Austin American Statesman Review

Gardner Selby of the Austin American Statesman reviewed Strong Inside in advance of my trip to Austin, the town where I attended high school (Go Maroons!). Here’s the full review:

It’s not often a writer uncovers a hero all but hidden among us. But Tennessee author Andrew Maraniss (ahem, formerly a much younger softball teammate of mine around the time he was an Austin High Maroon) manages to lift the all-but-forgotten story of Perry Wallace — a college basketball player in the Lew Alcindor era — into a spotlight just that memorably bright.

Wallace, who played for Vanderbilt University, was not the first black player to join a previously all-white team in the Southeastern Conference. Speedy Martin (who would end up living in Grapevine, outside Dallas) had earlier accepted a scholarship to play baseball for Tulane University, though Tulane left the conference in Martin’s first year on the varsity.

But Wallace, who ended up a Washington, D.C., lawyer and professor, was the SEC’s first black player of a major-college sport. Maraniss makes his story much more than that by showing the player both as a court artist and a black man fully embracing the civil rights era.

Don’t worry; you’ll get plenty of ball. I sat up to these words: “Wooooooooomp! Woooooomp! Wooooooooomp!” That’s the sound, ginned up by the author, of the tip-top players for Nashville’s segregated Pearl High, Wallace included, doing pre-game dunks — routinely psyching out foes. In Wallace’s senior year, as he weighed the prospect of playing for Vanderbilt, the Tigers won every game en route to taking the first state championship open to all high schools (previously, black schools were limited to competing against other black schools).

This work enthralls in part because Maraniss lets Wallace’s best and worst moments sink in.

Once settled at Vanderbilt, Wallace faced a life-scarring event in Mississippi that would stick with anyone. In the telling, his stroll by himself across a court in front of loud racist “fans” proves nightmarish yet cinematic. On another front, Maraniss nudges that Wallace, as much as Alcindor (who would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), was a reason coaches voted to bar dunks after the 1967 season. (“Henceforth,” proclaimed Rule 9, Section 11, “the ball cannot be thrown into the basket. It will be a violation for the offense to touch the ball or basket when the ball is in or on the basket and to touch the ball when any part of the ball is in the cylinder above the basket.”)

In a way, the author and player (who enthusiastically cooperated with the research) meld like teammates, straddling decades together. Since the book debuted, author and player have made joint appearances, doubling up at dynamic readings.

Wallace was more than a pioneering hoopster. He’s a man who doggedly refused to leash his own thoughts and impressions at some risk to his personal safety and success. Like his biographer, he strove to understand how he fit into our country awkwardly coming to terms (still so) with black and white and what it means to be an American.

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