Scott Ellsworth
ISBN: 9780316244619
ISBN-10: 0316244619
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Publication Date: March 10th, 2015
Pages: 400
Amazon Books: Kindle: $12.99; Hardcover: $19.47; Audible: $20.95 or Free
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| Coach John B. McLendon North Carolina Central University (Photo Courtesy: NCCU Eagles Athletics) |
They played each other.
No cameras, no cheerleaders, no screaming fans greeted the players as they took position on the court. In fact, the gym had been locked in an effort to keep spectators out. The reason for the secrecy was simple. The Duke Medical School team was white. The North Carolina College (North Carolina Central University, today) team was black. And in 1944, the color line in Durham, N.C., ran right through the basketball court. Crossing that line was not just an act of defiance — it was against the law.
This extraordinary contest — one of the first times in basketball history that a black team squared off against a white team at the college level — constitutes the focal point of Scott Ellsworth's compelling history, "The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph." But the book is about far more than a single game. It's about the evolution of a sport, the tortured legacy of race and repression, and about how basketball, which for decades had served as an instrument to defend segregation, became a tool to undermine it.
Ellsworth, a former Portland resident, combines an irresistible narrative with outsized characters, particularly the North Carolina Central coach, John McLendon, who came of age in the Great Depression, as basketball fever was sweeping across the Midwest. Too poor to afford a ball, McLendon and his friends tossed rocks and socks through a playground hoop. His stepmother forbid him to have anything to do with the game unless he read the bible for an hour every day and swore off coffee, soda, snuff, cigarettes, and alcohol.
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READ RELATED ARTICLES
Original New York Times article by Scott Ellsworth in PDF Format
Duke University Alumni Magazine article by Scott Ellsworth in PDF Format
The Hartford Courant article by Dom Amore in PDF Format
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