Dave Bing's final career chapters are yet to play out, but his bounce from sports to business to politics has enough drama to fill 18 chapters of a new book by veteran Detroit journalist Drew Sharp.
Dave Bing: A Life of Challenge came out recently in paperback and Kindle editions, and the author discussed it Tuesday morning with Fox 2 Morning News host Alan Lee in a five-minute segment.
Sharp, a Free Press sportswriter since 1983 and columnist since 1999, says he worked to learn "what compels an individual to succeed in three different fields of work" -- sports, business and politics. His narrative includes the mayor's ongoing struggles to avoid state control of Detroit finances and his two spring 2012 hospitalizations for a perforated intestine.
Though the second-term mayor sat for interviews with the author, the biography contains critical assessments of Bing's time in city hall.
Teaser tastes at Amazon's site include the two-page preface, 11 pages of Chapter 1 and a page from Chapter 2. Sharp drops an attention-getting surprise near the start:
The paradox that was Bing even extended to his ancestry. His was a black family that once owned a small number of slaves in South Carolina, a revelation that understandably unsettled Bing. He had antecedents, as far back as three generations, who were listed through the South Carolina census as some of the few black people in that state during the first half of the 19th century.
Bing ultimately came to terms with the revelation and decided not to make excuses for how is ancestors might have rationalized their actions.
A sampling of other portions:He didn't realize . . . that the task [of being mayor] required more than a willingness to simply do right by the position. It required the political acumen to do the job right.
Bing believed that he was above the institutional fractures and internal political fisticuffs. . . . He wasn't shrewd enough politically to sell the idea that the free ride was over to a community determined to maintain the mind-set that unlimited government assistance was a right rather than a privilege. He wasn't "black enough."
Kinder words appear in a single-page foreword by fellow NBA alumnus Kareen Abdul-Jabbar, whose 1969-89 basketball years overlapped partially with Bing's 1966-78 time on the hardwood. An excerpt:
Seeing Dave reach this point of political prominence . . . doesn't surprise those who knew him back then and played against him. When you're a product of such a transitional time in history like the '60s, you're always motivated through what you went though and what you saw others go through. . . .
What Dave has achieved -- a great basketball career, success in business and a prominent political post at a challenging time -- speaks to how all athletes should look at, not limit, themselves. We should always stand for something ,more than what the box score says about us."
The 328-page biography, published Nov. 5, has a $17.95 list price and costs $9.99 as a Kindle e-book.
