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 11-13 and EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Moreau Catholic Mariners vs. Bishop O’Dowd Dragons”
Mr. Yang approaches Jeevin to offer his empathy for the taunting he endured, but Jeevin claims that such taunting was nothing compared to the heckling that the team experiences in the Castro Valley. A flashback scene shows Castro Valley fans shouting things such as, “Go back to Beijing, Number 22” (323). A series of brief and successive comic flashbacks shows Paris breaking the school record with 43 points in a game and Ivan being named a McDonald’s All-American. During one game in which Alex carries the team in the absence of an injured Paris and sick Ivan, the team celebrates his accomplishments by pretending to pray with three fingers. Mr. Yang comments that such behaviors may have been culturally insensitive.
When Coach Lou will not let Paris play because he refuses to wear team shoes in a game against the Campolindo Cougars due to a toe injury, the assistant coach advocates for him. Paris ends up playing and performing exceptionally. In a separate interview, Coach Tony explains that Coach Lou wants his players to adopt a team identity. Coach Lou, for his part, clarifies that he simply doesn’t want his players to use their near-celebrity status to behave as though they are above the rules. He also confesses that the irreverent Paris reminds him of himself as a kid. In March 2015, the team plays the Moreau Catholic Mariners in the North Coast Section Championship. Mr. Yang decides to ignore a phone call from his agent before the game.
The game against the Mariners is heated. Paris Austin taunts a player who fouled him, so Coach Lou pulls him from the game. Although the Dragons are favored, they have only a 39-36 lead at halftime. The assistant coaches are more upset than Coach Lou, and Coach Tony covers his baby’s ears while he shouts obscenities at the players in the locker room. The second half finds the Dragons having earned a 10-point lead to advance to the Northern California Championship.
Back at home, Mr. Yang confesses to his wife that he plans to leave teaching. Although he has misgivings about not meeting with success, his wife jokingly suggests that he seems like he is interested in committing to the comics venture only if he is guaranteed success. In a later one-on-one interview with Coach Lou, the latter explains the details surrounding his hamstring injury: rather than occurring in a basketball game, it was caused by running recklessly during a $5 street race to which he was challenged. Lou thereafter had to retire from playing competitive basketball to take various jobs as a store manager and customer service representative before contacting Coach Phelps to ask about becoming his assistant coach. Lou explains that this is the reason why he doesn’t like his players to think that they are above the rules.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Austin”
Content Warning: The Chapter 12 Summary of this section includes discussion of sexual abuse.
Coach Yang interviews Austin Walker, a player who admits often being confused with superstar Paris Austin, one of Chapter 2’s title characters. Nevertheless, Austin does not seem to mind the confusion, as he is a confident, self-assured young man who Mr. Yang notes seems always to act as though he feels at home. Mr. Yang also briefly interviews Austin’s father, an alumnus of U.C. Berkeley and a public defender in Oakland, who takes no credit for his son’s interest in basketball, as he himself was a football player in high school. Austin explains that he has been attending Catholic schools all his life, and O’Dowd has always felt like home to him. Yang notes Austin’s poise and self-assurance, but the young player reveals his remarkable maturity and perspective when he explains that, after being sidelined by an injury for over a month, he enjoyed watching his teammates get more playing time. Austin’s confident and steady behavior causes Mr. Yang, shown in profile staring anxiously at his computer to question Coach Lou’s assertion that “the fewest mistakes win” (358), thinking that the courage to risk making a mistake matters more. Interrupting Mr. Yang beginning to anxiously type on his computer is his wife, who enters the room and says, “Don’t do it” (358). It’s unclear to what she is referring for the several pages of dialogue that follow. Mr. Yang’s wife claims that his comic books are allowed to change things, before transforming into an apparition of Mr. Yang himself, thus revealing her to have been a figment of his imagination. Mr. Yang recognizes his double as one side of his internal debate, but, in the next panel, his double is replaced by Mr. Yang’s colleagues, who discourage him from hurting the school. At this point, the reader still has little knowledge of this highly metatextual representation of Yang’s internal debate until Mr. Yang breaks the fourth wall by looking out at the reader and claiming, “I know what happened before, with Coach Phelps. I have to get that across to the reader, don’t I?” (361).
The following pages explain that Coach Phelps was on his way to becoming the winningest coast in California high school basketball history, when suddenly, in 2003, an anonymous allegation of sexual abuse 36 years prior caused him to be placed on administrative leave from O’Dowd, and, although the charges remained unsubstantiated and eventually dropped, his reputation remained tarnished, and he was never asked to return to O’Dowd.
