A New Shelf Life Begins

The world he creates in "Slam" doesn't feel that different. And when he describes moments such as nearly 16-year-old Sam's first encounter with his scarily gorgeous girlfriend, it's hard not to feel that Hornby has been through precisely the same thing in the quite recent past.

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"Slam" happened in part because an English editor who admired his work asked if he'd ever thought of writing a YA book. He hadn't.

Then one day he noticed "a very, very young couple pushing a buggy around." He thought he knew her story, "because there's so much coverage of teenage mums. But the boy being there kind of took me aback a bit. So I started thinking about him. "

Before long he was having a coffee with the editor, Francesca Dow of Puffin Books. He had an idea for a novel about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant and talks it over with the sports hero in a poster on his wall -- "a sort of guardian angel," Dow says, though not one who intervenes to protect you. Might that be the kind of YA thing she was after?

Yes indeed.

The sports hero was originally going to be former Arsenal star Thierry Henry, but Hornby began to doubt that a kid today would have that kind of intimate relationship with a soccer player. The game has become "Nike-ized and corporate," he says, and so expensive that the average age of spectators at top division matches is now 43.

He chose Tony Hawk instead.

Hawk, in case you're too ancient to know, is the greatest skateboarder who ever lived. Or, rather, the greatest skater, for as the board-obsessed Sam explains right away, "we never say skateboarding."

Why a skater?

"Weirdly, I have a poster of Tony Hawk," Hornby says. "He did an American library campaign a few years ago where sports stars were asked to be photographed with their favorite books and he chose 'High Fidelity.' "

Reading Hawk's autobiography, Hornby realized that he wouldn't even have to invent the skater's part of the dialogue in Sam's conversations with him: Hawk's own words would do nicely.

He got in touch with Hawk and asked if he'd mind having his life story appropriated.