John, what lured you to a basketball book? This is not the area that I expected to find

you in.

I love basketball, especially college basketball. I dreamed of playing all sports when I was

a kid. I liked every other kid and played sports. And I was good enough to start in basketball,

baseball, football, when I was a junior in high school. And that was about the peak of

my career. But I love basketball. Again, I loved all of them. But we, back then we played

each sport, you know, in season. And it was a, each sport was a lot of fun. Dreamed of

playing in college and never got close. Glaring lack of talent. And the, the, the, the,

some big sports fans since then, especially college sports. And we live here in Charlottesville,

Virginia. We got all UVA home games here. And my wife is a, a, a, Tar Hill, my daughter's

a Tar Hill. So we have that going on too. So we go to a bunch of games in Chapel Hill.

Throughout the winter, starting really in around the first of December, we watch a lot of

basketball and keep up with the ACC. And so that's sort of the background as far as why,

you know, I've written two football novels and one baseball novel because I had the stories

for those books and always thought about a basketball novel and didn't really have the

story until a couple of years ago, it came together. How did it come together? There were

three or four different inspirations at all kind of landed at the same time. The first

inspiration I just told you is love for the game and, and no, a little bit about college

basketball. The biggest inspiration was about two years ago, I found a magazine article

somewhere online, I think, about a team of top players from South Sudan who in the US,

doing a summer showcase tournament, these tournaments, you know, rage all over the country.

And they're great tournaments because kids have come all over the world and all the college

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