Tall Hoop Tales : FULL COURT: A Literary Anthology of Basketball.<i> Edited by Dennis Trudell (Breakaway Books: $23, 358 pp.)</i>

As Dennis Trudell points out in the introduction to his literary anthology, “Full Court,” basketball has overtaken baseball as this country’s most popular sport. Nevertheless, this fast-paced, balletic game that thrills fans in high school, college and pro arenas around the country has never attained the literary heights of the national pastime.

Basketball may have produced heroes like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, but where are the equivalents of, say, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural,” Mark Harris’ “Bang the Drum Slowly” or W. P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”?

Trudell inadvertently provides an answer when he writes: “I think one reason for basketball’s popularity has to do with time--the amount of drama that can occur (two time-outs, a three-pointer, answering jump shot, missed wild hook and a tap-in) with only 12 seconds left on the clock. A TV game fits more snugly into a viewer’s evening than an often endless-feeling nine innings.”

However, that same “endless-feeling” more typically generates the drama that makes up the stuff of life--and fiction. Ultimately, all sports are about the quest for perfection, but ironically the closer an athlete comes to reaching that ideal, the less interesting the event becomes. The best hitters in baseball fail seven out of 10 times, while the best shooters in hoops are successful nearly half the time (around the rim; at the foul line the percentage grows even higher). Life may imitate art, but baseball often imitates life. No wonder it has taken on mythical proportions.

Trudell, a teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (he also contributes two poems to this collection), provides us with what he considers the best of basketball short fiction and poetry. Though his pickings may be rather slim, he has combed the small presses and literary magazines expertly, coming up with hoop tales that resonate far beyond the basketball court.

Several familiar names with strong offerings appear in this collection, like Leonard Michaels, Willie Morris, John Sayles, John Updike, John Edgar Wideman and, a bit more surprisingly, Bobbie Ann Mason, who tells the charming tale of a 1952 Kentucky state championship team. But it is some of the lesser-known lights that let the ball fly from mid-court, occasionally nailing the three-pointer. Although there are a few air-balls in this collection, the beauty of shots like these--gliding through the hoop with a thrilling swish!--makes this collection a welcome addition to the sports fiction genre.

There are the obligatory “coming of age” stories, for example, like Jonathan Penner’s “At Center,” in which an overweight kid finds peer acceptance as well as acceptance for his equally overweight, klutzy father, and Theodore Weesner’s “The Body Politic,” in which the outsider kid makes the team. The cleverest and most original in this category is Jonathan Baumbach’s “Familiar Games,” which offers an amusingly bizarre athletic contest between mother and son:

“Every family has its games. Ours were in the service of an ostensibly competitive hierarchy. We had to defeat our mother--the game was basketball in those days--before we got to play our father. . . . She played, whenever she could be enticed into a game, in an apron and slippers, and at times, when coming directly from the kitchen, in rubber gloves. . . .”

Some of the stories are odd enough to catch you off-guard. Like Dick Wimmer’s “The Ultimatum of Hattie Tatum,” in which a 6-foot-2-inch black high school star from South Carolina finds herself cleaning toilets, preparing meals and watching over two kids in a New York City suburb. But first prize goes to science fiction writer George Alec Effinger’s hilarious “From Downtown at the Buzzer.” Where else can you read about five short, ugly E.T.s who face all comers on a basketball court located on the military base where they are being studied--and whip butt every time?

“The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” by Sherman Alexie is one of the finest tales in this collection, wittily chronicling the despair and hopelessness brought on by alcoholism among Native Americans living on a reservation. The narrator calls Julius Windmaker “the latest in a long line of reservation basketball heroes, going all the way back to Aristotle Polatkin, who was shooting jump-shots exactly one year before James Naismith supposedly invented basketball.

“I’d only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man.” But, waiting for a game to begin one night, Windmaker gets “drunk as a skunk.” “Don’t he have a game tonight?” someone asks a friend on seeing Windmaker stagger down the road. “Yeah, he does,” the friend replies. “Well, I hope he sobers up in time,” his friend says.

Unfortunately, the poetry in this volume does not live up to the standards of the prose. How many different ways can you describe a ball falling through the hoop or a man dangling in mid-air? Still, there are some notable exceptions, like Stephen Vincent’s “Anthem,” which eerily echoes Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”:

America, if you were a basketball court,

I’d dribble down

all your edges. America, if you were a

basketball court, I’d take my shots

in every State. I’d begin with a foul

in Chicago, a set shot in Florida, a hook

in Alabama, and a jump shot in Washington.

O, America, I’d put hoops on all your edges,

backboards against every border and sea. . . .