Polly’s American Shaolin and Shirley’s Can I Keep My Jersey?, two 2007 titles recently released in paperback, have more in common than the geographical origins of their authors. Both men were in their 20s when they left America looking to advance themselves.
Shirley, a farm boy and former starter on the Iowa State basketball team, hoped to get the call to the NBA while bouncing between various minor-league to European teams like an over-inflated Spalding.
Polly, who grew up 20 miles from Shirley in Topeka, traveled halfway around the world to learn the martial art that would help him find courage.
Both books were written to be read briskly. Shirley’s basketball diaries read almost like a blog — where the LOLs are early and often — but Polly has done the harder thing, which is to crack the façade and take us inside his existential crisis while keeping a lively American-abroad story moving.
That said, Shirley’s Can I Keep My Jersey? is one of the most important insider books about pro sports I’ve read. He logged a lot of miles in Greece, Spain and Russia, as well as in the CBA and whatever league it was the Kansas City Knights, for which he briefly played, was in. But it’s whenever he is signed for an NBA team (always briefly) that his perspective becomes so valuable.
“I rode on the daily bus to workouts with players who will someday be in the Hall of Fame … and their bodyguards,” he writes about his cup of coffee with the L.A. Lakers. While scrimmaging with the Atlanta Hawks, he is dumbfounded by a superstar teammate who thoughtlessly transfers piles of fan mail from the in-box to the circular file. As a Chicago Bull, he steps in front of a driving Austin Croshere, suffers a horrific injury and spends pages describing his recovery (“I would like to discuss the Foley catheter now”).
And every time, he is let go. Not, to hear him tell it, because he doesn’t have potential to be more than the 12th man on an NBA club, but because his sell-by date has passed. He knows he will never be the hot prospect that a team has invested millions in. He knows how coaches and managers think, and that they would never admit a player passed over in the NBA draft had more upside than the malcontents the team drafted instead.
Yet he is not completely jaded. During training camp with Atlanta, the Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins joins a pickup game, and it dawns on Shirley that he’ll be able to tell his kids someday about the experience: “Sometimes even I realize that my life can be amazing,” he writes.
In the opening pages Shirley relates a comment from his agent when the two met for the first time. The agent says frankly “that life as a white professional basketball player would be a constant struggle.” And he would be proven right. It would be a struggle not just to get minutes in the game, but psychically to summon the desire to keep showing up, wherever the game takes him. Ultimately, the book is not about basketball but about show business, and what a grim business it can be for the vast majority of those employed in it.
However difficult the benchwarmer’s life may be, it’s a cakewalk compared with what Polly documents in American Shaolin. Leaving college behind after his junior year, the young seeker journeys to the storied temple in China where kung fu is practiced with astonishing power and fortitude by Buddhist monks.
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