Book Talk: Fluffball!
Is that the book about the five really tall guys and the immortal Chinese philosopher who open the door to a parallel universe and save professional foam basketball? Why, yes. More or less.
Gee, it sure seems like we’ve been talking about books a lot lately, what with all the Book Talk and all. I’m going to do a quick rundown on Fluffball! here in a minute but first I’d like to share another passage from The Smalltown Way.
Mads McRight is one of the vilest characters I’ve ever created. She hosts a nationally-syndicated radio show from WQWQ in Spalding, and her shtick—like that of all the other reactionary media personalities—is to rile up people with big persecution complexes and little critical thinking skills and convince them that something is happening that should make them even angrier than they were yesterday. She is not interested in diversity, democracy, or intellectual integrity, but she does know which side her bread is buttered on. When a former WQWQ station manager emails her and asks how she sleeps at night, her reply is “On a pile of money.”
I thought about including a passage from one of McRight’s rants, but out of context they sound as real as any of the babblings of your Limbaughs and Hannitys and Carlsons—and I don’t want my newsletter befouled in such manner. Within the context of the novel, though, their stench is contained by nice odor-proof narrative with actual entertainment value.
That said, a fairly important character named Jerry Allison is a McRight fan, and Jerry uses her talking points in political discussions with Chuck Kelso and Bud Sykes at the Sweetpea Café every weekday at 2:30. The section below comes after the radio host has begun a shrieking campaign against a new play opening at Midwestern Illinois University, a play called Our Next Guest is God. Mads McRight has neither seen the production nor read the script, but Jerry takes her word that it’s an affront to decent people. The Rev. Ed Schoeling of Colby City Christian Church has joined the discussion at the Sweetpea:
Chuck introduced everyone and Betty put a cup of coffee in front of the pastor. “Thanks, Betty—I feel honored to be here. I’ve heard about the 2:30 Club but never dreamed I’d be a part of it. Does everyone have banana cream pie or is it just Chuck?”
“Late lunches for those guys, afternoon snack for me,” said Chuck. “But how’d you know about the banana cream?”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s anyone in town who doesn’t know about the banana cream. I’d better have one too, Betty.”
“It’s on me,” said Chuck. “You’re our special guest theologian today. We want to get your thoughts on that play over at MIU.”
“Our Next Guest is God, yes. It’s certainly an interesting premise. I understand there’s some controversy.”
“Ball’s in your court, Jerry.”
Jerry straightened up on his stool and cleared his throat as if participating in an actual symposium. “Well, uh, Reverend, I should point out that I’m not a regular churchgoer but I do believe in God and Jesus and I think they should be respected even by people who don’t. And, also, uh, I know nobody has seen it but it sounds like this play is completely disrespectful and sacrilegious. That’s what Mads McRight says, anyway.”
“Ah. Yes, I’ve heard second-hand what she’s had to say. I’d take it with a grain of salt, though. From what I’ve heard—and again, this is second-hand, so in a sense I’m doing what she’s doing—she tends to lump all Christians in with the very Republican point of view she espouses. By that I mean her radio show wouldn’t be considered a religious one. She is certainly entitled to give her opinions on any topic, but as I understand it she hasn’t been privy to reading the script or seeing a sneak preview of the production. I think the controversy comes down to two questions: One, should Christians go and see this play? And two—Betty this pie is amazing—should the play be produced at all? This is all strictly from my perspective, so no one has to agree or take it as gospel—thank you for laughing, Chuck, not everyone gets that. But let’s start with the second one. Because we don’t live in a theocracy and because the Constitution guarantees us all freedom of expression, people are entitled to present their ideas to the world no matter how much they might offend others. So from that point of view, the university is well within its rights to produce this play. And audiences—which might include people of all faiths or no faith at all—are well within their rights to go see it, enjoy it, love it, hate it, make their own decision on it. The first question is somewhat loaded. As a minister, if a member of the church were to ask me whether they should see the play or not, I would say it depends. I would ask this person how strong their faith was. I would ask if they’re going to see it just to get riled up. I would ask if they’re going because they want to understand the perspective of someone who might believe differently than they do. And who knows? The playwright might be a man of faith who’s just exploring some what-if situations in his own life. Does that help at all?”