The backdrop of Phelps’s story is a history of sexual abuse charges, beginning in the 1980s, against the Catholic church, usually on the part of priests. Mr. Yang admits that many of these emerging articles contained true and horrific stories about child abuse; however, when Mr. Yang asks Coach Lou for his opinion, the latter equivocates, saying “We don’t really know […] so what do you do when you’re faced with that kind of uncertainty?” (367). Lou himself admits to having taken a fateful step—represented by the motif of a close-up foot against the words “Step” (370)—to embrace Phelps and acknowledge him as a mentor whenever he sees him.
The opening-ended chapter’s closing panels show Mr. Yang arriving at O’Dowd early in the morning to speak with the principal.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Mater Dei Monarchs vs. Bishop O’Dowd Dragons”
The chapter’s opening recaps in a single panel the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons’ 56-47 victory over the Modest Christian Crusaders. The team advances to the California State Championships, where they will compete against the Mater Dei Monarchs, a team that boasts four consecutive and eleven total championships. The team is coached by the winningest coach in high school basketball, Gary McKnight. The O’Dowd varsity girls team, which won the championship the previous day, attends the game alongside thousands of parents, fans, and teachers at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion.
In the pregame pep talk in the locker room, Coach Lou invites the players, many of whom have known him for nearly a decade of their teenage lives, to consider how many alumni are in the stands, contributing to the legacy of the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons-- a legacy of which the players themselves are a part. When the game begins, the Dragons are off to a rocky start, which allows the Monarchs a 26-21 lead at halftime. In the locker room at halftime, Mr. Yang speaks up for the first time, admitting that, although he never used to like sports, he has been inspired by this time to finally take an interest in sports, and, moreover, to take risks: “When you step out onto the court, no matter how prepared you are, you don’t really know if you’re gonna win or lose. But you step out anyway […] and maybe those of us in the audience hope that watching you take that step will inspire us to do the same thing” (426). Mr. Yang thanks the players for the inspiration they have given him.
The second half of the game sees the Dragons close the points gap and tie the game by the end of the third quarter. The fourth quarter finds the Monarchs with another four-point lead, but Mr. Yang thinks to himself that the Dragons’ story will be worth telling regardless of the outcome. When the score stands at 58-56 in favor of the Monarchs with 25 seconds on the clock, Mr. Yang later admits to himself that winning or losing does matter. He features a very uncharacteristic obscenity, “f*** that,” in his comic panel, before shouting “GO DRAGONS!” (405) at the top of his lungs.
A layup by Austin Walker brings the game into overtime, and they tie the score. The score remains tied throughout the overtime period, until Ivan draws a foul with zero seconds remaining on the clock and finds himself forced to take two high-pressure shots from the foul line. Three pages of comic text show Ivan foul shot routine, followed by an air ball. The final foul shot, however, is a “SWISH” revealed across a two-page spread against a yellow backdrop, plain except for the basket, the ball, and the path of the ball delineated by an arc. The Bishop O’Dowd Dragons win the State Championship 65-64, a victory that causes Mr. Yang and the other fans to scream with enthusiasm while Coach Lou makes a tearful phone call, and Austin Walker walks off the court after his last momentous game with tears in his eyes.
Epilogue Summary: “Gene”
The mayor of Sacramento, former NBA All-Star point guard and U.C. Berkeley alumnus Kevin Johnson speaks to O’Dowd’s dual men’s and women’s championship teams at a luncheon. Mr. Yang invites Coach Lou for lunch and reveals to him an uplifting conversation with Alex in which Alex told him that Coach Lou picked him up for early morning practices when he couldn’t get a ride. When Coach Lou asks whether Mr. Yang will continue to travel with the team the following year, Yang confesses that he is retired from O’Dowd after 17 years. The two part ways with a fist pump, which Yang, for the first time, does not awkwardly turn into a handshake.
When Coach Lou excuses himself to make sure his player Ivan has money to eat, Mr. Yang reflects, as he watches the two players chat with their friends over a meal, that perhaps Paris and Ivan were reticent toward him not because of their reluctance to engage with the media, but because, like Superman’s Clark Kent, they prefer to keep their personal lives separate from their on-the-court superhero guises.
The closing pages find Mr. Yang fielding his youngest daughter’s questions, to which he explains that, unlike in the world of comic books, there are no good guys or bad guys, but the game needs to be played to find out who wins. The closing pages shows Mr. Yang, his wife, and their four kids playing basketball in the yard of their California home.
Chapters 11-13 and Epilogue Analysis
These chapters strongly demonstrate the costs and sacrifices of commitment to a team. Coach Lou at first seems harsh when he punishes his players for eating pizza together in the hotel room past curfew, but he explains that he simply has the team’s best interests in mind. Coach Lou has a vested interest in those on whom he is harshest, namely, Paris, precisely because Paris reminds him of himself as a kid. Coach Lou’s excessive discipline is a form of tough love: he wants to protect the players from behaving excessively or extravagantly to keep them from public criticism.
