Confessions of an Aspiring Basketball Player

Description

Confessions of an Aspiring Basketball Player began life during the Covid-19 pandemic, at a moment when ordinary routines had collapsed and small acts of effort suddenly took on disproportionate meaning. Inspired by the national 2.6 Challenge, the narrator sets himself a simple, faintly ridiculous task: to throw a basketball into a hoop 26 times a day, for 26 days, while reflecting on work, ageing, charity, anxiety, and the shifting moral weather of the pandemic years. What unfolds is not a sports book, and not a how-to guide, but a work of fictionalised reflection: humorous, uneasy, and quietly searching.

What this book is really about

Basketball here functions as a measuring device rather than a subject.

The book explores:

• effort without mastery

• the seduction of numbers and targets

• the urge to improve oneself in times of crisis

• the tension between public virtue and private doubt

• the strange pressure to perform meaning during collective trauma

Written originally as a blog and later reshaped into a book, the narrative allows itself “several flights of artistic fantasy”, moving freely between observation, exaggeration, and invention.

Form and tone

The tone is:

• dryly comic

• self-aware rather than heroic

• reflective without sentimentality

The structure mirrors the repetitive discipline of the task itself:  days accumulate, confidence wobbles, motivation falters and meaning has to be renegotiated repeatedly.

A final note

Despite the title, this book will not teach you how to play basketball.

It may, however, leave you thinking differently about why you set challenges for yourself, how you measure success, and what “trying” really means when outcomes are uncertain.