Asian American Basketball: A Century of Sport, Culture and Community by Joel S. Franks (review)

I wanted to like this book, but the first three chapters made that very hard; it fills in a gap in Asian studies, although less so in basketball history, where, despite outstanding research, the conclusions presented here are still more a footnote in basketball history than a real chapter. Nonetheless, Franks's research is remarkable in its tenacity and thoroughness. He has spent hours and hours gleaning high school and college yearbooks, major and minor newspapers, census data, and various lineage websites, such as Ancestry.com. The result is a comprehensive presentation of possibly every Asian American who suited up in any sort of organized game in the United States over the past one hundred years. Ultimately, however, that is also the greatest shortcoming of the book. The information is overwhelming, and Franks does little to weigh it to provide some way to determine what is of real value and what is just "demographic noise."

Knowing that a person with only a last name played for a freshmen team in a small town in Montana exhibits the author's research perseverance but adds little to the reader's enjoyment. That identifies what the book often lacks—passion. The author seems to feel obliged to present every example of an Asian American male or female playing in any level of basketball and creates no level of real importance for this. The two first chapters on community basketball are most guilty of this, wherein any local squad at any level of competence is mentioned, although hardly placed in a larger context of impact. When the author stops to allow for the development of a person's life, a game, or a community's reaction to Asian American basketball, one does feel the passion that had been missing, but such instances are simply too few.

Later chapters improve, and when they do, it is because of a real developed focus that captures the reader's interest, such as sections on postwar Japanese American basketball, which had to garner spectator interest in basketball and overcome feelings of angst because of both the war and the internment of Japanese American citizens as a result of Executive Order 9066; or the Oriental Basketball Tournaments of 1947–49, which showed the widespread interest in basketball among Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese ethnic communities and young men of those communities. Franks also presents excellent accounts of the numerous young women playing basketball in high schools, recreation leagues, and colleges.

The real strength of the book comes when Franks focuses on some of the top individuals, contextualizes their contributions, and develops their stories. These would include the focus on Ah Chew Goo, a Hawaiian, in the 1930s and his apparent influence on some top mainland players and coaches; Wit Misaka of Ogden High School and the 1944 University of Utah NCAA champions; Willie (Woo Woo) Wong and his exploits with the San Francisco Saints and the University of San Francisco; Al Mar of Seattle's Garfield High School and both Whitman College and the University of Washington; Fred Lee of Oregon State and the University of Portland; coaches Bill Kajikawa and Buck Lai Jr.; and Jeremy Lin, whose "Lin-sanity" sparked the research and writing of this book.