I grew up in Texas with two obsessions: basketball and Romantic verse. Satisfaction of both lay readily at hand. We had a hoop out back overlooked by the kitchen of a curry-house which sent its smell of spice and soapy water across the court. (Another neighbour once took a shotgun to the lights when I had stayed out late, banging the ball on the cement; I came back the next night and played in the dark.) Around the corner stood Half Price Books, which in my childhood lived up to its name. Both obsessions had their heroes: Byron among the Romantics - principally, I think, for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. 'Half dust, half deity', Byron wrote of man's estate, but I applied his meaning more specifically. 'Alike unfit to sink or soar' seemed to describe that hanging space, a few feet off the ground, in which Jordan lived.

LRB 23 May 2002 | PDF Download