Book Review: Getting Open by Tom Graham, Rachel Graham Cody

Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball

by Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody

Hardcover, 272 pages Published March 28th 2006 by Atria Books

My father taught at Indiana University, and the majority of sporting events I have been to in my life have been at IU. Some of my earliest memories come from the first season we had season tickets for 1981. That was the year Isiah Thomas lead the Hoosiers to the national title. While I have mixed feelings in hindsight about the Bobby Knight era of IU basketball I have Hoosier hoops in my blood. Martha the mop lady commercials make me emotional, the IU fight song gets me pumped even though personally I didn't go to IU.

So I was interested in this history not just as a IU fan but a fan of basketball history and Indiana state history. Getting Open is the detailed history of Bill Garrett - the first black player in the big ten. This is an important story about the integration of college basketball. While Garrett was the Jackie Robinson of midwestern college basketball it is important to note that outside the big Ten Black players were accepted to colleges in the west and even a few in the south. The Big Ten, however, was the most visible and popular conference in the sport at the time and in the early 40's they had "Gentlemen's agreement," not to recruit a black player. While that would have been better to call it an "Asshole's Agreement," but whatever. I am not going to say it was easy, certainly Bill Garrett dealt with may examples of racism. The history of racial prejudice in Indiana is not a pretty one. In the years after Garrett one player was murdered and the Klan blew up a black orientated store in downtown Bloomington. That said I happy to say his experience was not as bad as I feared. This book is a fun read if you are into the history of the sport, the story of Garrett's high school run to the Indiana state championship and the 40's Indiana march madness that inspired the national tournament was probably my favorite part. In this book, I learned so much about how the sport worked before TV coverage and that was interesting. In that context I learned little bits and pieces about Indiana. It was really interesting to learn that the Senate street YMCA in Indy was a cultral center where the black community organized. I learned that one of the first competitive basketball games out of Springfield Mass was in Indiana in 1896, and it was between the Lafayette and Crawfordsville Y's. I knew basketball was almost a religion in Indiana but this helped me to understand why. I really enjoyed this book, it is a fun and important history. I don't want to give away what happened to Bill Garrett but it is too bad it turned out the way it did.