47 pages • 1 hour read
Gene Luen YangDragon Hoops
Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Coach Phelps”
The beginning of the fourth chapter flashes back again to the early days of basketball. In the absence of a national league, teams traveled from gymnasium to gymnasium and competed in a disorganized fashion. They often adopted names that highlighted their ethnicities, such as the Jewish House of David and San Francisco’s Hong Wah Kues. The Harlem Globetrotters—who were actually from Chicago—soon emerged as the most creative team, and one particularly gifted ball handler, Marques Haynes—who was criticized by his college coach for his unconventional style of play—attracted significant attention. The NBA formed in 1949 when the white-players-only Basketball Association of America (BAA) merged with the more progressive National Basketball League (NBL), which included four Black players. In 1947, a skirmish on the court between a Black player from the Syracuse Nationals and the white player Chick Meehan from the Tri-City Blackhawks resulted in a feud that required the attention of the National Guard. A two-page spread reading “Bump!” “Smack” and “Pow!” (116-7) features a play-by-play of the physical altercation. After this feud, Black players—with the exception of the Harlem Globetrotters—“disappeared” from the NBA. Despite this segregation, the Harlem Globetrotters invited the all-white Minneapolis Lakers to a well-attended game in 1948 in which Marques Haynes heroically played through an injury that left him in a body cast for months after he led the Globetrotters to a narrow victory. Two years later, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton was the first African American player to sign an NBA contract, paving the way for legends such as Wilt Chamberlain and Magic Johnson.
As the flashback returns to Mr. Yang’s interview with Coach Lou, a second flashback of his own reveals that Coach Lou attended UCLA as a walk-on, although Coach Phelps had not recommended Lou explicitly for the team. Coach Lou also acknowledges that Mike Phelps “was the male figure that I was around the most in high school” and that “during the season, a player spends more time with his coaches than with his parents” (131). Coach Tony, who is routinely shown wearing his newborn baby in a carrier on his stomach, mentions that even when he was a bench player, Coach Phelps made him feel important by having bench players rotate in as a scout team during practice to help the starters practice their offense.
A brief flashback to a memory from several years prior to this conversation reveals that one former player, Brian Shaw, felt discriminated against by Coach Phelps, allegedly because of his race. Shaw never started at O’Dowd, although he went on to play for U.C. Santa Barbara as well as a handful of NBA teams, where he earned three championship titles for various teams. However, when Mr. Yang asks Coach Lou about this allegation, Coach Lou suspects that it is more likely that Coach Phelps simply favored mainstream players, while occasionally the “more creative, not so cookie cutter” (136) players whom Mike Phelps discouraged from breaking the rules often happened to be Black. He does not question the coach’s attitudes toward race or explore potentially racist elements of these decisions.
In the chapter’s closing scene, Mr. Yang is shown back in the car with his wife as they travel in their minivan with four children in the back to Yang’s in-laws’ home. Yang admits to his wife his trepidation about including Phelps in his graphic novel. This dialogue only alludes to the specific circumstances surrounding Phelps’s retirement. Mr. Yang explains that Mike Phelps was the math teacher whose Algebra 2 classes he took several years prior. Mr. Yang’s wife remembers the man as “the guy who made the news?!?” (140). Thus, Yang’s wife’s reaction reveals the seriousness of this story to the reader as she encourages him to leave the coach out of the story. Yang himself, however, is not sure how to tell the story without Phelps but admits that his wife is right on this score.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Bishop Gorman Gaels vs. Bishop O’Dowd Dragons”
On a rainy night, the O’Dowd Dragons host the Gorman Gaels in an exhibition game. O’Dowd player Jeevin Sandhu asks Mr. Yang for a new hairline, and in each comic panel in which Jeevin appears speaking to Yang, he sports a slightly altered hairline. Mr. Yang regrets that he will miss the game, as he is committed to spending Saturday night with his family. The familiar pie chart showing the various time investments in Mr. Yang’s life reveals that his comic book is currently taking up more than one quarter of his family time.
