KEANEY: If you don’t love to play, pivot and go home! by William Woodward, Dutch Island Press, Wickford, R.I., 315 pages, $17.95.

Remember when your grandfather told you stories about his playing days as a high school or college athlete?

If you enjoyed those reminiscences of a bygone era in sports, back when football helmets were soft and the academic courses athletes took were hard, then you’ll love William Woodward’s “Keaney, If you don’t love to play, pivot and go home!” a biography of Frank Keaney, the late, great basketball-football-baseball coach at the University of Rhode Island.

If, however, your eyes glazed over whenever Gramps got all warm and nostalgic about dodging wood stoves while chasing rebounds in makeshift gymnasiums circa 1920, then you might find Woodward’s bent-knee approach to his subject a little tame by today’s curse-and-tell standards for such fare.

Keaney’s chief claim to fame — both the man and the book — is the subject’s historical contributions to basketball. Keaney is credited with bringing such innovations to hoops as long outlet passes for easy fastbreak layups, less emphasis on dribbling and more on passing in general, and scoring as quickly as possible.

Woodward’s got the old newspaper clippings included in his text to prove his thesis that Keaney’s high school team at Woonsocket, R.I., was running the fastbreak in 1915, routinely scoring 50, 60, even 70 points at a time when most good teams were scoring in the teens and 20s.

If you like hearing about basketball courts built in swimming pools (drained, of course), the anecdotes are fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the one about the Woonsocket center named Nichols who dribbled up to the basket, leaped, hung on the rim with one hand, dunked with the other, then had all five defenders from Reading (Mass.) High grab onto him, collapsing the basket. The ref awarded Nichols five foul shots (one for each player who grabbed him), once the basket was put back up, of course.

The body of the book is built on Keaney’s 28 years as basketball coach for what was then Rhode Island State College (now URI). Beginning in 1920, Keaney brought his “pressure offense” philosophy to the Rams in Kingston, experiencing immediate and stunning success.

Woodward replays many of the major moments when Keaney’s “New Englanders” would venture into places like Madison Square Garden (to play highly touted St. Francis). In this instance, Woodward recounts the New York press ridiculing the “country boys” and their flashy “two-points-a-minute” offense. St. Francis will moider da bums, said the New Yawkers. Naturally, it’s Rhody that does the murdering on the court.

Another high point is the 1946 NIT in front of 18,000 fans in Madison Square Garden, when Rhody got a half-court shot from Ernie Calverley at the buzzer to send a game against Bowling Green into overtime. Rhody won.

For the Maine reader, there are plenty of stories about Keaney (a Bates grad) and his teams taking on the University of Maine, including one famous instance when Maine tried to stall the ball and Keaney responded by having his players stall even more effectively.

Then there was the time Rhody was assessed five technicals in Orono when the players left the court to get a drink of water. There was the 1938 train trip for a football game at Maine when a hurricane struck. And there was the time Keaney, acting as navigator on a basketball bus trip to Orono in a 1947 blizzard, succeeded in getting the team lost.

It’s all fairly tame stuff by today’s standards. But there’s a charm to it that keeps the pages turning. Woodward, a professor of education at URI, pieces together the narrative with written accounts from the newspapers and magazines of the time.

That’s really how “Keaney” reads, like a scrapbook found in the attic filled with yellowing newspaper clippings about teams and players long since past. You know. The kind of stuff your grandfather loves.

Mike Dowd is a staff writer on the NEWS sports desk.