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Travel Team Paperback – August 18, 2005
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Twelve-year-old Danny Walker may be the smallest kid on the basketball court -- but don't tell him that. Because no one plays with more heart or court sense. But none of that matters when he is cut from his local travel team, the very same team his father led to national prominence as a boy. Danny's father, still smarting from his own troubles, knows Danny isn't the only kid who was cut for the wrong reason, and together, this washed-up former player and a bunch of never-say-die kids prove that the heart simply cannot be measured.
For fans of The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, the Mighty Ducks, and Mike Lupica's other New York Times bestselling novels Heat, The Underdogs, and Million-Dollar Throw, here is a book that proves that when the game knocks you down, champions stand tall.
- Print length274 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level3 - 7
- Lexile measure930L
- Dimensions8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
- PublisherViking Books for Young Readers
- Publication dateAugust 18, 2005
- ISBN-100142404624
- ISBN-13978-0142404621
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“In a story every bit as exciting and tear-jerking as any novel or movie in its genre – Hoosiers, Mighty Ducks, The Bad News Bears – Danny gets his chance at glory. Lupica . . . has the knowledge of the game and the lean prose to make this a taut, realistic story not just about the game but about heart, character, and family. A winner.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Lupica . . . sets the scene for on-court action, and delivers play-by-play descriptions . . . that will thrill basketball buffs. Genuinely affecting.” –Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
He just didn’t think he was small.
Big difference.
Danny had known his whole life how small he was compared to everybody in his grade, from the first grade on. How he had been put in the front row, front and center, of every class picture taken. Been in the front of every line marching into every school assembly, first one through the door. Sat in the front of every classroom. Hey, little man. Hey, little guy. He was used to it by now. They’d been studying DNA in science lately; being small was in his DNA. He’d show up for soccer, or Little League baseball tryouts, or basketball, when he’d first started going to basketball tryouts at the Y, and there’d always be one of those clipboard dads who didn’t know him, or his mom. Or his dad.
Asking him: “Are you sure you’re with the right group, little guy?”
Meaning the right age group.
It happened the first time when he was eight, back when he still had to put the ball up on his shoulder and give it a heave just to get it up to a ten–foot rim. When he’d already taught himself how to lean into the bigger kid guarding him, just because there was always a bigger kid guarding him, and then step back so he could get his dopey shot off.
This was way back before he’d even tried any fancy stuff, including the crossover.
He just told the clipboard dad that he was eight, that he was little, that this was his right group, and could he have his number, please? When he told his mom about it later, she just smiled and said, “You know what you should hear when people start talking about your size? Blah blah blah.”
He smiled back at her and said that he was pretty sure he would be able to remember that.
“How did you play?” she said that day, when she couldn’t wait any longer for him to tell.
“I did okay.”
“I have a feeling you did more than that,” she said, hugging him to her. “My streak of light.”
Sometimes she’d tell him how small his dad had been when he was Danny’s age.
Sometimes not.
But here was the deal, when he added it all up: His height had always been much more of a stinking issue for other people, including his mom, than it was for him.
He tried not to sweat the small stuff, basically, the way grown–ups always told you.
He knew he was faster than everybody else at St. Patrick’s School. And at Springs School, for that matter. Nobody on either side of town could get in front of him. He was the best passer his age, even better than Ty Ross, who was better at everything in sports than just about anybody. He knew that when it was just kids—which is the way kids always liked it in sports—and the parents were out of the gym or off the playground and you got to just play without a whistle blowing every ten seconds or somebody yelling out more instructions, he was always one of the first picked, because the other guys on his team, the shooters especially, knew he’d get them the ball.
Most kids, his dad told him one time, know something about basketball that even most grown–ups never figure out.
One good passer changes everything.
Danny could pass, which is why he’d always made the team.
Almost always.
But no matter what was happening with any team he’d ever played on, no matter how tired he would be after practice, no matter how much homework he still had left, this driveway was still his special place. Like a special club with a membership of one, the place where he could come out at this time of night and imagine it up good, imagine it big and bright, even with just the one floodlight over the backboard and the other light, smaller, over the back door. His mother had done everything she could to make the driveway wider back here, even cutting into what little backyard they had the summer before last. “I told them you needed more room in the corners,” she said. “The men from the paving company. They just nodded at me, like corners were some sort of crucial guy thing.”
“Right up there with the remote control switcher for the TV,” Danny said. “And leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor.”
“How are the corners now?”
“Perfect,” he said. “Like at the Garden.”
