University of Arkansas Press Publishes Hoop Crazy

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton, by Dennis Gildea (cloth, $34.95), as part of its ongoing Sport in American Society series.

Clair Bee (1896–1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Coach Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players’ involvement with gambling.

To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge’s scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee’s attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit.

The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over 2 million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.

Michael Weinreb, author of The Kings of New York and Bigger than the Game, called Hoop Crazy “an engaging portrait of a man who was long overdue for a serious re-examination of his legacy.”

Dennis Gildea, a former sportswriter, is a professor of communications at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

The University of Arkansas Press was founded in 1980 as the book publishing division of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.