Dragon Hoops

Coach Lou Richie is Gene Luen Yang’s first character to be introduced, in a chapter that shares the character’s title. Yang positions the rough-and-ready, goateed Coach Lou, who wears a whistle around his neck, as his foil. The head coach of the O’Dowd Dragons, Coach Lou is an athlete, committed to his O’Dowd varsity men’s basketball team from which the novel takes its name and to the sport of basketball in general through and through, as he has been for life. He came to O’Dowd to coach as an alumnus, although a hamstring injury sidelined him when he was at the zenith of his career, playing for a D-league team, and already having walked on to the UCLA college team. Despite his serious disposition, Yang presents Coach Lou faithfully as a character who is not afraid to joke around. For example, he calls Yang “Yangster” and routinely greets him with a first pump.

An alum, Coach Lou is heavily invested both in his team and in one of his star players, Paris Austin. Notoriously strict on all his players, Coach Lou shows Paris an especially healthy dose of “tough love,” refusing to tolerate seemingly small faux pas such as not wearing the team shoes for a game. Despite his harsh reputation, Coach Lou is respected by his assistant coaches and players alike; they understand his commitment to the team and his sole interest in bringing out the team’s and players’ best performances and characters. He is a rule-follower, and, when he opens up to Mr. Yang in one of the duo’s several one-on-one interviews, he reveals that his young-adult recklessness caused his career-ending injury, which by his own admission explains the strictness with which he treats his players.

Paris Austin is Coach Lou’s All-Star point guard who, compared to the novel’s other characters, is conspicuously reticent about his personal life. Yang explains only that he grew up in Oakland, having been raised by a single mother. Paris acknowledges that growing up in inner-city Oakland has caused him to play with a “chip on his shoulder” (72). Yang presents him as an assertive, dominant player whose agility on the court seems to endow him with superhuman strength.

Yang juxtaposes the 5’10” Paris with the 6’10” Ivan Rabb against a flat blue background with a ruler next to their statures. He uses this physical contrast to highlight their contrasting personalities, too. The two have played together since childhood, Ivan having always been shyer. Such depictions of Paris’s physical stature complement Coach Lou’s straightforward description of Paris as an “alpha male” (68). Thus, Yang uses direct characterization to present the limited backstory of one of his book’s central characters. As an author, Yang acknowledges these sparse details concerning Paris’s life and accommodates such paucity into his memoir by admitting that, insofar as his performance on the basketball court represents a persona, individuals endowed with such superhero-caliber skill deserve to conceal their private identity. Such a confession in Yang’s closing chapter nicely accommodates the absence of information that he was able to retrieve by means of one-on-one interviews. The superhero metaphor also piques Yang’s readership’s already strong interest in “the real” Paris Austin of the O’Dowd Dragons just as the book ends, in the fashion of a bona fide superhero comic that begets a sequel.