The Cockroach Basketball League

From the author of the critically acclaimed, National Book Award-nominated novel Have Jump Shot, Will Travel comes this players-and-coach’s-eye view of life in the Commercial Basketball League, a collection of rag-tag teams just this side of solvency, where the owners and coaches are unscrupulous and the players are one step removed from stardom in the NBA… or the playground hustlers of ‘White Men Can’t Jump’. In this fact-based novel that does to basketball what Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo did to baseball, Coach Bo Lassner’s task of gearing up his team for the playoffs involves much more than orchestrating the on-court X’s and O’s. In a league filled with NBA hasbeens, wannabes and neverwillbes, it’s a struggle just to keep the team’s meddling owner out of the way and the players’ minds off wine (in their milder moods), women and white stuff long enough to concentrate on the game at hand. In ribald, authentic inside detail, the author (himself a former coach in the real-life Continental Basketball Association) vividly captures the flip-side of the millionaire-ridden world of the NBA - where life truly is a metaphor for basketball.