National Basketball Association

The National Basketball Association is represented in the novel through Andre Fleet’s career as a professional basketball player and through the playoff story he tells at a campaign gathering. The league supplies more than a credential: Fleet draws on its competitive world to make a case for collective discipline, turning a remembered game into a lesson about how a team—and, by implication, a community—can act together.

Fleet’s professional career

Before his political rise, Fleet played in the National Basketball Association as a point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers and the New York Knicks. At a church gathering, Isaac Blakey presents him as an accomplished student and athlete who went on to play in the league, linking his professional success to his origins on Atlanta’s South Side and to his continuing ties to home.

The narration measures Fleet’s stature against the league’s unusually large players. At six foot four, he had seemed comparatively small in the NBA, but in the church hall he appeared to tower over the audience. His physical presence and professional history combine to make him a persuasive public figure: a star who has returned to speak among local people rather than appearing only from an elevated stage.

The league as a source of public authority

Fleet’s NBA career is part of the way his campaign is introduced and staged. Blakey recalls Fleet’s athletic success, while Fleet himself moves through the church audience, reaching out to people in the rows. The account sets his professional prominence against this close, accessible manner of campaigning. His NBA past lends him symbolic standing, but the scene presents that standing as most effective when he appears to be among his listeners.

The league also gives Fleet a recognizable framework for political persuasion. At the pulpit he shifts among roles—the preacher, neighbor, fishing companion, and former NBA player—and uses basketball to address the audience. The sport is not an incidental detail in his biography; it is a shared vocabulary through which he can turn a personal memory into a public argument about cooperation.

The playoff story and its lesson

Fleet recounts a playoff game in which the 76ers faced the Boston Celtics, then featuring Larry Bird. His team was behind three games to one in the series and trailed by 21 points entering the fourth quarter. Coach Buster Grant brought the players together and told them to approach the period as though the game were just beginning, to play basketball rather than force desperate long shots, and to let only the open player shoot.

The instruction also checked the habits of Gunner Wycoff, a gifted shooter who kept firing whether or not he was open. Grant did not single him out, but let his eyes rest on him longer than on the others. The team then outscored Boston 35–13 in the final period and won 84–83. Seven players shared the scoring, none making more than six points; Wycoff scored four, two from free throws. Fleet stresses that Wycoff gained something beyond points: recognition that he could pass and make plays as well as shoot.

Narrative significance

Fleet presents the comeback as the result not merely of sound advice but of words that reached the players’ sense of themselves as a team. The anecdote gives practical shape to his political appeal: shared purpose matters more than an individual’s urge to dominate, and a group can improve when each member accepts a role beyond personal glory. By grounding that appeal in his NBA experience, the novel makes professional basketball both a source of Fleet’s public authority and the central analogy through which he argues for collective action.