arcade game NBA Jam. He has two projects forthcoming in 2021: a collaborative chapbook on the Rocky films with the poet Jason McCall, “What Shot Did You Ever Take,” by The Hunger Press, and a full-length collection of essays, “Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling” by The University of North Carolina Press.

Reviews

[Kevin Stebner]

A book of essays about NBA Jam? Be still my twitching thumbs. An essay for every team from the classic, Oliu's Enter Your Initials, with occasional help from Player 2's, is a love letter to basketball and video games and basketball video games. But it's more than that; it's about the disconnect between your ideal and actual self, childhood, the inherent nature of NBA teams, art, celebrity, wishful thinking - all framed around the (probably)(still) greatest sports video game. Loved it!