Author & UNC Professor Fred Hobson Shares Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, November 9, at 9:30 PM!“Why should a particular game, played with a round ball by twenty-year-olds in short pants often hundreds of miles away, mean so much to me, since I seem to have so little to gain or lose by its outcome?” Fred Hobson thus begins Off the Rim, his narrative of college basketball and society, of growing up and not growing up. He seeks the answer to this question by delving into the particulars of his own experience as a player and fan in his book, Off the Rim.
Growing up in a small town in the hills of North Carolina where basketball was king, Hobson became a rabid UNC basketball fan at the tender age of thirteen during 1956–1957—the Tar Heels a “magical” 32–0 national championship season. He starred as a high school basketball player and lived a dream by “walking on” the highly successful 1961–1962 Carolina freshman team, the season Dean Smith was elevated to head coach of the Heels. Hobson observed firsthand the difficult early days of Coach Smith before he became the winningest coach in college basketball.
In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Friday, November 2, at 9:30 PM, Hobson shares his unique tales this time— a story of a boyhood that never ends, relived each year during basketball season in the frantic, tortured life of a fan.
“This is a book about basketball that is more than a book about basketball. It is, in the beginning, a depiction of a part of the South that departs from the usual idea of Dixie, a look into the culture, religion, and politics of the Carolina hills,” says Hobson. “It is a portrait of the people who made up the South, including the author’s parents, who both were and were not conventional southerners.”
Fred Hobson is a Lineberger Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. He is the author of numerous books, including Mencken: A Life (1994), Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1984), and The Silencing of Emily Mullen (2005).
Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Fred Hobson on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, November 9, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, November 11, at 5 PM.
Author Andrew Britton 
