Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Fury (Keeping the Faith) traces the growth of the jump shot and its various deployers, including Denise Long, the first woman drafted by the NBA, and Hall of Fame-center Bob McAdoo, one of the first big men to make the jump shot part of his offensive repertoire. In the mid-1950s, the jump shot was deemed an illicit (and unfair) action that diminished basketball's ethos of teamwork. "What's ruining basketball is the jump shot," Jimmy Breslin proclaimed in 1956. Now it's an established, integral part of basketball. Fury's enthusiasm for the topic and his love of uncovering the obscure-the NBA experimenting with a 12-ft.-high rim in 1954, for example-give the book a fun jolt, but eventually become burdensome. Fury is so consumed with covering every source and piece of information with equal brio-Larry Bird, long-forgotten college gunners from the 1970s, rebellious jump-shooting instructors-that readers don't know what to pay attention to. Those who resign themselves to Fury's rudderless ways will savor the times when he connects. Agent: Louise Fury, Bent Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Journalist Fury (Keeping the Faith: In the Trenches with College Football's Worst Team, 2005) celebrates basketball's jump shot: its origins, its fundamentals, and its greatest practitioners. "Roughly thirty-four years after I first picked up a ball," writes the author, "there's still nothing like being on the courtinside or outside, with teammates or alonefiring away with the jumper." These are the words of a man smitten with a game, and within that game, he found something deep and abiding. It certainly affected his career arc, for here are more than 300 pages devoted to a tour d'horizon of the game's most revolutionary shot: the jumper. Fury also takes detours into the history of the game, secrets and superstitions of shootersno dribbles before free throws, sure, but also the idea that each hoop has its own personalitythe worlds of shooting coaches and high-tech machines like Noah (color-coded to measure that consistency of the arc) and Dartfish (which "uses cameras to track a player's shot frame by frame"), and the bizarre circumstances that led basketball players to be called, at least in the old days, "cagers." In a pleasing touch, Fury mixes a little memoirhigh school, college, and playground gamesinto the stories of Joe Fulks and Kenny Sailors, the outlandish Celtics dynasty of the 1950s, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, the Indiana savants Jimmy Rayl and Rick Mount, the Iowa stars Denise Long and Jeanette Olson, and the shot that launched the movie Hoosiers. The author digresses and then returns, smoothly if not silkily, to the chronological march, noting how the evolution of the shot changes everything each time it punctures the game's equilibrium, most recently with big men moving away from the basket to shoot (something that Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had foreshadowed). Fury ends with every basketball fan's favorite provocations: the greatest shot, the greatest shooter, etc. The jump shot created offense, and Fury elevates it to yet higher ground. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The author of Keeping the Faith: In the Trenches with College Football's Worst Team (2005) comprehensively traces the transformative effect of the jump shot on the game of basketball. At one point, he imagines the excitement of watching a pure jump shooter say, Joe Fulks, Sam Jones, or Rick Mount hit shot after shot in the gyms in which many of these young men (some into old age) virtually lived. The reader may not share the level of the author's excitement (jump shots in a gym?) as, chapter by chapter, the evolution of the shot and thus the history of college and professional basketball since the 1940s is recounted, from opposition to its very existence through the introduction and then primacy of the three-pointshot, from Kenny Sailors through Jerry West to Steph Curry. Still, there is much here to rekindle the memories of basketball fans, who will quickly discern that there is one thing all these jump shooters have in common: Swish!--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Fury (Keeping the Faith) calls his latest work a love letter to basketball and the jump shot, which changed the nature of the game. All of the great shooters are here: pioneers such as Ken Sailors; legends such as Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Larry Bird, and more; and ending with today's marksman, Stephen Curry. The author also revisits Indiana schoolboy legends Jimmy Rayl and Rick Mount, and deadeyes of the old Iowa women's high school game (three players per team playing offense, three playing defense), Denise Long and Jeanette Olson, who dueled in the 1968 state tournament final with Olson outscoring Long, 76 to 64 in a losing cause. All expound on the shot and the game, making this a fascinating discourse on the evolution of the sport. -VERDICT Apart from Fury's historical account, ultimately we must return to the love letter, as it transports us back to the days when the world was just us, a basketball, and a hoop mounted in a driveway, an alley, a barn, or a deserted playground, and in our minds we became West or Robertson or Long, and it seemed we would be forever young.-Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
