Whatever happened to Frankie King

Here is the story of one of basketball's greatest prospects, a player whose dream faded into obscurity before it could begin. In 1953, Frankie King was a 15-year-old basketball phenom who became the youngest player to make New York's first-team All-City. King was recruited as a starting guard at the University of North Carolina, but he never played a college or professional game. Instead, King disappeared from the sport, popping in for occasional pickup games at neighborhood playgrounds and blowing players like Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) off the court. He later became a brilliant and prolific mystery writer who indulged in perpetual self-destruction through alcohol and vagrancy. Eli Neugeboren adapts his father's brilliant and personal 2021 American Scholar essay visually, the art complementing the narrative seamlessly. Eli stitches together reminiscences by family, friends, and colleagues of King to paint a portrait of a cerebral thinker haunted by untamed demons and never fully content with his athletic or intellectual gifts, much like the wounded and traumatized Philoctetes of Sophocles' play. Whatever Happened to Frankie King is mesmerizing and contemplative literary journalism, instilling empathy and compassion to its troubled tragic hero.

Jay Neugeboren (Imagining Robert) and his son, Eli, buck the tortured genius trope by locating the brightness in this crackling graphic biography of wayward basketball prodigy Frankie King. The Jewish "baby-faced" teen from Brooklyn was scouted by the New York Knicks and the Washington Generals in the 1950s but suddenly quit the sport. Rumors flew that he'd been institutionalized or gone to work for mob boss John Gotti--in reality, he entered the military, went AWOL, and ultimately became a writer. Through a pleasingly chaotic assortment of quotes from family and friends, readers learn that the "wise scribe and wild card," with "Brooklyn street smarts and the language of John Milton," displayed self-destructive tendencies and a desire for "erasing himself." He also churned out dozens of novels, including a bestselling cozy cat mystery series under a pen name, and popped by New York basketball courts to win cash against players deceived by his squat physique and street clothes--including a young Kareen Abdul-Jabbar. King stands apart from other sidetracked prodigies in this account--a man who fought to remain himself no matter what the world demanded. Art by Eli is appropriately jittery and grubby, rendering King's roustabout life as a chain-smoking barfly, street philosopher, and autodidact. It's a winning portrait of an unforgettable personality. (Nov.)