HOMECOURT ADVANTAGE

Attorney and mother of three, Ewing is the ex-wife of New York Knick Patrick Ewing; McCrary is an entertainment lawyer married to Seattle Supersonic Greg Anthony. Between them they have a homecourt advantage in telling the stories of basketball wives. The New York Flyers have never won an NBA championship trophy, though they’ve led the Eastern Conference for two years running. Now, management will sell the team and move it out of New York if they don’t bring home a championship this year. The next six weeks of playoffs will be hell, with the players needing all the female comfort they can get. The story focuses less on the players than on the bonds holding their wives and girlfriends together: the coach’s wife, Alexis Mitchell, skillful handler of the wives, who’s much like a coach but as intent as her husband on the Flyers winning; newlywed attorney Casey Rogers, working 70 hours a week and married to the team’s star forward Brent Rogers, who swears his fidelity to Casey and expects her to give up most of her legal work to care for him and his son by a former girlfriend; Trina Bellevile, who holds the whole sport in contempt and dresses down to show it; Kelly Tucker, mother of pretty little Diamond and undergoing a much-too- long engagement with Steve (who actually has a new love interest and is edging Kelly out); superfamous, leather-jacketed singer Remy; and Dawn, first-year resident in psychiatry, hitched to a hot young rookie. The Flyers’ mostly tough women aren—t used to laying off of their men, as Alexis would have it, and they face not only an enforced, blissful silence during their husbands’ rough schedule but a scandal and murder that rock the team. A richly hard-as-nails, largely African-American sports opera as only two legal-eagle insiders could write it. (Author tour)