He had just enough room in the corners now, mostly for shooting. He didn’t feel as if he was trying to make a drive to the basket in his closet. Or an elevator car. He had room to maneuver, pretend he really was at the real Garden, that he was one of the small fast guys who’d made it all the way there. Like Muggsy Bogues, somebody he’d read up on when one of his coaches told him to, who was only 5–3 and made it to the NBA. Like Tiny Archibald and Bobby Hurley and Earl Boykins, a 5–5 guy who came out of the basketball minor leagues, another streak of light who showed everybody that more than size mattered, even in hoops.
And, of course, Richie Walker.
Middletown’s own.
Danny would put chairs out there and dribble through them like he was dribbling out the clock at the end of the game. Some nights he would borrow a pair of his mother’s old sunglasses and tape the bottom part of the lens so he couldn’t see the ball unless he looked straight down at it. This was back when he was first trying to perfect the double crossover, before he even had a chance to do it right, his hands being too little and his arms not being nearly long enough.
Sometimes he’d be so dog tired when he finished—though he would never cop to that with his mom—he’d fall into bed with his clothes on and nearly fall asleep that way.
“You done?” she’d say when she came in to say goodnight.
“I finally got bored,” he’d say, and she’d say with a smile,
“I always worry about that, you getting bored by basketball.”
Everybody he’d ever read up on, short or tall, had talked about how they outworked everybody else. Magic Johnson, he knew, won the championship his rookie season with the Lakers, scored forty–two points in the final game of the championship series when he had to play center because Kareem Abdul–Jabbar was hurt, then went back to East Lansing, Michigan, where he was from, in the summer and worked on his outside shooting because he’d decided it wasn’t good enough.
Tonight, Danny had worked past the time when his mom usually called him in, not even noticing how cold it had gotten for October. Worked underneath the new backboard she’d gotten for him at the end of the summer. Not the only kid in his class with divorced parents now. Not the smallest kid on the court now. Just the only one. He’d drive to the basket and then hit one of the chairs with one of his lookaway passes. Or he’d step back and make a shot from the outside. Sometimes, breathing hard, like it was a real game, he’d step to the free throw line he’d drawn with chalk and make two free throws for the championship of something.
Just him and the ball and the feel of it in his hands and the whoosh of it going through the net and the sound one of the old wooden school chairs would make when he tipped it over with another bounce pass. He knew he was wearing out another pair of sneakers his mom called “old school,” which to Danny always meant “on sale.” Or that she had found his size at either the Nike store or the Reebok store at the factory outlet mall about forty–five minutes from Middletown, both of them knowing she couldn’t afford what Athlete’s Foot or Foot Locker was charging for the new Kobe sneakers from Nike, or Iverson’s, or McGrady’s. Or the cool new LeBron James kicks that so many of the Springs School kids were wearing this year.
He finished the way he always did, trying to cleanly execute the crossover–and–back five times in a row, low enough to the ground to be like a rock he was skipping across Taylor Lake. Five times usually making it an official good night out here.
Except.
Except this was as far from a good night as he’d ever known.
Basically, this was the worst night of his whole life.
Danny’s mother, Ali, watched him from his bedroom window on the second floor, standing to the side of the window in the dark room, trying not to let him see her up here, even though she could see him sneaking a look occasionally, especially when he’d do something fine down on the court, sink a long one or make a left–handed layup or execute that tricky dribble he was always working on.
Sometimes he’d do it right and come right out of it and be on his way to the basket, so fast she thought he should leave a puff of smoke like one of those old Roadrunner cartoons.
God, you’re getting old, she thought. Did kids even know who the Roadrunner was anymore?
“Nice work with that double dribble,” she’d tell him sometimes when he finally came in the house, tired even if he’d never admit that to her.
“Mom, you know it’s not a double dribble. This”—showing her on the kitchen floor with the ball that was on its way up to his room with him—“is a double crossover.”
“Whatever it is,” she’d say, “don’t do it in the kitchen.”
That would get a smile out of her boy sometimes.
The boy who had cried when he told her his news tonight.
He was twelve now. And never let her see him cry unless he took a bad spill in a game or in the driveway, or got himself all tied up because he was afraid he was going to fail some test, even though he never did.
But tonight her son cried in the living room and let her hug him as she told him she hoped this was the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“If it is,” she said, “you’re going to have an even happier life than I imagined for you.”
She pushed back a little and smoothed out some of his blond hair, spikey now because he’d been wearing one of his four thousand baseball caps while he played.
“What do I always tell you?” she said.