Mr. Yang sits on the couch with his family watching a superhero movie. When one of his youngest daughters reacts, “Daddy, I don’t like it when there’s bad guys” (166), her father assures her that the heroes always win. Mr. Yang excuses himself from the family movie while he sits in the bathroom to check the score on his phone. While he intently watches the game’s recording given to him from the videographer, traditional-looking comic panels include onomatopoeic language like “Paap!,” “paa…paa…” and “ka-thunk!” (149-50). A full-page spread reveals Ivan dunking against a background of vivid colors and Yang’s conventional bubble text that reads “SLAAM!” (166). The Dragons best the Gaels, and Mr. Yang shouts, “Yaaa!” while imagining himself in the stands among the crowd, although a panel below reveals that he is, in fact, in his office. Yang repeats Couch Lou’s mantra that the team in basketball with the fewest mistakes will win. Back home doing the dishes, Mr. Yang’s wife notices that he is in an exceptionally good mood, and jokingly chides him for formerly questioning her brother’s similar emotional investment in the San Francisco 49ers.
In a subsequent interview with Coach Lou, Lou explains that during the game, nine of the players did not see any playing time and were not enthusiastic. Weston Bell, who Coach Lou admits is a talented player, but one to whom he didn’t grant enough playing time, transfers to another school.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Oderah and Arinze”
Chapter 6 flashes back to 1892 in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Smith College physical education teacher Senda Berenson finds an article by Naismith on the sport of basketball. In a flashback within a flashback, Berenson, a Jewish Russian immigrant, was encouraged to take up exercise as an antidote to health problems. When she became convinced of the merits of exercise, she chose to pursue a career in physical education. She first introduced women to basketball—a modified version with no stealing and minimal “ball hogging” allowed. A familiar panel shows Berenson’s close-up step on the basketball court against the text, “Step” (175), although, unlike the male characters, she wears women’s boots with a low heel.
A few pages of panels usher the reader through the next century, during which women—sporting shorter hairstyles and different clothing to suit the captioned decade—began to enjoy the lifting of certain gender-specific restrictions. In 1984, Georgeann Wells, a female player from West Virginia University who later played for the Harlem Globetrotters, was the first female player to dunk the ball. A full-page of text reads only “SLAM!” (180) to underscore the dramatic milestone represented by this event. The event was witnessed by a small crowd in the stands. The sole recording of the feat was recovered only in 2009, when a Wall Street Journal reporter tracked down the heir to the Charleston team’s videographer, who refused to relinquish the tape during his lifetime because of his pride in the recording.
Yang takes the reader back to O’Dowd, where the movement toward gender equality is manifest by the construction of two gymnasiums in 1951. Coach Lou explains that the women’s team won the state championship twice, and a panel shows a series of banners earned by the women’s team. Lou credits this success in part to Oderah Chidom, O’Dowd’s first McDonald’s All-American. Oderah is introduced on a full-page image against a backdrop of projecting stars. Mr. Yang knows Oderah as the sister of one of his computer programming students, Arinze. Arinze facilitates an interview with Oderah, who is home from Duke University after Christmas. At a diner, the brother and sister sit with Mr. Yang and explain their friendly sibling rivalry and share that their parents always supported their interest in athletics. Arinze confesses that coming to O’Dowd was difficult, as he has felt hidden by the shadow of his sister. Coach Lou puts Arinze on the junior varsity team as a junior, alongside another junior named Alex, an exchange student from China. Alex and Arinze challenge one another to earn a spot on the varsity team the following year as seniors. Arinze claims that his sister Oderah helped push him to become a more competitive player, and Oderah remains proud of her younger brother, whose high school career she follows while she is away at college.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Bishop O’Dowd Dragons vs. Montverde Eagles”
The beginning of Chapter 7 finds Mr. Yang reminding his students that he won’t be in class due to another absence for basketball game attendance. Meanwhile, Mr. Yang’s colleagues and family are convinced that a lightning storm will hinder the Dragons’ scheduled trip to Florida, where they will play the number one team in the country in a game televised on ESPN. Nevertheless, despite academic classes being canceled, the team travels to Orlando in a thunderstorm. Jeevin is frisked by airport security, according to his teammate Isaiah, because he said the word “bomb.” Alex Zhao translates for Mr. Yang the conversations of Chinese businessmen in the airport who are wondering if the students are an NBA team. When the team arrives at the $6.5 million gymnasium of the Montverde Eagles, Mr. Yang gains admission to sit with the team by identifying himself as the team tutor. The game is narrated vividly through a series of panels replete with drawings and words that demonstrate the specific court movements (e.g., “PAA…PAA…PAA…” “BEEP,” and “SLAM” (223-25). The game is tied at the fourth quarter, but when Ivan Rabb is benched for fouling, the Eagles take the lead at the half. Despite Paris’s attempts to carry the team, the Eagles enjoy a 78-64 victory. When Mr. Yang leaves the game, he sheepishly asks his wife how her birthday was, and she replies that she did laundry. Mr. Yang promises to take her out for dinner, just before he receives a phone call from DC Comics offering him a contract to write a monthly Superman comic. When his daughter asks her father if he can write a comic without superheroes, Mr. Yang assures her that, while superheroes always need an opponent, the hero always wins.
