So, yes, I use a lot of basketball rules in the book. Ultimately this is a book about basketball, but it’s really about so much more. It’s about family and brotherhood and friendship and crossing over from boyhood into manhood. Basketball was just sort of a — it was a frame. It was a way to sort of get boys to pick up this book. It was a way to get girls excited about this book. It was what I remembered liking when I was 12 years old and would have loved to have had a book that dealt with this subject.
So, growing up, my father used to say things to me like — my father was a basketball player in the Air Force and in college. He was a star. They called him the Big Al. I didn’t know him during that time. I wish I had because by the time I came along, my father was a PhD from Columbia. So he was an academic.
And so but my dad used to say things to me like you can’t know what you don’t know. Never hang — he used to say never hang around with people who have less to lose than you do. My dad used to drop these things on me nonstop going to school in the morning or when I made a mistake. Half of them I didn’t understand. The book, The Crossover, is sort of a song for my father, an ode to my father as it were.
I mean my father was nothing like Da Man. I guess in ways I wish my father was a little bit more funnier. I tried to write the character in a way that okay, well, maybe Da Man, Chuck “Da Man” Bell, the father in The Crossover, was the father that I didn’t know, you know, because again I got the academic, but prior to that this is who I imagine he would have been.
And so as it relates to the basketball rules, that was sort of his thing. I knew how the book was going to end and I needed there to be something that the boys would have to sort of hold onto to help guide them, sort of that fatherly advice, that same advice and guidance that I got and didn’t understand. And I think they kind of view it the same way, at least some of them. As they mature, they begin to understand what some of those things mean. And what did Larry Bird say?
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. Is that not like the best metaphor for life? Yes. Some kid in a school just a couple weeks ago told me that well, your book could have been about baseball or football or soccer. And in a certain way, yeah, sports is a great metaphor for our lives and how we live them. So, for me for The Crossover, basketball was the best way for me to tell this particular story.
