Black Gods of the Asphalt

Starred review from March 14, 2016
Inner-city youth turn to hoops to find hope and healing in this vivid ethnography of street basketball in Boston. Viewing street basketball as an urban “lived religion”—where the principal problems and structural sins of inner-city life are ritualized, renegotiated, and reimagined—Woodbine interprets the games as religious performances and practices where young men exorcise their metaphorical demons through dancing, exercising, and dunking. This narrative is more than academic prose; it is a deeply personal and poetic travel through the author’s own story of racial struggle and the survival tactics of the players he befriends. The composition drips with Woodbine’s passion for the game as he weaves street-court scenes of damnation and redemption with richly textured biographies of the young men who play to fight off the specters of racism, violence, and drug addiction. In this majestic study of basketball as ritual, religion, and culture, Woodbine plunges into the courts of Boston with an insider’s savvy to catalogue the urban sport’s pulsating (and potentially transcendent) dialogue.

April 1, 2016
Hoops to the nth degree. The author is a street-basketball player himself as well as a Yale graduate, and his book combines personal experience and city life with careful research and quotations from Derrida, theologians, and scholars of many sortsan unlikely combination that works well. This is participant ethnography with a difference: it's authentic. Woodbine's got game, on the court and on the page, and here he dunks emphatically. From the time we meet Shorty, a street-basketball legend, through a brief history of the game and its link (religion playing a large role) to young African American culture, we learn of basketball, and the many lives it memorializes, as we have in few other books. Woodbine's ethnographic canvas is the inner city of BostonRoxbury, Dorchester, Mattapanand while it would have been instructive to visit at least one other city (like New York) to see how it matched or differed, one suspects that the findings would have been nearly identical. Basketball can be ennobling, on whatever street or court it's played.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)