[Fred C. Hobson]Off the Rim : Basketball And Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood (pdf){Zzzzz}

“Why should a particular game, played with a round ball by twenty-year-olds in short pants often hundreds of miles away, mean so much to me, since I seem to have so little to gain or lose by its outcome?” Fred Hobson thus begins Off the Rim, his narrative of college basketball and society, of growing up and not growing up. He seeks the answer to this question by delving into the particulars of his own experience.
Growing up in a small town in the hills of North Carolina where basketball was king, he became a rabid UNC basketball fan (like many others) at the tender age of thirteen during the Tar Heels’ “magical” 32–0 national championship season in 1956–1957. He starred as a high school basketball player and lived a dream by “walking on” the highly successful 1961–1962 Carolina freshman team. That was also the year Dean Smith was elevated to head coach of the Heels. Hobson observed firsthand Coach Smith’s difficult early days before he became the winningest coach in college basketball.
Forced to find a substitute for his beloved sport after not making the varsity his sophomore year, Hobson turned to the romance of books, both reading and writing them. Changing his major to English, he discovered the joys of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, and H. L. Mencken, and made a career teaching American literature.
This is a book about basketball that is more than a book about basketball. It is, in the beginning, a depiction of a part of the South that departs from the usual idea of Dixie, a look into the culture, religion, and politics of the Carolina hills. It is a portrait of the people who made up the South, including the author’s parents, who both were and were not conventional southerners. Finally, in some respects, it is the story of a boyhood that never ends, relived each year during basketball season in the frantic, tortured life of a fan.
Although Hobson’s story is largely about the Tar Heels—and about other things related to growing up in the South of the 1950s—what he says about basketball, childhood, and adulthood also holds true for those who find themselves in emotional bondage to Hoosiers or Bulldogs or Ducks, to Wolverines, Gophers, Badgers, and various other species of Upper Midwestern low-lying ground fauna, to Blue Devils or Blue Demons, to Tigers, Wildcats, Cougars, and all other breeds of cat.

Publisher: University of Missouri (March 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0826216439
ISBN-13: 978-0826216434

Editorial Reviews
Review

"Basketball and North Carolina go together like a horse and carriage. Fred Hobson knows because he lived it. If you love basketball, you will love this book." —Bill Bradley

“A joyous celebration of college basketball from the heart of Tobacco Road…”--Billy Swanson, Aethlon

“In “Off the Rim”, Fred Hobson gives us both a touching memoir and, along the way, a vivid account of North Carolina’s intense culture of basketball worship.”--Theo Lippman Jr., The Wall Street Journal



“I’ve read most of Fred Hobson’s books and admired his relaxed and seemingly effortless style, but Off the Rim is his best, in my opinion. This is Hobson at the top of his game, using the first-person narrative like an inmate who has sprung his lock and flown free.”—John Egerton


"Off the Rim is a marvelous basketball memoir, sprightly and entertaining, and it will take a place on the shelf alongside great autobiographies of fandom like Tim Parks’s A Season with Verona or Nick Hornby’s ruefully comic Fever Pitch. But Hobson also brings to the task his experience as one of the South’s most distinguished literary critics and commentators, and along the way he provides thoughtful and moving ruminations on race, on family, and on coming of age in piedmont North Carolina in the 1950s and '60s. A delightful account not only of what sports mean to us but of why they matter.”—Michael Griffith


“Fred Hobson has written a lovely, wry account of his lifelong devotion to Tar Heel basketball. He knows that he stands out even among Tar Heel fans for how much Carolina-blue blood he bleeds and how often he bleeds it, and he also knows that readers will find his obsession more amusing than he does. Even if you don’t care who wins the Carolina-Duke game—is that possible?—you’ll enjoy this book.”—John Shelton Reed
About the Author


Fred Hobson is Lineberger Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books, including The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays and Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Follow the bouncing ball
By Amazon Customer on July 4, 2006
Is there anything stranger than the psychology of the sports fan? Are there human beings other than religious martyrs that endure more suffering for such ephemeral, fleeting rewards? Before we had Nick Hornsby's Fever Pitch; now, in Fred Hobson's immensely entertaining new memoir, we have an American version of the lifelong sports fan. Even Hobson's title, Off the Rim, suggests the pain of it all - the near-miss that in the end may count more than the perfect shot, the swish. This is truly a guy's book--a book by and about a guy. Indeed, allow me to confess that, in this age of gender equality, I for one find it difficult to imagine a female version of the inveterate, die-hard fan that Hobson so painstakingly paints, maybe because I think too highly of women. Nonetheless, this is also a tale for women readers--a cautionary tale in which they can gain a glimpse into the interior life of the men in their lives, those fans whose love of sports is part of an elaborate strategy to protect their inner boy. It also seems not to matter that Hobson has been a lifelong fan of a team, the University of North Carolina Tarheels, with an incredible winning record. Maybe that's why Cubs fans seem so patient--do they already know the evanescent nature of the pleasure of victory, compared to the deep, lingering angst (the joy?) of losing?

Hobson's book is a great read, even in the middle of summer and hence as far from the winter season of college basketball as one can get, for as Hobson informs us, for the true fan, there is no off-season, no time without dread. Basketball, like life, is all about getting ready as a youngster . . . and then enjoying a lifetime of reminiscing. Put a stethoscope to Hobson's heart, and what would one expect to hear if not the echoing bounce of a basketball in a musty summer gym?

Not just a basketball book
By DC Dave on May 14, 2012
The cover of the paperback version of this book has this promotional blurb from Bill Bradley at the bottom, "If you love basketball, you will love this book." It's not perfect logic to say so, but the clear implication is that if you don't love basketball you shouldn't waste your time. And that would be a mistake.

The part of the book I found most edifying, and what I think will end up making the book most valuable in the long run, is in the first half before the author gets so deeply involved in his own basketball exploits. I say that as a lifelong basketball fan and a small town contemporary of Professor Hobson who had a somewhat more successful high school basketball career than he did and about the same level of accomplishment (or lack of accomplishment) thereafter. More interesting to me were his descriptions of family and small town life in the Yadkinville of the the 1950s. In the attitudes of his parents, who were surely among the county's gentry, we have a living example of the very un-American complete absence of materialism that the truly great Southern social thinker Richard M. Weaver talks about in Southern Tradition at Bay. Hobson's father thought displaying one's prosperity was vulgar, and when he eventually built a mountain cabin retreat, he made it freely available for church groups and such to use, partly out of a sense of guilt, Hobson believes. And the idea of selling any of the great surplus his enormous garden produced was anathema to the elder Hobson. He gave it all away, of course. That was the rule in my small Southern community as well