Synopsis

Pete Torrey, a long-time Walnut Creek, California resident and former television sportscaster, has hit the bull’s eye with his historical fiction novel, “Safe Passage Guaranteed,” based on true events. The story, focusing on the relationship between two Indiana high school basketball teams in the 1970s — one Black and one white — carries a message that is even more powerful today than it was 50 years ago.

Torrey, during his tenure at WANE-TV in Fort Wayne, Indiana, stumbled across a true story that he promised not to tell until now. While playing in a pick-up basketball game he overheard two teenagers, one Black and one white, planning a series of secret summer games involving no coaches, no parents, no referees, and no press. The players, fearing the games would be politicized and misunderstood, made him promise not to tell the story until they were “really old like 50.” So Pete colorfully tells the kids’ story as he imagined that the games played out. He sandwiches the basketball tale around many of main character Nick Cunningham’s zany and hilarious television adventures, including interviews with many of the era’s top sports icons like Hank Aaron, John Wooden, John Madden and others.

In the course of playing the summer basketball games, the players from both teams realize that they share more than their hoop dreams of being Indiana State Champs, and unknowingly give a community and a nation a much-needed lesson in compassion and race relations. Torrey’s fictionalized account of this yarn is a true “feel-good story” not to be missed!