DURHAM, N.C. — About a year ago, author John Grisham woke to unthinkable news: COVID-19 had canceled March Madness — calamity for the hoops fanatic and former three-sport athlete.
But in the absence of buzzer-beaters, the novelist best-known for legal thrillers turned his imagination to the basketball court, turning out “Sooley,” his pandemic novel set on the hardwoods.
Grisham’s spin onto this type of court drama is no real departure. His “Calico Joe” centers around a badly thrown baseball. His “Playing for Pizza” features a washed-up quarterback who gets a fresh start in Italy.
But his newest sports novel lands his readers squarely in Tobacco Road, though set in what the book affectionately calls “that other school in Durham.” In it, Samuel “Sooley” Sooleymon lands an unlikely scholarship at Durham’s N.C. Central University, a bit of fortune that places him far from home on the day rebels burn down his village in South Sudan.
“What I do is look for a good story,” Grisham told the N&O, “and I just love the kids from South Sudan who dream of playing the game but also getting away from where they are. They dream of being in the NBA just like American kids do. ... I love these sports books.”
‘SOOLEY’ WAS JUST RELEASED
At 368 pages, “Sooley” weighs in far heavier than Grisham intended. The writer famous for putting out a book a year jokes that he typed more while housebound over the past year than he had in the last 30.
He had hoped to finish in time for the return of March Madness, with its reduced-size 2021 crowds. But with an April 27 release date, he just missed it.
The idea came from a magazine article Grisham read a few years ago, which described a visiting underdog South Sudanese team in an American tournament — players experiencing airplanes, locker rooms and wood-floor courts for the first time.
“They really captured the imagination of the crowd,” Grisham recalled. “People loved to watch them. Big smiles. Plus, they were crushing everybody. They became the darlings of the tournament.”
But the South Sudan of Sooley’s story shows the millions unlucky enough to excel at something as bankable as basketball, even on the dirt courts of the bush country.
On the bus ride home from Juba, the South Sudanese capital where Sooley makes the national team, soldiers take the front seats holding Kalashnikov rifles, anticipating a bandit attack. With his new basketball in his lap, Sooley watches the soldiers happily slaughter the marauders and then take turns admiring his new gear.
“So,” the leader said, “when you make a million dollars in the NBA, you’ll come back here and buy us a beer, right?”
“All the beer you can drink.”
GRISHAM’S DIVIDED ACC LOYALTIES
For Grisham, who has a house in Chapel Hill and divides his ACC loyalties between UNC and Virginia, Sooley had to play for a small school. As a character, he isn’t heavily recruited, running faster and jumping higher than everyone on the team, but throwing up enough bricks to build a shed.
He spoke to real-life NCCU basketball coach and former star Levelle Moton — who has a fictional stand-in in the book. And Grisham snuck onto N.C. Central’s Durham campus only once for a peak at the gym.
Triangle readers will appreciate Grisham’s characters taking jabs at that other Durham team:“You think Duke worries about SAT scores?”
As well as Durham’s tonier neighborhoods. At a highly rated restaurant, two coaches have this exchange:
“Is that why we’re having lunch in such a swanky place? The privacy?
Yes. We probably won’t see anyone from Central in here for lunch.”
But “Sooley” succeeds by Grisham’s ability to weave an international refugee crisis into a hometown sports drama, creating an underdog story with a conscience.
