Basketball: The Great Equalizer

         

 
         After all the the pieces of Sherman Alexie's literature and film that we have seen in class I thought it was prudent to know a little bit more about the guy.  My image of Alexie is centered around the idea of him as a Native American writer, poet, filmmaker, activist and I don't really know much more about him. There had to be more to him than being a great writer.  Something that we had in common.  Creating a brief biography for Alexie helped me find it.
       Sherman Alexie was born on the Spokane Indian reservation on October 7th, 1966.  He was born with hydrocephalus that required brain operation from which he was not expected to survive.  But he did survive, and even excelled despite the resulting childhood seizures.   Alexie turned out to be an advanced reader with an aptitude for all time dealing with literature.  Reportedly, as a teenager enrolled in the reservation schools, Alexie found his mother's name written in a textbook assigned to him and was determined not to spend his life on the reservation.  So he sought a better education at the high school in Reardan, Washington, where he was a top student and a star basketball player.  He graduated in 1985 and then attended Gonzaga University on a scholarship.  He later transferred to Washington State University after two years to study pre-med.  Fainting spells in anatomy class convinced Alexie to change his major.  He graduated with a bachelors degree in American Studies and shortly thereafter received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
     So I made star basketball player bold because that is our common ground.  I should have realized that he was a fan of the sport because in Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing there are scenes revolving around basketball.  The more research I did into Alexie's love of basketball the more I realized the guy himself was just very passionate about all things that were important to him.  

 The video above is Sherman talking about why he loves the game and the reasons behind it.  The professional team he is talking about losing is the Seattle Sonics.  When the team got bought out and moved Alexie was a big proponent of keeping the team in Seattle.  He did several speeches for the Sonics in order swing votes to keep them in Seattle.  Unfortunately they were bought out and are now known as The Oklahoma City Thunder.  This next video is another of Alexie describing the unifying effect of basketball.

He even has poetry about basketball.  My favorite being Defending Walt Whitman.  Here is a reading of it.

Sorry for such a video laden post but I was just really excited to find a common ground between someone whose life is very different from mine.  But we do have one thing.  We were raised on basketball.