Remembrance of Cagers Past : CAGES TO JUMP SHOTS <i> By Robert W. Peterson (Oxford University Press: $19.95; 183 pp., illustrated with archive photographs) </i>

Fanship is nothing to brag about. At its worst, its slack, hollow passivity earns the current rejoinder, “Get a life!” Fanship implies that one derives excessive vicarious pleasure from the accomplishments--or even just the existence--of others.

All that being said, I defer to no one in my attachment to professional basketball. My fanship, though, is not, I’m proud to report, of the jock-sniffing kind; I don’t hustle my borderline celebrity for a chance to schmooze with Magic. But I do gaze at as many NBA games as technology allows; you will find me courtside at the Summer League games in Loyola’s now-famous gym, and I may be the only person you know about who witnessed several consecutive games in the now-probably-defunct U.S. Basketball League, on whose Rhode Island Gulls 7-foot-6 Manute Bol and 5-foot-7 Spud Webb were teammates.

This degree of fanship should make me--and people like me, if there are any--the perfect target audience for a book that promises the most complete account possible of the pro game’s early years, with the sport now nearing its centennial anniversary. But ultimately, “Cages to Jump Shots” is less satisfying than a Clipper-Hornet blowout in mid-February.

The problem may have something to do with the nature of the game. Robert Peterson, after all, first achieved fame with a history of baseball’s Negro League, “Only the Ball Was White.” Baseball is (let’s be generous) a leisurely game, with great gaping pauses between bursts of action that can be enlivened by recalling earlier dramas with earlier heroes. So a history of an alternate universe of stars was a welcome source of new lore, and new stats.

But basketball is a game of flow. When players are at their peak, they can get into “the zone”--not the illegal defense, but a level of play in which the exceptional action occurs unconsciously, just part of a seamless team game. The moments of excellence glide past a viewer’s eye more swiftly than Kevin Johnson slips past Mark Eaton. The fan’s got his hands full remembering everything that just happened.

So a bookful of stories about the sport’s formative years, years when pro basketball was an all-white game, better be written in sparkling prose, to grab one’s attention away from the action at hand. But the prose in “Cages” rarely rises above the serviceable. The story is told chronologically, despite the fact that the game developed in fits and start, with few enduring teams and no enduring leagues until the NBA. And characters who sound promising--like Hungarian immigrant Frank Basloe, a vaudeville comedian and promoter of marathon races and boxing matches, who became one of the earliest owners of a successful basketball team--are disposed of in a couple of paragraphs, while leagues long dead have their pennant races replayed at length.

There is interesting information here. Wonder, as I did, why headline writers of the recent past called basketball players “cagers”? The pro game was, in fact, played inside a cage for decades. Its removal provoked anguish that the sport was being destroyed. And one of many old-time players that Peterson interviews tells him: “You could play tick-tack-toe on everybody after a game, because the cage marked you up; sometimes you were bleeding and sometimes not.”

There are some details added to the known picture of basketball’s origins, a major American sport thought up by Dr. James Naismith as a way to enliven the winter for the young men whose physical training he was supervising at the YMCA. He lived to see the game develop substantially, and kept a greater sense of perspective about it than many who have, for impressive sums of money, taught it since his time. “Basketball is just a game to play,” he told a friend who was taking a college coaching job, “you don’t coach it.”

A reader can, by judicious dipping in these pages, discover a plenitude of oddly named teams: the Kate Smith Celtics (a New York-area team run for a while by the portly singer’s manager-husband), the Philadelphia Sphas (acronymed for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Assn. and, lacking a home court, nicknamed the “Wandering Jews”), and, among the dozens of clubs named for the businesses that backed them, the Chicago Duffy Florals.

But basketball was, in its early decades, slow-moving, violent, low-scoring and dull. Not until the pros outlawed the double dribble, eliminated the jump ball after each field goal and installed the 24-second clock did the game begin to achieve its current status as a nearly constant-action competition among some of the world’s greatest team athletes.

The installation of the shot clock, in 1954, is where this book ends. Maybe, for the hard-core fan, this is a keeper, a book to put away until next July, when it can help fill those long weeks between the summer league and exhibition season. But there are far too many detailed accounts of games long over, among players long retired, in leagues long disbanded.

Read it the way I play basketball, in brief spurts, and maybe brew some strong coffee.