Hardwood: A Novel About College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play

Hardwood is a comedic contemporary novel narrated by Jimmy Tribeca, the story’s protagonist and a white point-guard from Brooklyn, N.Y., playing for an otherwise all-black Lewis & Clark College basketball team. Through a fluke, the college shocks the collegiate basketball world by recruiting one of the nation’s most sought after high school graduates, a scoring machine named Trevor Windgate who brings national attention to Lewis & Clark and its men’s basketball team. Tribeca is a psychology major battling the persistent Portland rainfall and a nasty case of Seasonal Affective Disorder -- as well as an aberrant relationship with his on-and-off girlfriend, and a relationship of questionable closeness to his mother. Tribeca’s curriculum includes brutal and revealing therapy sessions with a German émigré named Meghan Himmler, a decorated psychologist who Tribeca both admires and resents. The standoffish Windgate is a nature-loving country boy (hence, his decision to attend Lewis & Clark to study its heralded environmental law program) who has more in common with Tribeca than his black ＂brothers＂ from America’s inner cities. One militant teammate starts a mail correspondence with Louis Farrakhan and decides to join the Nation of Islam at mid-season and insists on changing his name, setting off a fresh round of tumult just as the Lewis & Clark Pioneers are in hot pursuit of an undefeated Immaculate Season. The team’s head coach, Roman Hoyt, is prescribed a cocktail of anti-depressants to endure the mounting pressure, a situation exacerbated by threats of dismissal from the college’s Athletic Director if Hoyt does not finally win the Northwest Conference Championship -- especially after the department bent recruiting guidelines to get Windgate’s letter of intent. The story reaches its madcap crescendo when two catastrophic events imperil the season and several careers.

Mike Consol is a career-long journalist, working as a reporter, editor, writing coach, publisher, blogger and podcaster for companies such as Knight Ridder, American City Business Journals and Institutional Real Estate, Inc. You can learn more about him at www.MikeConsol.com. Hardwood is his first novel. His second novel, soon to be published, is titled Family Recipes -- A Novel about Italian Culture, Catholic Guilt and the Culinary Crime of the Century.