Fall River Dreams

Sporting News, The, Jan 23, 1995 by Steve Gietschier

Fall River Dreams (By Bill Reynolds. 353 pp. St. Martin's Press. $22.95).

Fall River, a city in the southeast corner of Massachusetts, has been down on its luck since 1924. In that year, Matthew Charloner Durfee Borden, the city's most powerful textile mill owner, announced that his company was moving its machinery to Tennessee. The economic boom that had fueled Fall River's prosperity for more than half a century was over. And Fall River has never recovered.

Matthew Borden was a relative of Lizzie Borden, the young woman who on an August morning in 1892 may or may not have whacked both her parents with an ax. He was also a Durfee, the family that gave its name to what is still the city's only public high school.

As Reynolds shows in this wonderful book, it is Durfee High's boys basketball team that has long been the soul of Fall River. With the unemployment rate, the crime rate and the dropout rate showing precious little downward movement even in good times, the feisty, overachieving basketball program, led by New England's winningest coach, is about all the city has going for it.

Unlike high school basketball in many other Eastern cities, Durfee basketball is a compelling experience. Boys grow up dreaming of playing for Coach Skip Karam and idolize each year's starters. Towns-people pack the gyms, home and away, and hold each team to an impossible, decades-old standard: Win the state championship or hang your heads. Players are burdened by this collective dream, personified by Abe White, official scorer at every Durfee home game since 1945.

Yet for all this success and intensity, Durfee has produced few Division I college players. Reynolds thus examines what it is like to live, coach and play in an environment where guys who don't make Karam's varsity see their dream die early, and most who do often play their last meaningful basketball game in the state tournament. He focuses on the 1992-93 team, blessed with the presence of Chris Herren, a legitimate Division I talent who seems to embody all of Durfee's history and tradition that he couldn't avoid even if he wanted to. The result is a remarkable book, open and honest, full of the joys and the pain of growing up and of the stark truths that the Fall River dream encompasses.