Sam Houston Leaping Deer is a Alabama-Coushatta Indian transported by his transcendent basketball talent from the reservation in East Texas to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the Fighting Illini), where he immediately becomes a star. Gerald Duff's powerful work of satire, humor, and tragedy tells the story of Sam's encounter with the white man's world of greed and deception. While encountering a cross-section of sixties academia, he retains his inner world of Coushatta legends and traditions, a contradiction that forms the power of this memorable novel.