Jerry said he wasn’t sure. Chuck said that was because Rev. Schoeling had answered in gray as opposed to the black and white Jerry was used to hearing from Mads McRight. Bud said he thought he’d have a slice of banana cream pie today too.
Mads McRight, of course, encourages people to go out and protest outside the theater, and when one of her followers disrupts one performance and has his ticket refunded by the playwright himself, she tells listeners that people of faith are being roughed up by liberal elites.
Oh, and when she learns that the character of God is being played by a gay actor, she, if you’ll pardon the expression, truly loses her shit.
But on to Fluffball! I covered most of this in a somewhat recent newsletter, before I knew I was going to do these Book Talk thing deals, so forgive me there’s quite a bit of copy-and-paste going on here.
The Title
The official title is Fluffball! Or, How Five Really Tall Guys and an Immortal Chinese Philosopher Opened the Door to a Parallel Universe and Saved Professional Foam Basketball, More or Less. If I ever hear of a contest for Best Book Title, this is my entry.
What It’s About
Well, it’s about a bunch of grown men who play professional foam basketball, and if the term foam basketball makes you think of Nerf—before Nerf became known for its toy weaponry—then you have a pretty good idea what these guys are doing. As a satire of professional sports, the novel includes a rich history of the Foam Basketball Association—but there’s also an element of mystery. Various players and retired players keep seeing references to someone named Michael, and the more they learn the more they think this Michael person has some answers to their very existence.
Main Characters
Parker Hill, greatest player in the history of the Foam Basketball Association and now the coach of the New York Nighthawks. A gentle giant. When team owner Shirley Eldridge and starting center Brad Stanton fail to come to terms on a contract, Parker Hill considers coming out of retirement at age 53.
Lum Billingsley, a retired player and now “the dean of FBA sportswriters.” He’s a little insecure in most aspects of his life, all except his knowledge of foam basketball history. He jumps into the Michael mystery with both feet.
Don Gooding, an FBA Hall of Famer and Billingsley’s best friend despite being his polar opposite. Gooding is cynical to a fault and has no patience with anything foolish or irrelevant—which makes him an unlikely choice to host a call-in radio show for sports fans.
Dan Morrison, one of the early greats of the game whose career was marred by what looks to be an undiagnosed mental illness—including several incidents in which he seems to be channeling the spirit of an ancient Babylonian athlete named Namunamu. Now the coach of the Cleveland Red Barons, Morrison seems to have his life in order, except for the times when Namunamu shows up.
Visa Clark, a rookie forward for the Philadelphia Cheeses whose childhood dream was to play professional foam basketball. He’s the first person to be drawn into the Michael mystery, and his main concern is keeping it from affecting his play on the court.
Beau Bopko, outspoken foam basketball writer for the New York Post and one of my top five favorite characters—not just in Fluffball!, not just in my own work, but in all of literature. That might be putting too fine a point on it, but I like this guy. From the very first draft, Beau Bopko looked and talked like the actor Bruno Kirby (and if the late Mr Kirby pops into your head while reading Fluffball!, you’re welcome). Bopko thinks it would be a fantastic idea for Parker Hill to come out of retirement.
Tzu Han Tzu, the namesake of the 7th-century Chinese philosopher, or perhaps that 1300-year-old philosopher himself. He’s not saying. Tzu is not only a foam basketball fan, he seems to know something about this Michael business. Oh, and he’s invented a way to travel to parallel universes.
A Little History
My brother Ric and I got a Nerf basketball and hoop for Christmas. Christmas 1973. We set the hoop on our closet doors and played countless games of one-on-one. Eventually we had to make up some team names, and then when that wasn’t enough we had to make up the names of the superstars on each team, and when that wasn’t enough we had to make up the ten-man rosters for every team in the league.
Twenty teams in the league, ten players on a team, 200 names.
And within a year or two, I was typing up the official NEBA directory each year so that we’d know every player’s position, his age, his uniform number, and his hometown. I did this for years, which gave me hundreds of characters.
Hey, wait a minute, I thought—books have characters. I should put these characters into a book.
So I did.
Favorite Passages
Here’s a scene where Parker Hill—in his role as general manager for the Nighthawks—realizes the contraction negotiations between the team and Brad Stanton aren’t going to go well. Stanton’s agent is the tenacious Bulldog McCloskey. (I also used the agent McCloskey in a comedy sketch in which he represents a guy wanting to sell his plasma.)
