Michael and the Whiz Kids

Imagine a boy, five feet tall and one hundred pounds, who wants to play high school basketball. Now imagine that he was blind until the age of six and that hes the first black student to attend his suburban school. And there you have Michael Thompson in 1965 in San Bruno, California. He played at the school where a young English teacher was coaching lightweight basketball, a competition for smaller players that has since disappeared. The team that Coach John Christgau put together came to be called the Whiz Kids for the way they rocketed up and down the court, led by Michael and invariably winning. Michael and the Whiz Kids tells the story of the teams 1968 championship season. It is a tale of cliffhanger games and players as outsized in character as they are short in stature, from the wild-haired, bespectacled Professor to the well-traveled Latvian dubbed Suitcase to the quiet and tenacious Salt, as in of the earth. But it is also a tale of the timeof counterculture, suburbia, integration, and racial brawls erupting on the court. In Christgaus deft telling, it is an absorbing, often comic story of coming of age, for coach and Whiz Kids alike.