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Dragons and Hoops

Gene Luen Yang pushes the genre envelope with this graphic memoir of basketball, history, biography, school legacy, and reflection. He draws in the super-hero tradition of Marvel comics, sketching intense inter-actions with Pa-pa, Slam! Wap! Swish! Steal!   He follows his own high school’s basketball team over several years, even coaching generations. He creates biographical sketches of young stars, for some a trajectory to the National Basketball Association, and he educates his readers on topics ranging from the origins of men’s and women’s basketball to the principles of the Sikh religion.

Perhaps most interesting of all is how he negotiates the roles of Teaching, Comics and Family as he is drawn into a sport that evoked failure for him from his earliest forays.  More than anything, the saga of Bishop O’Dowd High School’s basketball team lured him into interviewing the coach and the players, because of the remarkable tradition he found over his years teaching mathematics there.  The story becomes an increasing part of the “comics” quadrant of his time as the drama unfolds (see below).

Like Yang’s previous epic Boxers and Saints the generational story of Bishop O’Dowd’s High School basketball team addresses large themes of self-discipline, family loyalty, inter-racial conflict, religious prejudice, gender discrimination among others. Some chapters are baldly socio-historical, such his fascinating analysis of the rules of early Women’s Basketball. Yang points out how the the tripartite division of the court and rules excluding dribbling and stealing, preserved the traditional view of women: “avoids ugly muscles,” avoids scowling faces,” “avoids competitive spirits,” and “they’ll still be able to attract the most worthy fathers for their children” (174).
With the same instructional goals, Yang gives his readers an illustrated history of men’s basketball, the origins of basketball in Catholic high schools, the Sikh-Hindu conflict that turned the Sikhs against Mahatma Gandhi, and the decades-long development of basketball in China.
None of this seems incidental to the epic of Bishop O’Dowd’s pursuit of the State High School Basketball Championship. Yang interviews Coach Llewellyn Blackmon Richie throughout the narrative, showing his dedication to his players and to scholastic basketball. Richie played basketball for the same high school under their legendary coach Mike Phelps. Later he tells Yang stories of his best young ball players when he was coach.  Jeevin Sandhu (Punjabi Sikh), Qianjun “Alex” Zhao (Chinese), and Austin Walker (African American) are later featured to show the diversity and character of the 2015 team.
The final chapter tells of the march of the team to the California State Championship against the Mater Dei Monarchs, a powerhouse going for its fifth straight championship. Yang makes both the individual and team performance critical to the exciting outcome in overtime.
Although Dragon Hoops will totally absorb the basketball junkies among men and women, it carries strong themes of his previous graphic novel American-Born Chinese to engage many other readers of adolescent fiction.  It is the first graphic narrative I have seen with extensive notes in the Appendix, documenting sources of both information and drawings, including those of popular culture, school yearbooks, and his own experiences.  The chapter-by-chapter bibliography completes the strong impression of a graphic documentary of a period of scholastic basketball.

Dragon Hoops, Gene Luen Yang,  New York: First Second, Roaring Brook Press, 2020

 

 

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