Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond [Hardcover]

A reasonably intelligent young man gets paid a more than decent wage to play a game he sometimes loves. Along the way he travels the world, deals with uncertainty and illness, and lives and works with people from profoundly different backgrounds than his own. In the hands of someone with an open mind, a curious nature and a willingness to learn, the result might have been an insightful and fascinating book. Bill Bradley's Life on the Run, or Ken Dryden's The Game are two classic examples of how a sports memoir can be about much more than a game.

Paul Shirley had the chance for such a book, especially given his position of the far edge of his profession, where he had to fight hard to keep his professional career alive. Instead, what emerged was a book that, while periodically clever, grows increasingly tiresome as the pages turn.

Almost everyone Shirley meets is, for him, somehow lacking. Yet when Paul Shirley makes so few friends on so many teams in so many countries, the obvious question is whether it might just be the author who is at fault.
A subtitle for the book might have been "My deep contempt for just about everyone I ever met and most countries, too." Contempt isn't witty and it isn't smart. It's just boring, isolating and, in the end, a little sad.

The basic plot repeats with each chapter: A) anxiety about getting a job, B) getting a job, C) how the new job proved boring/stupid/unworthy, D) how the location of the job proved dreadful, E) how the people with whom the author worked proved too dumb or too religious to be worth the author's time, conversation or interest and F) how it all fell apart, causing him to return to A) above.

Shirley can be funny and, almost despite himself he does impart some information about what it's like on the margins of professional sports. For that I award the book two stars, but when I think of what the book might have been, I'm tempted to drop it back down to one.

This is a young man of talent, but his insecurity and ego keep him from learning much, and that's a tragedy. My hope is that the book is colored by the author's relative youth and that, in later years, he might prove more reflective about his experience and its lessons. This first effort, however, just seems both shallow and self-absorbed when it could have been so much more.

Here's hoping Shirley someday finds a way consistently to live up to his potential as both a basketball player and an author. I honestly wish him well.

As a Jayhawk, I would never in a million years have thought that I'd be writing in praise of Paul Shirley when he played for Iowa State. However, starting with his blogs as a member of the Phoenix Suns, I really came to appreciate Shirley's talent as a writer and the insight he gives into the world of professional basketball. Shirley looks at the world of basketball through the eyes of somebody who has grown up loving the game (he is, after all, from Kansas) and who happened to have the ability to play (or sit on the bench) professionally.

While Shirley's humor sometimes misses its mark, the writing is engaging and much more interesting than your typical basketball player's memoir. The effort and dedication required to become even an average division I basketball player results in a lot of sentences in basketball memoirs like, "on Tuesday I went to the gym and shot 10 thousand three pointers." Not exactly the ideal grist to create a memorable book, but Shirley has succeeded in writing a book that addresses the reality of a life in basketball while maintaining a refreshing sense of humor about it.

Chances are the readers of "Can I Keep My Jersey?" are one of two types:

1) People who are basketball fans in general and have never read Paul Shirley before.

2) Readers who got hooked on Paul Shirley via his NBA Blog, or via Bill Simmons' columns on ESPN's Page 2. If you found this book by way of either of these methods, I'm sure you'll love it.

If you're in group 1 and you have a smart-a&#, sarcastic, dry, witty, smart sense of humor, I think you'll like Paul's writing.

I loved hearing about his experiences in foreign countries most of all. Paul gives you a look at being a complete fish out of water in places most tourists never go. If you've traveled outside the US, you'll definitely relate to some of his uncomfortable, awkward stories.

You also get a first-hand tour of the dredges of professional basketball in the USA - the CBA and the ABA. Personally, having been to the wonderful world of Yakima, Washington, I found his CBA stories about his time there to be particularly entertaining.

Again, this book isn't so much about the NBA or famous basketball players, it's about Paul's travels across the world while doing his job. I get the idea that while Paul loves playing basketball, he may not enjoy the rigmarole of playing in 3rd-world countries; it sort of seems like a paycheck for him in some points. Also, after making it into the NBA, he really brought an everyman-view to the NBA lifestyle too.

I breezed through this book. If you're in his target demographic (I am) and would enjoy reading things like blogs, I would recommend it. If you're not though, I'm not so sure...