My book, An Almost Perfect Season: A Father and Son and a Golden Age of Small-Town High School Basketball, is now available for purchase at RoseDog Books for $15.00. In about three weeks, the book will also be available online from Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, etc, and from bookstores. To see early reviews of An Almost Perfect Season, view the Almost Perfect Season page.
Order Your Copy
If you would like a signed copy of the book, please email me directly at [email protected]. These will be $20, including shipping.
I want to take a minute to share several items that I believe makes the book of importance to any reader in southern Illinois and the Midwest who has an interest in high school basketball as it was played in the 1960s. I was able to find every box score of the varsity games I played in during my sophomore, junior, and senior years—1966-1967, 1967-1968, and 1968-1969.
I was also able to access every sport column article written about the games the Bluford Trojans played during that time in papers such as the Mt. Vernon Register News, the Southern Illinoisan, and the Sunday Evansville Courier and Press, among others. From these sources, I was able, in the words of one reviewer, to bring that long-ago time “back to life once again, sharing personal struggles while capturing many up-and-down moments experienced by the Bluford community, by Coach Roger Yates, and by the individual players.” From these sources, I also constructed a very detailed and rich narrative about many other teams, coaches, and individual players from southern Illinois as I wrote about the Bluford games.
If you or any of you, your friends, or family members played for Waltonville, Wayne City, Woodlawn, Crab Orchard, Enfield, Sesser, Mills Prairie, Thompsonville, Dahlgren, Ashley, Enfield, Tamaroa, Noble, or Benton, among others, you will probably want to read this book. Many of the games, especially the monumental ones where conference or tournament titles were at stake, are described in great and dramatic detail, and include the names of many of the players and team coaches from these teams. Several great Mt. Vernon and other southern Illinois teams are also talked about in the earlier contextual narrative of the book. These stories are further spiced and enhanced with humor, an important element that balances out another basic theme in the book—my struggles with deep bouts of depression. One review has said of the book: “Randy Mills’ bitter sweet book, An Almost Perfect Seasons, filled with so many pleasing stories—some sad, some humorous, and some lending gentle insights about living—brings back to life this now forgotten age, evoking the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of an extraordinary era that should be cherished and remembered.” The book certainly represents my heart-filled thoughts and memories about a pivotal time in my young life, a time, now over fifty years past that still lingers in my heart and mind. I only hope my words bring some understanding to the reader about what these great and sometime difficult times were like.