Mr. Yang, although he is neither a player nor a coach, himself experiences the sacrifices required by the team. He ignores a call from his agent at DC comics to watch the Moreau game, although the game doesn’t start for another 45 minutes. He demonstrates the way in which commitment to a team involves dedication on the part of more than just the players: Coach Lou is forced to administer tough love, Assistant Coach Tony carries a newborn in a baby swaddle in every graphic in which he appears—demonstrating the way he accommodates the team even as a new father—and the players are required to wear the same shoes. Although Coach Lou does not expect anything specifically of Mr. Yang, who follows the team in the joint capacities of a journalist, writer, and fan, Mr. Yang is compelled by the commitment he sees in others to make a similar sacrifice of his own, specifically by ignoring a call from his agent. Mr. Yang’s commitment to the team increases with each game; he first missed his wife’s birthday to travel to Orlando and watch the Dragons play the Montverde Eagles (Chapter 7), but he accepted a phone call from his agent against the Dragons (Chapter 9). Mr. Yang’s later ignoring a professional phone call proves his increased allegiance to the Dragons, inspired by the commitment he sees from the Dragons themselves.
The structure of these chapters also contributes to this tradition as the Dragons gain increasing relevance in Mr. Yang’s life. He ordinarily closes his chapters with conversations with his wife, as he does in Chapters 4, 5, 7, and 9. In Chapter 11, Coach Lou’s private interview, in which he confesses the circumstances of his injury, which, at least in part, discloses the reason for the toughness he shows to his players, occupies the final position of the chapter. Such a demonstrable change in structure would suggest that Coach Lou and the O’Dowd Dragons, themselves representative of Mr. Yang’s hobby—or at best, his side job—have assumed the most immediate relevance to his life. Moreover, Coach Lou confides in Mr. Yang just as Mr. Yang confides in his wife, and so, despite the replacement of Coach Lou with Mr. Yang’s wife in the closing pages of this chapter, Mr. Yang preserves the tradition of disclosing inner matters of personal interest at the very end.
Finally, these chapters represent a bold artistic stroke on the part of the author. He deceives the audience in a move that invites the reader to reflect on the craft of writing itself. Yang chooses to represent himself as a character twice in the same panel, which, he encourages the reader to consider, is just a slightly more exaggerated step than representing even just one version of himself. Specifically, Mr. Yang chooses to represent his internal conflict as, in turns, a dialogue with his wife and colleagues and an inner monologue. This is not only a representation of internal conflict; it is also an assertion about the reading experience.
When Mr. Yang (the character) is shown talking with his wife, and on the following page, Yang (the author) replaces the wife with an apparition of Mr. Yang’s double, who turns briefly into apparitions of Mr. Yang’s O’Dowd colleagues before turning back into Mr. Yang, he risks losing the audience’s trust. The readers are unlikely to have taken literally his wife’s comment claiming that, in his cartoon, “I’m not even your wife” (359) until the following page replaces her with Mr. Yang’s double, whose speech bubble explains, “I’m your conscience” (360). While Yang has made metatextual moves before, such as when he changes Jeevin’s hairstyle, these are playful but not quite so deceptive. In these chapters, Mr. Yang’s wife—really his own conscience—accuses him of lying about his conversation with Jeevin in Chapter 11, which Mr. Yang admits actually took place via text. Thus, these chapters exhibit the first instance in which the author deliberately deceives his audience by means of a careful combination of words and images. Yang is also less than forthcoming about his decision to leave his teaching role. Although the novel’s previous conversations lead the reader to believe that he will take this risk, the author does not reveal his protagonist’s decision until Mr. Yang himself admits the decision to Coach Lou in the novel’s epilogue. The reason for this highly unconventional and risky decision by Yang is his objective to encourage readers to question their relationship with the experience of reading. Even nonfiction, the rightful genre of Dragon Hoops, necessitates changes due to being a representation. All readers, Yang suggests, must accept these changes in order to engage with a literary work.
Finally, these chapters witness Mr. Yang’s complete submission to the sports culture, which he formerly found himself outside of, preferring to identify as a comics guy. In a muted yellow speech panel that distinguishes the narration from the speech bubbles of the text, Mr. Yang writes, “You know what I just said about how the final score doesn’t matter? F*** that. GO DRAGONS!” (405). Mr. Yang has truly embraced the team he has followed through the entirety of the season and whose history he has researched meticulously for the purpose of the book. His counterpart, Yang the author, is very forthcoming about this personal transformation, even at the expense of subjecting himself to the laughter of his readership.
