We live in the age of the jump shot. The young NBA star Steph Curry, perhaps the greatest shooter of all time, is known not for his dunks but for his prolific threes. Hoisting up baskets in his carefree way, he appears to be a character in a videogame even as his opponents are stuck in real life. And the jump shot is the go-to move in pickup games on courts everywhere: Old guys or young women hook around picks, catch the ball, rise up and release.
The shot, now so integral to the game of basketball, was once a peculiarity, as fresh as the Fosbury Flop was to the high jump or the forward pass was to football. Like those two maneuvers—stumbled upon by the 16-year-old Oregonian Dick Fosbury in 1963 and the Yale undergrad Walter Camp in a game against Princeton in 1876—the jump shot had to be invented by someone with enough youthful imagination to remake the game.
RISE AND FIRE
By Shawn Fury
Flatiron, 339 pages, $27.99
It’s hard to believe, but basketball was nearly a half-century old in 1934 when Kenny Sailors, then 13, playing on an old rim nailed to the windmill on the family farm in Wyoming, rose in the air to shoot over his older, bigger brother Bud, the only witness to what might have been the first jump shot. Even several years later, when Sailors took a bigger stage, the shot appeared a funky novelty. Sailors “can leap with a mighty spring and get off that dazzling one-handed shot,” one Colorado sports reporter wrote in the early 1940s, as Sailors led the University of Wyoming to a national championship.
Back then, in its primordial period, the sport was a decidedly earthbound exercise. Players bodied up inside for layups or passed the ball around till a teammate could deliver a set shot, a lofting of the ball while both feet remain on the ground. The first famous dunkers—George Mikan and Bob “Foothills” Kurland—were still a couple of years from wide fame.
In “Rise and Fire,” Shawn Fury, a journalist and former college basketball player from the upper Midwest, recounts his own love affair with the jump shot while chasing down famed shooters of yesteryear to learn the secrets of their scoring genius. A hint: Stroking a steady jump shot involves the same directions as getting to Carnegie Hall.
We get mini profiles of Sailors, who died in January; Laker great Jerry West, for whom Mr. Fury holds special awe and who grew up a lonely obsessive, practicing his jumper from every angle, including from behind the backboard; a Minnesota basketballing family whose patriarch made the kids dribble in the dark in the basement; and the real-life Bobby Plump, whose exploits as a kid were captured in the film “Hoosiers.”
There are some intimate moments here about the monastic quality of developing a jump shot: Dave Hopla, a sometime NBA shooting coach in his late 50s, tells Mr. Fury about the piles of notebooks he has kept to chart every one of his makes and misses since he was 16: “I didn’t realize nobody else in the world did it.” Mr. Hopla, the author writes, is “Dale Carnegie with a, presumably, better 20-foot jumper,” refusing to even say the word “miss.”
The book runs chronologically, ranging from the jump shot’s folk roots to the shooting labs and statistical preoccupations that color today’s game. Mr. Fury interviews at least 60 people, and while his shooters-gallery approach covers a lot of impressive ground—we also meet a pair of women who scorched nets as high-school players in 1960s Iowa and learn about a playground great who could never get it together to play in the NBA—there is no real narrative development to “Rise and Fire.”
And Mr. Fury’s prose can be rather flat-footed. “Architects do worry about how players shoot in arenas, although skyboxes, suites, and modern entertainment concerns are of more interest,” he writes in an otherwise interesting passage about how particular shooters can be about their courts. “Colleges and pro franchises think more about the citizens who fill the skyboxes than the great shooters who fill the seats. Still, architects do what they can to help, but they often start at a disadvantage because their jobs aren’t just about creating ideal homes for shooters.” And a couple of times Mr. Fury tells us, euphemistically, of the off-court “demons” that afflict various players, at least one of whom never lived up to his potential.
To Mr. Fury’s credit, his reading about the jump shot is omnivorous—he mentions, for instance, a barbed John Edgar Wideman short story about a university seminar on the invention of the jump shot: “My colleagues of the Euro persuasion will claim one of their own, a white college kid on such and such a night,” says the black narrator, “in such and such an obscure arena, proved by such and such musty, dusty documents, launched the first jump shot.” And yet an early-chapter pilgrimage to the home of John Christgau, the author of “The Origins of the Jump Shot” (1999), while admirable in its homage, also leaves you thinking that maybe that’s the book to read. (If you’re looking for a taut, moving book about basketball and life, I can’t resist recommending Darcy Frey’s “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams,” published in 1994, about a Coney Island high-school basketball team made up of hard-luck cases.)
Mr. Fury might be at his best when giving us glimpses of his own shooting history. He honed his jump shot on a rim attached to his grandfather’s barn. The basket had an unfriendly bounce, and in the winter the frozen net caught the ball. “Rain brought mud, and that completely eliminated dribbling,” he writes. “This was not a court to learn ball-handling; it was a court to learn shooting.”
“All shooters have one of those,” Mr. Fury writes, in one of the nicest observations in the book—the basket that makes you gripped by the game.
—Mr. Price, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, is the author of “Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity.”
