winners
What it's about (or who cares, i'll buy it)
Chimney sweep Shane McCarthy has three great loves in life: a whip-smart wife named Lou, pickup basketball, and his booming hometown, San Francisco.While Lou hunts easy millions at the height of the dot-com frenzy, Shane fills his extra hours searching for a troubled player from his weekly hoops game—a twenty-year-old named Sampson who's disappeared, leaving only a bulging duffle bag behind. Following the trail that winds through Pacific Heights parties and the projects, Shane unravels a mystery that links his wife's new world to the missing Sampson and his family.
Evoking the glitter of The Great Gatsby and the pulsing streets of Clockers, Winners is both a chronicle of a surreal historic moment and a gripping portait of a man caught between two worlds. A novel of startling scope and ambition, Winners reaches into the hearts and minds of would-be millionaires and ghetto toughs, businesswomen and single moms, gym-rat moguls and pissed-off slackers, all grasping for the gold ring of something better.
How it happened
Winners is the most personal thing I've ever written and my love letter to San Francisco. It might not look like it, but it is. I knew I was going to write about my adoptive home, and my life gave me this: an unhealthy obsession with pickup basketball, an inside view of San Francisco's dot-com decadence, a suicide, and a stolen call. I've played pickup ball my whole life with guys named Bingo, Mingo, Dragon, D-1, Bindo, Finesse, Wood, Deuce, Show, Super Mario, Porno, that kind of thing. Guys you play ball with, well, you're not close, not in any normal way, but you end up hanging out alot over the years. Then I played in a game for a while where one of these guys killed himself, and it brought all those walls tumbling down.
We realized how little we knew about each other, and yet we had that collective feeling of wanting to do something. So that was the first piece of the puzzle, this extraordinary and instant coming together of half-strangers on the court.
The second part was the insanity of 1999 in San Francisco. I was working for a dot-com mogul friend who organized over-the-top parties packed with the rich and famous and hungry hopefuls. But I lived pretty close to some of the city's housing projects, and one day my car was stolen and I went out looking for it. By chance I ran into a guy I'd known from when I worked at a homeless shelter in the early 90's. He was living in the projects, and we started spending some time together. So WINNERS was born in that bouncing back and forth between the world of the projects and the world of dot-com prosperity, with the idea of a mystery that brings these two worlds together.
What they're saying
"Expertly written, just the right blend of existential mystery with hoop dreams..." --Kirkus Reviews
"A well-crafted, unsentimental examination of loneliness and the lengths to which some people will go in order to connect with another human being." --Publishers Weekly
"Fast-paced story of the culture clash between old and new, rich and poor, real and virtual..." --Library Journal