Without looking up at her, reciting it like she was helping him learn his part in a school play, Danny said, “Nobody imagines up things better than you do.”
“There you go.”
Another one of their games.
Except on this night he suddenly said, “So how come you can’t imagine a happier life for us now?”
Then got up from the couch and ran out of the room and the next thing she heard was the bounce of the ball in the driveway. Like the real beat of his heart.
Or their lives.
She waited a while, cleaned up their dinner dishes, even though that never took long with just the two of them, finished correcting some test papers. Then she went up to his room and watched him try to play through this, the twelve–year–old who went through life being asked if he was ten, or nine, or eight.
Ali saw what she always saw, even tonight, when he was out here with the fierce expression on his face, hardly ever smiling, even as he dreamed his dreams, imagining for himself now, imagining up a happy life for himself, one where he wasn’t always the smallest. One where all people saw was the size of his talent, all that speed, all the magic things he could do with a basketball in either hand.
No matter how much she tried not to, she saw all his father in him.
He was all the way past the house, on his way to making the right on Cleveland Avenue, when he saw the light at the end of the driveway, and saw the little boy back there.
He stopped the car.
Or maybe it stopped itself.
He was good at blaming, why not blame the car?
What was that old movie where Jack Nicholson played the retired astronaut? He couldn’t remember the name, just that Shirley MacLaine was in it, too, and she was going around with Jack, and then her daughter got sick and the whole thing turned into a major chick flick.
There was this scene where Nicholson was trying to leave town, but the daughter was sick, and even though he didn’t care about too much other than having fun, he couldn’t leave because Shirley MacLaine needed him.
You think old Jack is out of there, adios, and then he shows up at the door, that smile on his face, and says, “Almost a clean getaway.”
He used to think his life was a movie. Enough people used to tell him that it was.
He parked near the corner of Cleveland and Earl, then walked halfway back up the block, across the street from 422 Earl, still wondering what he was doing on this street tonight, cruising this neighborhood, in this stupid small small–minded town.
Watching this kid play ball.
Mesmerized, watching the way this kid, about as tall as his bad hip, could handle a basketball.
Watching him shoot his funny shot, pushing the ball off his shoulder like he was pushing a buddy over a fence. He seemed to miss as many shots as he made. But he never missed the folding chairs he was obviously using as imaginary teammates, whether he was looking at them when he fired one of his passes. Or not.
Watching the kid stop after a while, rearrange the chairs now, turning them into defenders, dribbling through them, controlling the ball better with his right hand than his left, keeping the ball low, only struggling when he tried to get tricky and double up on a crossover move.
The kid stopping sometimes, breathing hard, going through his little routine before making a couple of free throws. Like it was all some complicated game being played inside the kid’s head.
He hadn’t heard anybody coming, so he nearly jumped out of his skin when she tapped him on the shoulder, jumping back a little until he saw who it was.
“Why don’t you go over?” Ali said.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people that way.”
“No,” she said, “you shouldn’t sneak up on people that way.”
“I was going to call tomorrow,” he said.
“Boy,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.”
Ali said, “You can catch me up later on the fascinating comings and goings of your life. Right now, this is one of those nights in his life when he needs his father, Rich. To go with about a thousand others.”
Richie Walker noticed she wasn’t looking at him, she was facing across the street the way he was, watching Danny.
“Why tonight in particular?”
“He didn’t make travel team,” she said now on the quiet, dark street. “Your travel team.”
“Look at him play. How could he not make travel?”
“They told him he was too small.”
