Hoops
Contents (16)
ALSO BY WALTER DEAN MYERS
On a Clear Day
145th Street
Darnell Rock Reporting
Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid
The Outside Shot
What They Found
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 1981 by John Ballard
Cover art by Ian Keltie
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, New York, in 1981. Based on an original screenplay by John Ballard with additional material by Dennis Watlington.
Ember and the E colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-307-97611-6 (tr. pbk.)
eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-51212-0
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v3.1
To my father,
Herbert Dean,
who bought my first
typewriter for me
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
We Asked Walter Dean Myers …
A Conversation with Film Producer John Ballard, About Hoops, Based on His Original Movie Screenplay
Excerpt from On a Clear Day
Excerpt from 145th Street
On a Clear Day
About the Author
One of the things my father used to say was how his days were piling up on him. When I told him I didn’t know what that meant, he said one day I would.
“Right now,” he said, “you got your days filled up with playing and going to school. Then after a while you gonna start dreaming about this and that, and you gonna lay your days out in front of yourself like an imaginary road. That’s what I did.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Then they started piling up on me,” he said. He looked away and didn’t say anything else, and I knew the conversation was over. When he looked away like that, there wasn’t any use to keep on talking.
After he split, I stayed around the house a lot. I did most of the things I was supposed to do, like making the school scene and helping out around the house. I got a little job at the Grant, a little run-down hotel, when I got to be sixteen. That was really okay. I could earn a few bucks, and I could crash there when my moms got on my back too much. By my senior year she was on my back just about all the time, too. Something had come up between us that put an edge on everything we did. It wasn’t anything I could really lay out and say, “Hey, there it is,” as much as it was a feeling. I’d be sitting in the kitchen eating and she’d come in and make some remark about how late I was staying out or something, and I just wouldn’t want to hear it. So I’d finish eating as soon as I could and then bust over to the Grant to spend the night there and cool out.