Our podcast interview series "Ram It, Jam It" features an informal, conversational format with Tuscaloosa and regional artists in open, honest conversations about each them including what they're up to, a focus on their relationship to Tuscaloosa, their childhoods, their introduction to music and much more.
knows basketball. Born in Indiana, he can't help it.
His father Royce Waltman served as an assistant at Indiana University under legendary head coach Bobby Knight and then as head coach for DePauw (Kevin's alma mater, University of Indianapolis and Indiana State.
Despite not playing much beyond high school and intramural basketball, Kevin Waltman remains an avid fan and student of the game. He opted to admire the sport as a spectator for many years and now as an author of several young adult novels depicting young players' lives and attachment to it.
. It marks the first in a four-part series telling the story of Derrick, an inner city Indianapolis high school phenom learning the ropes of the game and a social life as he enters his freshman year.
Waltman, a full-time instructor in the English department at the University of Alabama, wrote the book in Tuscaloosa during 2012, in the midst of another national championship run for the Alabama football team. But Waltman says the football success in Tuscaloosa offers little distraction for the sport to which he's remained steadily devoted his entire life.
He grew up about an hour away from Indianapolis and then lived and worked in Indianapolis for about five years, giving him "a good sense of Indianapolis high school hoops."
In the podcast below, Waltman talks about growing up in Indiana with a basketball coach for a father, opting to write instead of pursue sports, bucking stereotypes about Indiana basketball stories, getting inside the head of an inner city teenager and staying patient in his industry.
Each book in the series will mark one of each of Derrick's years of high school. Waltman is currently writing the second manuscript, which he hopes to finish by the end of the year and release this time in 2014.
Though I've lived in Alabama for over 12 years now, I'm still very much a product of Indiana. Having lived there for the majority of my life, that doesn't disappear when I come here. It's not hard for me to tap into that basketball mentality just based on how long I lived in Indiana.
I played and played poorly. I played up until my season year of high school. Became pretty evident that I was going to be pretty much relegated to the bench. My dad was a basketball coach. He started out high school coach in Pennsylvania, and then we moved to Bloomington where he was an assistant for Bob Knight for five years. Then from there, he was a head coach at DePauw and then Indianapolis and Indiana State. My life was pretty well-steeped in basketball, even if my playing career didn't amount to much of a career at all.
I was lucky in that I had a coach/father who was a father first and foremost. I'd always go to his games, we'd watch games together, we'd go to games together. There was never a sense for me as I'm somehow failing if I'm not a good basketball player. A lot of coaches' sons are kind of forced into playing, and that becomes the crux of the whole father-son relationship.
There's so much out there. You have the movie "Hoosiers" and all kinds of variations on it where it's the small town underdog. "Hoosiers" was my favorite movie as a kid, and those stories are great. But those stories have been done. As far as the types of players that are going on to college and the NBA, it's more commonly kids who are coming up in these kinds of neighborhoods. I'm also moving away from the stereotype of the corn-fed, country shooting guard. He's in the inner city, but not from this kind of chaotic background. He's got this solid home life. The school, while it's not the greatest school in the state, there's a sense of structure, discipline and education there. I tried to let that come through.
A little bit when I was young. When I got into college, I got hooked on creative writing courses. For me, writing fiction has always made more sense of a way to get across things I want to get across. It's something I certainly thought about, but fiction was what worked for me, so that's where I went from there.
It's exciting to be excited about them again. When I was living in Indianapolis, it was the Reggie Miller era. That was fantastic. So fun to live in a city with that kind of buzz come playoff time especially, and I remember going to playoff games. It's exciting to see them being able to challenge the Heat. It's been a challenge in terms of writing and revising the book. I can't anticipate how the NBA season is going to play out as the book is released. The best I can gauge is what happened last year. There are lines in there like when Derrick says the Pacers are always going to be a step behind the Heat. I'd be really happy if that line in particular turned out to be wrong.
There's a lot of perseverance, but there's also a lot of luck. Anyone's who's honest will tell you that. It was a project that started in 2011, maybe the end of 2010. At one point, it had died. By serendipity, it got on the desks of some people at Cinco Puntos Press. They wound up contacting me after I kind of thought the project was never going to materialize. You write in isolation, and you try to block out 'Where does this go?" because that's so far down the road. There's a little bit of a sense of a lottery. You just send and send and send. There were a lot of places who said no to this. It's just a matter of searching and searching until you find a press who sees what you hope they see.