James McKean

James McKean was born and raised in the Seattle-Tacoma area. As an undergraduate, he played basketball for the Washington State University Cougars, starting at center from 1965 to 1968 in what was...

Home Stand
Growing Up in Sports

James McKean

Pushcart Prize Winner for the essay "D/Altered"

2006 Finalist: Washington State Book Awards, from The Washington Center for the Book at The Seattle Public Library - General Nonfiction

Click this link to read chapter samples from Home Stand

If he had not fouled out, maybe Washington State University’s center, James McKean, might have held Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to only forty points. It was 1967, a transition year for college athletics in a dramatic time for those coming ofage. In this memoir set in the 1950s and 1960s, McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University (for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote), and his fashioning a life during and after basketball.

Driven by the energy and spirit of athletics, the language in Home Stand lights up McKean’s wonderfully eclectic work—the aunt who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his last run as a misguided drag racer, his playing basketball for a washing machine factory in Bologna, Italy, or against the prisoners in Walla Walla State Penitentiary—all seen in the context of turbulent times. Needless to say, Lew Alcindor scored his points and UCLA won, which they did every game that season. What James McKean took home was five fouls and a good story. 
 
Home Stand delivers a lyrical, thoughtful reflection of what it is to be an athlete—inside as well as outside the game—and how one man’s love of basketball evolved into a love of poetry, "good turns of speech," writing, and teaching.

Reviews

"Home Stand is that rare achievement, a multi- generational sports memoir that actually takes us into the zone where ball becomes thought, becomes poetry itself in all its wit and force, its accumulating motion. McKean stakes his place out there in the line of fire and, against the odds, nails it, each story more personal, more tellingly banked than the last. In the process he reveals the unwritten sporting lives of mid-sixties working-class America in all their singularity and turbulence."
—Robin Magowan, author of Tour de France, Memoirs of a Minotaur,and Kings of the Road.

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"...When he began reading the non-fiction of Annie Dillard and Scott Russell Sanders, among others, he found the right tool, and over the course of six years he pieced together the Home Stand collection....McKean's writing is ripe with humor, but isn't dependent on the waggish anecdote; there is depth without weighty posturing. It's obvious he's enjoyed the stretch from poetry, and made it work to his advantage."
- John Blanchette, "The Spokesman-Review" May 22, 2005 www.spokesmanreview.com