Product details
- Publisher : Viking Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (August 18, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 274 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0142404624
- ISBN-13 : 978-0142404621
- Reading age : 10 - 13 years, from customers
- Lexile measure : 930L
- Grade level : 3 - 7
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Mike Lupica](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31eVSrMgWtL._SY600_.jpg)
Mike Lupica is one of the most prominent sports writers in America. His longevity at the top of his field is based on his experience and insider's knowledge, coupled with a provocative presentation that takes an uncompromising look at the tumultuous world of professional sports. Today he is a syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News, which includes his popular “Shooting from the Lip” column, which appears every Sunday. He began his newspaper career covering the New York Knicks for the New York Post at age 23. He became the youngest columnist ever at a New York paper with the New York Daily News, which he joined in 1977. For more than 30 years, Lupica has added magazines, novels, sports biographies, other non-fiction books on sports, as well as television to his professional resume. For the past fifteen years, he has been a TV anchor for ESPN's The Sports Reporters. He also hosted his own program, The Mike Lupica Show on ESPN2. In 1987, Lupica launched “The Sporting Life” column in Esquire magazine. He has published articles in other magazines, including Sport, World Tennis, Tennis, Golf Digest, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, ESPN: The Magazine, Men's Journal and Parade. He has received numerous honors, including the 2003 Jim Murray Award from the National Football Foundation. Mike Lupica co-wrote autobiographies with Reggie Jackson and Bill Parcells, collaborated with noted author and screenwriter, William Goldman on Wait Till Next Year, and wrote The Summer of '98, Mad as Hell: How Sports Got Away from the Fans and How We Get It Back and Shooting From the Lip, a collection of columns. In addition, he has written a number of novels, including Dead Air, Extra Credits, Limited Partner, Jump, Full Court Press, Red Zone, Too Far and national bestsellers Wild Pitch and Bump and Run. Dead Air was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Mystery and became a CBS television move, “Money, Power, Murder” to which Lupica contributed the teleplay. Over the years he has been a regular on the CBS Morning News, Good Morning America and The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour. On the radio, he has made frequent appearances on Imus in the Morning since the early 1980s. His previous young adult novels, Travel Team, Heat, Miracle on 49th Street, and the summer hit for 2007, Summer Ball, have shot up the New York Times bestseller list. Lupica is also what he describes as a “serial Little League coach,” a youth basketball coach, and a soccer coach for his four children, three sons and a daughter. He and his family live in Connecticut.
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Customers say the book is great for young adults and sports lovers. They find the writing style very well written and entertaining. Readers describe the plots as educational and entertaining, and mention the book as realistic fiction.
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Customers find the book great for young adults, boys who love sports, and friendship. They also mention that the story touches on many topics.
"Nice series for boys who love BB ... there is good story that touches on many life lessons and good values ...." Read more
"...about determination, integrity, sportsmanship, friendship and love of the game😊. I enjoyed reading it with my 12 year old grandson...." Read more
"I think this book is great for pre-teens and ages 8-14, I personally loved it and love Mike Lupica but some people would disagree...." Read more
"Mike Lupica books are just perfect for boys that are really into sports. I would say that boys from 5th-grade-9th grade will just love them...." Read more
Customers find the book very well written, detailed, and easy to read. They also appreciate the great description and expressive tone of voice.
"This book has a high lexicon which my 10 year old needs. He loves this series. Highly recommend." Read more
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"...set really helps them absorb the information clearly with expressive tone of voice!..." Read more
"It was very well written and had me at the edge of my seat through out the whole book wanting to know what would happen next!" Read more
Customers find the book age appropriate, educational, and intriguing. They also say the plots are inspirational.
"...series for boys who love BB ... there is good story that touches on many life lessons and good values ...." Read more
"Super book about determination, integrity, sportsmanship, friendship and love of the game😊. I enjoyed reading it with my 12 year old grandson...." Read more
"...This audio set really helps them absorb the information clearly with expressive tone of voice!..." Read more
"This book is compelling, intriguing, but most of all, inspirational.I loved it. Now you can should love it too." Read more
Customers find the book realistic fiction with nice plots. They also say it's age appropriate and educational.
"...My boy loved this writer and I would highly recommend it ! Nice plots - age appropriate and edicational as well as entertaining ." Read more
"...It is a realistic fiction and I would recommend this for people who are basketball fans and like mike lupicas books." Read more
"Great fictional sports author..." Read more
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By: Gianni Leonardo
Travel team
Book review
This book is about a young basketball player named Danny Walker. He tries hard to get on the basketball team. Danny usually makes the team, until this year, When he didn't make the team, he felt confused. He later found out that he didn't make the team because he was too small. Danny's dad decides to make a team for him. Danny's dad used to play basketball until he got in a car crash. They then won a couple of games and eventually made playoffs. Danny's dad then gets in another car crash. After that, the best player, who breaks his wrist later on, joins the Middletown Vikings.
I highly recommend this book to everyone, especially if you love basketball. The book is very suspenseful. Every chapter has its own problem to be solved. The characters are very relate able, which makes the book even better. Once you pick the book up, you can't put it down.
The theme of this book, is not to give up. Even though Danny was cut from his team, he still kept going. And believed in himself and kept his head up high and didn’t doubt himself. Even through the darkest times, Danny still has hope for his team. I think if you play basketball or any sport in general and you are having trouble of making the team this book will show you to not have doubt, to be confident and keep trying. Hopefully this will show you a little bit about the book . You can learn from Danny’s experiences from his problems. !
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