AP Features, May 14th, 2007
"Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond" (Villard, 330 pages, $23.95) _ Paul Shirley: Professional basketball player Paul Shirley probably is too complex for his own good: smart, witty, sarcastic, self-depricating and appreciative that he gets paid to play a game that he loves, even though it's often under less-than-ideal circumstances. Luckily for the rest of us, professional writer Paul Shirley can spin an entertaining tale about his life on the fringe of big-time sports.
Shirley, a 6-foot-10 forward who played at Iowa State while on an academic scholarship, is the kind of pro athlete whom sports fans hear little about. He's good enough at his sport to be better at it than almost anyone else in the world, but most of his job offers have come from overseas teams or wobbly minor-league U.S. teams.
A few times, he has had brief stints in the world's greatest pro basketball league, the NBA, most recently this season with the Phoenix Suns.
"Can I Keep My Jersey?" is an athlete's mostly humorous, sometimes heart-string-tugging, always interesting journal of the ups and downs of his career, but it's not necessary for a reader to be a sports fan to enjoy it or appreciate it. Shirley explains details about his sport when he needs to and avoids getting too technical about it the rest of the time.
The book is filled with clever quips and sly observations. While describing a long trip through the Great Plains on a team bus, Shirley, a Kansas native, writes:
"By bus, the Dakotas look a lot like Poland. Flat. And barren. The Canadian army would not have a hard time conquering this part of the world _ if Canada does, in fact, have an army."
After suffering a debilitating shoulder injury while playing for a team in Spain, he talks about his visit to a doctor's office for a painful medical procedure called an electromyography, or EMG, which involves inserting needle electrodes into skin tissue:
"I had an EMG on Monday. I recommend that anyone with sadomasochistic tendencies schedule one."
Shirley does well at downshifting from humorous into serious mode, such as when he describes the pure joy he felt the first time he achieved his life's dream of joining an NBA team _ even though he received only a 10-day contract.
He may never become a basketball star, but his first book is a page-turner that shines.