Chapter 7 mirrors the structure and appearance of Chapters 3 and 5. The title pages show stylized images of the two teams’ mascots, and images of the scoreboards punctuate the comic panels that illustrate the characters.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
These chapters feature important elements of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a literary term that refers to the allusive warning—often regarding something negative—of an event beforehand. For example, the title character of the fourth chapter, Mike Phelps, does not seem to play a big role in the chapter named for him until the final few pages, in which Coach Lou and his assistant explain how supportive he was as a coach. Additionally, the details of why Coach Phelps retired in 2002 or why he was dismissed halfway through the year from the math department are not divulged in the same chapter.
An additional theme presented in these chapters is point of view. By virtue of being a writer, Mr. Yang finds himself interviewing various characters: In addition to Coach Lou, these chapters feature extensive interviews with the assistant coach, Tony. However, the author does not limit his point of view to that of these characters alone. He weaves in details from basketball’s history, representing a sort of periodical style of reporting, with a layout that might befit a newspaper, as well as the point of view of his wife, with whom he has a conversation at the close of several chapters. In this way, Mr. Yang’s conversations with his wife impart a sort of closure to his chapters. As his wife is Mr. Yang’s closest confidante and partner, and he usually chats with her at the end of the day, the close of each Dragon Hoops chapter mirrors the character Yang’s lived experience as he goes home each day from his job as a teacher and writer. Yang the author is careful to show several points of view, despite the nature of the novel as a metatextual piece in which he conducts first-hand interviews. Finally, a structural pattern is revealed in these chapters wherein the author alternates between treating a player, coach, or individual (e.g., Chapter 2: Ivan and Paris; and Chapter 4: Coach Phelps) and reporting on a specific game (e.g., Chapter 3: Bishop O’Dowd Dragons vs. De La Salle Spartans; and Chapter 5: Bishop Gorman Gaels vs. Bishop O’Dowd Dragons). Chapter 1: “Coach Lou” establishes the titular character as Mr. Yang’s interlocutor and mouthpiece for the rest of the book, as Coach Lou facilitates many of the introductions to other characters and flashbacks.
Racism dominates these sections as a theme. Although Coach Phelps’s reputation was ultimately damaged by sexual allegations, he had previously been scrutinized for favoring white players over Black players. Coach Lou’s testimony attempts to absolve him of this damning aspersion; however, the accusations themselves are a testament to the prevalence of racism in the zeitgeist (or the prevailing mood of a particular era) during the early days of basketball. Both coaches fail to explore the role that racism may have played in the decisions that marginalized Shaw as a high school player, couching them in language related to behaviors rather than considering the ways that Phelps’s perceptions of Black athletes may have affected his decisions as a coach. In these sections, Yang introduces the related theme of gender discrimination. Chapter 6’s flashback reveals 19th-century physical education teacher Senda Berenson leading the basketball community to accept women, despite the era’s censure of women engaged in competitive sports. This process of a social group ascending to a position or achievement from which it had once been excluded is described by the metaphor of “breaking the glass ceiling.” Wells’s athletic achievements and groundbreaking role as the first female Globetrotter help illustrate changing societal mores and the progress made by female athletes as a result of Title IX protections that ensured equal access to sports for women.
These sections continue to develop the theme of metatextuality. When Jeevin bashfully asks the teacher Mr. Yang to adjust his hairline, Yang the author invites the reader right into the text as well as into his experience of writing it. Readers watch Yang change his character’s comic illustration. Yang the author also adds a dose of irony to this metatextuality: Mr. Yang—the character—wonders aloud to his wife how he will leave such a legendary figure as Phelps out of his novel, although he suspects that she is right in suggesting that he avoid such a sensitive subject, because the coach was such an influential character in the history of basketball. Astute readers may recognize the irony that the very novel they are reading does feature Phelps, which demonstrates the author’s sense of irony.
