Jump Ball by Mel Glenn
"Jump Ball" by Mel Glenn is a compelling exploration of the emotional landscape surrounding high school basketball, specifically focusing on the fictitious Tower High School's team as they aim for a state championship. The narrative is deeply rooted in the culture of prep sports, reflecting both the exhilarating highs of athletic competition and the profound challenges faced by the characters. Central to the story is point guard Garrett James, whose talent propels the team, while accompanying voices from players, fans, and coaches reveal a tapestry of personal struggles, including issues of poverty, health risks, and unrequited love.
Glenn intricately juxtaposes the excitement of the season with the sobering reality of a tragic bus accident, which serves as a poignant reminder of life's unpredictability. This accident not only casts a shadow over the team's aspirations but also invites readers to confront deeper issues of mortality and resilience. Through vivid characterizations and emotional depth, Glenn critiques the often glorified culture of sports, highlighting the psychological pressures athletes face and the societal implications of their successes.
Ultimately, "Jump Ball" transcends a simple sports narrative, offering a nuanced reflection on hope, loss, and the fragile nature of existence, culminating in a powerful message about the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
Jump Ball by Mel Glenn
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1997
Type of work: Poetry
The Work
Glenn discovered the drama of prep sports in the early 1990’s when Lincoln High School felt the impact of Stephon Marbury, a point guard of considerable talent who guided Lincoln to a state championship and would go on to an All-Star career in the National Basketball Association. Most obviously, Jump Ball draws on the roller coaster emotions of that experience—the Tigers of fictitious Tower High School ride the talents of point guard Garrett James to position themselves for a run at a state title. Among the voices of the Tower players and fans, Glenn juxtaposes broadcast accounts of pivotal games, providing not only a linear thread to the anthology but exploiting as well the pulsing suspense inherent in any championship season. The reader is caught up by the persuasive tension of the unfolding season. Here, voices recur as the season plays out, and characters are given nuance. For instance, readers follow a hopeless crush that a female student manager has for one of the players; one player’s ill-advised decision to play despite a bad heart; a player’s struggle to conceal the depths of his family’s poverty and his own homelessness; and the aching loneliness of a coach’s wife.
Glenn deploys his characters to assess the cult of the jock that arguably has come to challenge academics in high school education. He explores the mental stamina and emotional register of the athletes themselves; the pressure to win despite the clichés that sports is not about the score; the jealousy that star players generate not only among students but also among teammates; the distaste some teachers feel for the glorification of game playing; and the dreams that such success engenders in lesser others who see the single talented star as validation that dreaming is not unrealistic. More dramatically, in stepping inside the heads of gifted players, Glenn anatomizes the magic of sports itself, the thoughts of those who so effortlessly work the visual spectacle of sports performance. Glenn explores what it means to be “alone, alive, above the rim, above the arena.”
However, Jump Ball is not content to be a sports book, although it does bring a human dimension to issues that are typically scrutinized by media covering prep sports. Early on, amid the monologues of players and fans, teachers and coaches, the reader is given disturbing voices that speak of a catastrophic mid-winter bus accident: a bus in upstate New York skids on an icy country road and crashes through a guardrail with significant casualties. Even as we are swept up into account of the games, the reader begins to realize that the bus is in fact the Tigers’ team bus on its way at season’s end to the state championship game. Such a realization casts a troubling shadow across the Tigers’ march to the championship—indeed, each voice that is part of the accident account and the massive rescue effort is printed on a page that is itself backgrounded with an ominously shaded oval. Thus, what Glenn brings to his sports poetry is the hard reality of the real world that unfolds outside the tidy lines of the basketball court. The bus accident represents the difficult world of chance and misfortune that does not follow rules, that does not play fair, that does not add up. The narrative moves toward the only logical closing—not an account of a state championship but rather a hospital accident report that, in stark unrhymed prose, simply lists those who survived the accident and those who did not. Glenn thus compels his young adult reader to accept what is most difficult at that age (and any age)—the precariousness of every moment, the fragile structure of life, the harsh unpredictable intrusion of death. It is only after the initial reading that such irony can be fully felt, the doom that lurks in the most casual remarks. Thus, finishing the book leads the reader to a complex moment of beginnings: the characters so dramatically affected by the accident must now begin to address that impact, a beginning suggested by the title itself that recalls the moment of initial play in a basketball game. Glenn, an enduring optimist whose years as a public educator only convinced him of the resilience of the human spirit, is certain of recovery; the volume closes with a resident of the town nearest the crash site grimly surveying the accident scene but refusing despair, “Hope we get no more snow/ I’m looking forward to spring.”
Bibliography
Children’s Literature Review, pp. 84-95. Detroit: Gale, 1999.
Copeland, Jeffrey S. Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Lesesne, Teri S. “Mel Glenn.” In Writers for Young Adults, edited by Ted Hipple. Supplement 1. New York: Scribner, 2000.
“Mel Glenn.” In Contemporary Authors: New Revised Series. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
“Mel Glenn.” In Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994.
Mel Glenn Web site. www.melglenn.com.
Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. “Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: The Poetics of Power in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric.” Style 35, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 486-497.