When Americans remember the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, they think of Jesse Owens, the African American track star who won four gold medals, overturning Nazi notions of Aryan supremacy. Or the University of Washington crew team immortalized in Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat, a band of student athletes from modest backgrounds who won gold in Berlin and defeated the Nazis’ hand-picked team.

Heroes to be sure, but the fuller story of America’s participation in the Berlin Olympics is more complicated, as vividly illustrated by the story of the United States’ first Olympic basketball team. The players, giddy with the thrill of representing the U.S., had to weigh Olympic participation against a boycott of the games to protest Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities. A Jewish team player faced competing in a country where Jews were harassed, persecuted, and murdered. Several teammates faced a hard choice; in the depths of the Depression, they were told that if they left to play for their country, their jobs would be gone when they got back.

Andrew Maraniss conceived their story as a great book for middle and high school students, both a lively sports saga and an indelible history lesson. Author of the award-winning Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, Maraniss is an articulate advocate for accessible and relevant nonfiction for YA readers, students who “might pick up a book with basketball players on the cover who wouldn’t pick up a book about civil rights or fascism,” he says. “I’m trying to write the books I would have been interested in as a kid.”

The Nashville-based Maraniss, son of author David Maraniss, answered some questions about his new book, Games of Deception: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler’s Germany (Philomel, Nov. 5).

Members of the first U.S. Olympics basketball team came from two separate teams—the Globe Refiners of McPherson, Kansas, and the Los Angeles Universals. Most were young working-class men. How did they manage to get to Berlin?

They qualified to go to the Olympics by playing in New York, but then they had to go back to LA or Kansas, and they were freaked that they weren’t going to get back to NYC to get on the boat. The McPherson team sold raffle tickets. The LA team didn’t think they were going to get to go until some famous actors donated at the last minute (Boris Karloff was a supporter). Employers told them that if they went, they wouldn’t have jobs when they got back—they really had to love the sport for its own sake.

Sam Balter was a Jewish player for the Universals. How did he make his decision to participate?

Heading into the qualifying tournament, it was already being talked about in basketball circles and the Jewish community—what will this guy do? He was hearing such strong opinions from people who said he should not go that it kind of turned him off. He decided the best thing was to go to the Olympics and win a gold medal. What better rebuke could there be to Hitler than that? I think he truly believed that. I think the African American athletes felt the same way.

You draw parallels between the Nazi persecution of Jews and minorities and American treatment of blacks and immigrants during the 1930s.

I thought that was extremely important—it would be a real oversight not to address the way things were here. The Nazis came over to America to study race laws because they were the most racist laws they could find….Anti-lynching legislation was being discussed, but we couldn’t even pass that. 

People were talking about Jesse Owens as if his feet on the track dispelled Hitler’s notions of Aryan supremacy. We don’t talk about the fact that when Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson [another track star and Jackie Robinson’s brother] came back, they couldn’t find jobs. Plus the fact that this basketball team had no African American players.

You’ve written for both adults and a YA audience. How is the writing different for YA readers?

I write in a quick pace—quick chapters, so they can feel like they’re making progress. I want a sense of momentum, with interesting leads and good kickers. People have short attention spans these days. Maybe an adult could see this as a book they could read too. And there are so many interesting photos from the Olympic Games. I wanted to place readers in the stories through my writing and through pictures as well.

Mary Ann Gwinn is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist in Seattle who writes about books and authors for several publications.