But no sooner had Parker put the Bloomfield crisis to rest than a new one popped up. Second-year center Brad Stanton wanted his contract renegotiated. Or at least his agent did, and his agent was the notorious Bulldog McCloskey, fresh from his success at securing hefty contracts for all five starters on the Seattle Olympics despite the team’s 29-61 record in the FBA Western the previous year, 31 games behind the division-winning Santa Fe Chiefs. McCloskey managed to get those lead-footed underachievers long-term contracts, salary increases that bordered on the obscene if not the exponential, bonus clauses, company cars, post-retirement jobs in the Seattle organization, and a nightly seafood buffet. Granted, McCloskey had been shooting fish in a barrel, as it was generally known that the [Seattle team owners] could be out-negotiated by a seven-year-old with attention deficit disorder.
Parker’s first line of defense was to inform McCloskey that the Nighthawks fully expected Stanton to honor the two-year contract he signed as a rookie. “He will,” said McCloskey, “right through the last game of the preseason. At that point, if there’s no new contract, my client will play the 1995-96 season in Europe.”
“The EFL is on the verge of collapse,” Parker reminded him. “They had 17 people show up for the Barcelona-Bratislava game, and that was the playoffs.”
McCloskey set his jaw. “You’re bluffing.”
“It was in all the papers.”
The Bulldog consulted his legal pad. “My mistake—wrong client. I meant to say that if there’s no new contract, my client will play in Australia.”
“Their season just ended.”
“Mr Hill, my client is prepared to go home to Reed City, Michigan and sweep floors in his father’s general store rather than play for the pittance the Nighthawks want to continue paying him.”
“That must be one hell of a general store.”
I had a blast writing this book, partly there’s so much to satirize in the world of sports. In this next passage, Dan Morrison is introduced to the world of fantasy sports leagues:
Like most people active in the Foam Basketball Association, Dan Morrison was aware of the existence of fantasy leagues but too busy with the real thing to do any digging into what they were all about. In fact, the first time he heard the term “fantasy league” he thought it must include teams like the New York Spankers and the Cleveland Threesomes. But since he was a quick study it didn’t take him long to understand the rudiments of fantasy Foam basketball: four or more sports fans would get together, ante up a few bucks ($100 and more in some of the pricier leagues), then create imaginary teams by drafting 10-12 real FBA players. Fantasy coaches would then activate a starting five each week—depending on who’s hot, who’s healthy, who’s playing against the league’s weaker teams—and be awarded a certain number of points for their players’ field goals, free throws, rebounds, steals, assists, and three-pointers. At the end of the regular season, the player with the highest aggregate fantasy score would take home the prize money. Was it gambling? Some said yes, some said no. The fact that there was skill involved in drafting the right players and activating the right ones at the right time came down strongly on the no side, as did the fact that the payoff for six months of research and recordkeeping amounted to about 25 cents an hour.
Fantasy sports leagues had grown from someone’s fun kitchen table idea to a booming cottage industry. For Foam basketball alone, there were a half-dozen full-color magazines devoted to ranking the players and helping coaches pick the best teams: Fantasy Foam Basketball, Foam Basketball Fantasy, Fantastic Fantasy Foam, Foam Fantasy League Companion, Ultimate Fantasy Foam Basketball Guide, and the iconoclastic U.S. Foam and World Report. (Though Lum Billingsley’s FBA Abstract column in Foam Digest was considered the definitive last word by serious FBA fans, many fantasy players saw nothing wrong with giving Billingsley’s rankings less weight than those found in Fantasy Foam Basketball, which was apparently edited by a 15-year-old with some sort of psychological aversion to spell-checking.) Among the most frequent and most ungrammatical advertisers in Foam basketball fantasy magazines were those offering statistical assistance (“Attention Foam Fantasy Players: Let Me Keep States for You’re League”). More often than not the stat services were one-man outfits, the one man being a guy who was already spending 23 hours a day frying his retinas in front of a computer screen and saw fantasy Foam basketball as an opportunity to turn his spreadsheet expertise into some extra cash. As Billingsley once put it, the desire to compile basketball stats for complete strangers isn’t the most perverse thing in the world, but it’s right up there.
