69 pages • 2 hours read
Walter Dean MyersHoops
Fiction | Book | Middle Grade | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Lonnie is woken up at the Grant by Harrison, who says his mother is looking for him. When he arrives at his mother’s, she begins a sermon about the “trouble of this world” (85) and Lonnie tunes her out, pouring himself a drink. A little later that morning, Lonnie investigates the store where he cashed the checks, asking around about Paul. Lonnie figures out from the owner of the store, Ugly, that Paul has been stealing checks and selling them but can’t “figure out why Tyrone was getting them” (87). On the way back from the store, Lonnie stops to play three-on-three at the park. Afterwards, he thinks about how he’s getting much better at basketball.
Just as Lonnie is about to leave the park, he sees Paul and confronts him about what happened with Mary-Ann. Even though they’ve always been close, this conflict is too much, and it escalates into a fight. When the fight concludes, Lonnie is on the floor and Paul is crying. They talk it out over some sodas, and Paul explains how he got invested in the check-stealing scheme to impress a girl. Paul also explains how he originally just sold the stolen checks to Ugly, but that Tyrone found out and intervened, saying he’d burn the checks for Paul, but Paul would owe him.
With all this new information, Lonnie fills Mary-Ann in and explains that they cannot tell Paul about Tyrone not cashing the checks nor about them stealing the checks from Tyrone. Lonnie gets a little drunk and has a strange dream where a bunch of white scouts watch him play basketball without really paying attention to him.
Chapter 6 Summary
On the train to practice the next day, Lonnie talks to Cal about Aggie. Once they get to the gym, Cal has the team do a challenge where they try to jump two inches higher than their highest jump. None of them can do it once Cal takes away the running start. Afterwards, they have an intense practice filled with drills. Lonnie feels that “the practice wasn’t hard, it was ridiculous” (100).
After practice, a newspaper photographer tries to get the team to let him take some photos, but Cal says no. On the way out of the gym, a child asks for Lonnie’s autograph, and this prompts Lonnie to ask Cal why he didn’t have a child. Cal tells a long story about how after he was unable to play basketball and owed money, he got depressed. One day, he heard about a job and asked a neighbor to look after his son Jeffrey while he went to investigate it. When he came back, the house had gone up in flames and his child had died. That was the end for Cal and Aggie’s relationship. Before they part ways, Cal tells Lonnie that the team needs “a leader” (105).
As Lonnie and Mary-Ann catch up on the Tyrone situation, she asks him if he wants to get married. Lonnie feels “crowded in, like [he] was suffocating” (108) and doesn’t respond to Mary-Ann’s pressure to say I love you, leaving instead.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
As the novel moves closer to the climax, Lonnie addresses how to resolve different kinds of conflicts. These conflicts are connected to Lonnie's identity as a young Black man living in the city: he struggles with his interpersonal relationships with the people he is closest with and wrestles with how the rest of the world judges and treats him. Many of the central conflicts of the novel are linked to the basketball tournament as a vehicle for Lonnie to work out how he feels about these pressures. When Lonnie dreams about the tournament, it reflects many of the conflicts he is enmeshed in. Lonnie has particularly intense feelings about performing on display to a mean, indifferent white audience. He also has specific feelings about how gender influences how he is treated. In the dream, audience members are by both race and gender. In addition, Lonnie has a fight with his close friend Paul with whom he never imagined getting into an argument. This external physical outburst mirrors the intense physical emotions present in Lonnie's dream about the tournament. Overall, Lonnie struggles to figure out how to resolve conflict in appropriate ways, especially when faced with social expectations. He attempts to learn about these adult issues through his relationship with Cal, but Cal’s own flaws also complicate how Lonnie learns about resolutions.
In many ways, Cal operates as a distorted mirror for Lonnie to figure out his path in the world. Lonnie frequently talks about Cal in relation to Lonnie's understanding of dreams, the streets, and his future. In Chapter 6, Cal’s past is fully revealed as he shares the tragic circumstances surrounding his child's death. When Cal concludes the story, Lonnie deals with an internal need to minimize his own conflicts; shortly after, Lonnie is dismissive of Mary-Ann’s affections as well, feeling “suffocated” (108). This emotional response reflects some of Lonnie’s earlier ideas about how success might come for him. Since so much of Lonnie's future depends on how he will be treated as a young black man, he feels very isolated in his path to achieve his dreams. When Lonnie hears Cal’s stories about his child and failed basketball career, Lonnie is backed into a corner. Given that Lonnie’s path ahead seems similar to Cal’s, he wonders how he can change that trajectory.
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