McKean gets chance to tell his life’s stories

Growing up in Tacoma – and growing tall, all the way to 6-foot-9 – Jim McKean fell in love with a turn-around jump shot. Not his own.

It belonged to Tom Whalen, a fine player at Pacific Lutheran University in the mid-1960s. As McKean polished his own game at Wilson High School, the turn-around became his happy obsession, with hours devoted to developing a sincerest-form-of-flattery knockoff of the Whalen original. That McKean could also rebound, catch and pass attracted the attention of Marv Harshman, then the basketball coach at Washington State, who paid a recruiting visit to the McKean home and was treated to coffee and cookies off the family’s fine china.

On McKean’s reciprocal visit to Wazzu, he warmed to Harshman, the pace of campus life, the hospitality of the Phi Delta Thetas, the musty coziness of Bohler Gym and the notion of studying in architecture.

“Then I met Jud,” he said.

This would be Jud Heathcote, Harshman’s assistant and coach of the freshman team, which of course meant that it would be his withering critiques resonating in McKean’s ears that first season. Naturally, McKean was eager to show off his arsenal.

“And the first thing Jud said to me,” McKean recalled, “was, ‘Take that turn-around jump shot and stick it in your Wilson drawer.’ “

As it happens, both the jump shot and Jud are fulcrum points in “Home Stand,” McKean’s loose-knit memoir of a life if not defined then at least framed by sports. Published just this month by Michigan State University Press – coincidentally, the school where Heathcote gained his measure of fame – McKean’s collection of personal essays is one of those rare treasures to be found on the sports shelves of bookstores crowded with blowhard bios (Johnny Damon, white courtesy telephone, please) and dense statistical scripture.

Not that McKean hasn’t been there before.

The essay “Playing for Jud” – originally published in a literary magazine out of Detroit – was included in the collection “Best American Sports Writing 2003,” as selected by the volume’s editor, Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights.”

Which you could say makes McKean, All-Pac-8 as a basketball player, an All-American sports writer. Heck, for so deftly humanizing his caustic old coach, McKean should have been in the hunt for a Nobel.

Still, it’s somewhat tangential. At WSU, he was the Cougars’ “Jolly Green Giant,” a career double-double scorer and rebounder on a couple of the school’s best teams which had the bad timing being good when Lew Alcindor and the UCLA Bruins were redefining greatness. But McKean was also discovering what would be a more enduring talent as a poet. He gave up on architecture and found his way to the English department, and after 16 years of teaching at Columbia Basin College he found his way to Iowa’s prestigious writing workshop.

Now a professor at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Falls, McKean has published two acclaimed volumes of poetry. The most recent, “Tree of Heaven,” won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1994 and includes, among other poems, a wry narrative on scoring beer at 16 with a stranger’s discharge papers as I.D. (“I had my story,” he writes, “but forgot my tattoo”). His first book, “Headlong,” opens with a haunting stanza about a childhood memory of a drowning at Green Lake.

But in addition to his being a teacher and a poet, McKean is also a fisherman, a survivor of a dalliance with drag racing, a former basketball mercenary for an Italian washing machine factory and the nephew of an Olympic swimmer, Olive McKean, who won a bronze in the 1936 Games.

“For years I had these stories,” he said, “about playing for Jud and Marv at Washington State which was one of the great influential periods in my life, but also about my aunt and fishing. I worked for many years at the art and craft of writing poems and kept wondering, ‘How am I going to tell these stories?’ “

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.

It begins with a story of fishing with his father, in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca and in particular off Hat Island – what McKean calls “a rite of passage story.” There is a more frantic tale of the summer he and a friend raced an altered dragster, when he broke the steering at 120 mph.

“Crazy, stupid stuff,” he said.

He actually returned to Italy to dig up old clippings and memories of his unrequited tour in European basketball with the Italian factory, which fired him. Another essay plays off his days at CBC, when his town team would go to Walla Walla to play inmates every Thursday – and he’d return on Saturdays to run poetry workshops. And for the chapter about his aunt, he flew to her home with a copy of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” a documentary of the Berlin Games which included footage of the 100-meter freestyle in which Olive McKean competed.

“I was sort of arguing against the Housman poem, ‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’ ” McKean said. “She’s 80 and she’s still an athlete, and it was interesting to watch her watch herself.”

But the story that started McKean on this journey is “One on One,” a moving account not only of his Cougar days doing humbling head-to-head battle with Alcindor – McKean once “held” the future Kareem to a mere 61 points – but of a more delicate encounter with former teammate John Nebel, who went off to a war McKean’s height kept him out of and came back with his right leg gone below the knee. It’s a well-drawn unraveling of the sports-as-war metaphor, but more than that a remarkable slice of self-discovery.

“I hope,” he said, “I’ve learned the art and craft well enough to do these people justice.”

Well, that’s a slam dunk. 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.

“A poem for me is driven by the language,” he said. “I’m kind of following along to find where the next line is gong to go and it’s often a surprise to me. In the essays, there’s more of a design – basketball, of course, has a story inherent in the sport itself.

“In poetry, you can spend a lot of time just on two or three lines. I didn’t feel I needed to hone to the perfection of a poem.”

Any other differences?

“Well,” he said after a pause, “you use a lot more paper.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear he picked up that line playing for Jud.