Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

Larry Colton travels into Montana's Crow country in pursuit of a story of how young men on the reservation (the rez) are using basketball as a way to regain hope and honor. A chance sighting of a graceful and instinctive female player in a pickup game changes all that. After seeing Sharon LaForge, Colton switches the focus of his quest and becomes a shadow of the Hardin High Lady Bulldogs, in their quest to make it to the Montana high school championships. He is allowed unlmited access to the team, their practices, invited into some of their homes, tutored by some of the locals in the ways of the rez, and the delicate relationships between whites and Indians. This is a glimpse into a world I have not known much about. With unemployment, alcoholism, physical abuse as the norm, it is easy to see how a community can pin its hopes for redemption and validation on the slim shouldres of high school girls....and Sharon's family is expecting victory to redeem them from tragedy and scandal. Counting Coup is at its heart a great sports story, it reminded me of the documentary Hoop Dreams. It gives an honest and compassionate look at high school athletics, those who play, those who coach, those who watch and all those who pin their dreams on victory. It also is the story of a young girl trying to find her place in her world, and the dreams claimed and lost along the way.

No political correctness here, no trumpeting idealism, no hard-breathing expose of the flaws of the reservation Indians or the whites who live around and among them. Larry Colton gives us only reality, a reality that condemns racism on both sides but shows the hurdles that the residents of Hardin put in front of themselves. His real-life characters don't do what any of his readers might expect them to do or want them to do; they do what they do. In Sharon and her girls basketball team's quest for the Montana state title, Larry Colton finds and reports all the elements of high drama: tragedy, betrayal, passion, defeat and hope. And, he finds them in a world and a people unknown to almost all of us. You'll hang onto your seat waiting for the outcome of the basketball games, but far more you'll hang on waiting to see how the members of his cast succeed or fail in their lives.

Larry Colton tries hard to remain objective and detached in writing his account of life on the rez, and of Sharon LaForge's attempts to transcend it by excelling at basketball. He fails miserably in his attempt--getting caught up in Sharon's struggle, telling us about his own life, injecting his opinions about how the coach should be coaching--and the book is infinitely better for it. An objective, detached account would not have been nearly as effective and affecting. We really come to care about Sharon, as Colton did, and root for her, and are crushed when things don't work out in the heartwarming way we've come to expect from innumerable sports movies. You don't have to love basketball, or even like it particularly, to love this book. It's as well written and dramatic as the best of novels, but it's far more memorable than most novels because it's true.

In the tradition of Madeleine Blais (IN THESE GIRLS, HOPE IS A MUSCLE) and H.G. Bissinger (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS), Larry Colton spends a season living in Hardin, Montana, studying the lives of the girls' basketball team and the members of the Crow Indian tribe who are members. In particular, he focuses on the team's leading player, senior Sharon Laforge, whose talent seems to insure that she will escape the generational poverty and cycle of alcoholism that plague her family and other members of the tribe. As we learn, however, talent guarantees nothing.As the Hardin High Lady Bulldogs head for the state playoffs, Colton spends more and more time with the members of the team, and with Sharon Laforge and her family in particular. He watches with increasing concern as she battles with an alcoholic mother, a permissive aunt and grandmother, and as she becomes more and more involved with an emotionally distant, physically abusive boyfriend.Colton's account of his season with the team and their families creates an indelible image of life on the reservation with its infighting and politics, tragedies and traditions. I found myself rooting for Sharon Laforge and hoping desperately that she would use her talents to escape what seemed like an inevitably bleak future. The cycle of poverty, abuse, and family control are powerful opponents however, and there is little hope that Laforge will lead a life much different than her elders.The story of the team's season, with its suspensfully written scenes of the basketball action, will keep readers hooked to the page, as will the ongoing dramas on the reservation and the tension between whites and tribal members. I understood much more thoroughly the cycle of abuse, poverty, and alcoholism after reading this book. I learned a great deal about dreams and about hope, too.

This book is a multi-layered tale that will take you on a roller coaster of an emotional ride. If anyone is looking for evidence that racism continues to have a profound impact on the way that we relate to one another as human beings, look no further than this tremendous book. Larry Colton spent 15 months with members of the Crow Indian tribe in Montana. He followed the fortunes of the Hardin High School girls' basketball team, a team comprising an almost equal number of white and Indian players. Despite the immense talent of Sharon LaForge, an Indian, it is clear that the deck is stacked against her being recruited to play Division I basketball. But, Colton makes clear that this is not a simple case of prejudice that prevents Sharon from succeeding, it is an environment where she is worshipped as the savior of her family and team on one hand, but constantly held to lower standards by the school. Not surprisingly, while she shines on the basketball court, off the court she's completely lost and unable to find her way. Colton works hard to admit his own prejudices as a white person. He questions whether he is trying to impose Eurocentric standards on an independent, proud culture, but he also asks himself whether some of the beliefs of the Crow culture don't in the end defeat its people. They are tough questions, and really, there is no answer. There were times when I found Colton presumptuous, but I asked myself whether I wouldn't have wound up in the same position--he knows that there is another life outside of the reservation, a life where it is possible to become someone else. He comes to care deeply for Sharon and wants what he thinks is best for her, but what he feels would be best for her is to get her off the reservation and out into the rest of America. Who's to say if that is really the best choice for her? And, when she does make the choices that she makes, what are we, the readers, to make of them? The fact that Sharon is never approached by a college coach is really quite unbelievable. The only conclusion that one can draw is that coaches are unable to take a chance on an Indian basketball player. Why?This book will stay with me. It forced me to acknowledge that I know next to nothing about life on the reservation and nothing about what challenges face the women there. The grinding poverty of the reservation also has a horrible effect on the relationships between men and women, and the horrifying aspect is that these young teenaged women are making the same poor choices that their mothers and grandmothers made before them. Finally, this book should be required reading for any potential college athlete who doesn't understand the connection between academics and athletics. 'Nuff said.This book would make a great selection of a book club. I find myself wanting to discuss this book with someone else who has read it.