Prof recounts his role in legendary “Hoosiers” game As a high school and college athlete, Phil Raisor was on the losing end of two of the most storied basketball games ever played. Raisor, a longtime faculty member in the ODU English department, started at guard for the heavily favored Muncie Central Bearcats, who fell in the 1954 Indiana state championship to tiny Milan, the David vs. Goliath event that inspired the 1986 movie “Hoosiers.” Later, on a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas, he watched his Wilt Chamberlain-led Jayhawks lose the 1957 NCAA championship in triple overtime to North Carolina. But there is more to life than basketball, as illustrated in Raisor’s new book, “Outside Shooter” (University of Missouri Press), which transcends the sports memoir genre. Raisor recounts the hard knocks and hard-won triumphs of a basketball odyssey across 1950s America during an era in which a racially divided society was taking halting steps toward integration and few places held more tension than the sports arena. Raisor saw firsthand the toll of racism on Muncie’s star player, John Casterlow, whose life followed a trajectory from playing the legendary Oscar Robertson to a virtual draw in the Indiana high school playoffs to death in the streets of Detroit at age 23. Later, at Louisiana State University, after transferring from Kansas, Raisor joined in early attempts to integrate the LSU campus. Devoted though Raisor was to basketball, “Outside Shooter” captures the period of his life in which he gradually stopped defining himself in terms of the game. His basketball fortunes eventually became overshadowed by the rest of his life: the competing measures of acceptance and expectation from his family and companions; the courage and challenge offered by a young woman equally bent on accomplishment; his struggles with failure and doubt juxtaposed with his awakening intellect and conscience.