The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball

The 1981–1982 Poets, the basketball team of Baltimore’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, reside in sports folklore, as Danois explains in this tedious history. Three future NBA players—Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues, David Wingate, and Reggie Williams—started with the Poets that season, and one future NBA All-Star (the late Reggie Lewis, who was a captain on the Boston Celtics) came off the bench. Coach Bob Wade, who happened to be an ex-NFL player, refused to have his players coast on their talent. Instead, the Baltimore native conducted practices where players carried bricks and sandbags to teach their bodies to combat fatigue. Danois, editor-in-chief of the Shadow League, recounts the memorable season and its resonance in a city whose salad days had shriveled into unemployment, drugs, and violence. The anecdotes, including the 5’3” Bogues astonishing crowds with his formidable abilities and Wingate’s struggle to balance basketball with caring for his disabled mother, only go so far. Danois rarely talks to anyone outside of Dunbar’s squad, and the season-long narrative lacks a hook beyond the team’s dominance. Danois’s attempts to branch out—profiling Baltimore’s youth basketball organizers and fallen legends—do little to reduce the insular flimsiness. (Sept.)