Morrison understood the rudiments of fantasy Foam basketball but didn’t yet grasp its appeal, didn’t know why people who were into it got so far into it that their fantasy teams seemed more real to them than the real teams from which they borrowed their fantasy players. That, however, was about to change. There was a young guy in the Red Barons ticket office, a kid named Alan Lampshire who had graduated from Ohio State with a degree in philosophy in ’93. Lampshire was one of the co-founders of the Euclid Avenue Fantasy Foam Basketball Association and, as coach of the Cuyahoga Wittgensteins, the defending champion as well. A month earlier he had informed Morrison of a vacancy in their league and only half-jokingly asked the coach if he’d be interested in stepping in. “We’d work the draft around your schedule,” Lampshire added hopefully.
“I’m sure you would,” said Morrison, “but aside from the fact that the FBA might frown on me having a stake in a fantasy team, I don’t know the first thing about it. I might find out I have no talent for picking talent. However, if you’ll let me sit quietly and observe, you can hold your draft at my house. I’ll supply the pizza and beer.”
“Holy cow, how cool would that be?” said Lampshire. “Except we’ve got one guy who doesn’t drink.”
“I’ll have pop on hand too.”
“Cool. Diet?”
“Sure.”
“I think he drinks caffeine-free.”
“That’s fine.”
“Caffeine-free diet.”
“He will be accommodated.”
“Wow—I can’t wait to tell everyone. You don’t have cats, do you? We got one guy who’s allergic.”
Right before the fantasy draft is about to start, one of the participants hopes to get a leg up on his colleagues by plying Morrison for some information about what he has planned for the Red Barons this season:
Of course, part of out-drafting one’s cohorts involved picking up inside information here and there, as Morrison found out when he went to the kitchen for more paper towels. The Little Italy coach—Bud, the one with the bushy eyebrows—followed him there and looked around secretively to make sure no one was behind him.
“Hey, Coach,” he said quietly. “Two questions.”
“Sure.”
“Are you leaning toward Everman or Stewart at center?”
Morrison chuckled. “What do the magazines say?”
“They all said it was too close to call at press time.”
“It still is.”
“Shoot. What about Parker Hill?”
“I’m not leaning toward him at all.”
“I mean as a fantasy pick.”
“He’s older than I am.”
“But he’s the greatest player who ever played.”
“I’m told Mae West was a pretty decent lay in her time too.”
“Ah. So you’d steer clear of Parker Hill?”
“And Mae West both.”
“Got it.”
What Readers Think
I submitted Fluffball! to the 2021 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards Competition and while I was disappointed it didn’t advance to the next level I was heartened by the judge’s comments. The judge understood what I was doing, called the structure and the writing style exemplary, and said, ahem, “The amount of thought that went into developing a long history of a fictional professional basketball league must have been immense. It truly reads like a detailed history of a real sports league. Well done.”
I don’t know if the judge was reading my mind or not, but he or she also noted that “while the book will probably not appeal to non-sports fans, any fan of a professional sports league, especially fans who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, will enjoy this tall tale.”
Before publication I sent a sample chapter to a number of friends and got these reviews:
“Whether you love basketball or you live in a parallel universe, this book is for you. A treat to read.” --Greg Welch
“Landing blows on owners, players, coaches, advertisers, and the media, Donovan’s satire is a slam dunk.” --Tim Guiden
“The latest in Donovan’s lineup of engaging, entertaining, and funny stories. Fun, bright, and entertaining.” --Stan Himes, author of The Women in Pants series, which you should buy, seriously
“Everything I’ve been wanting to read in a book for a long, long time. I’m now wishing the FBA was a real thing!” --Scott Dreher
“Donovan’s most hilarious outing yet, Fluffball! introduces readers to nation’s weirdest team sport and the crazies who dreamed it up. Sports fan or no, grab a copy—it’s engaging, enlightening, and entertaining as hell!” --Mark Lunde
“Literally laughed out loud.” --Julie Lasche Brown
Post-publication, there’s only one review at Amazon right now:
“Like other material by the author, it’s worth a read, and then another read. Once to enjoy the expert storytelling and a second to pick up the subtle throwaway lines that often carry the biggest laughs. Any time you can take a glimpse inside the inner workings of a mind like John Donovan’s, it’s well worth your time.” --Karen Swanson