The pursuit of a basketball career after college has taken Paul Shirley around the world.

A journal intended for family and friends turned into “Can I Keep My Jersey?,” a 336-page memoir that has already been labeled a classic about his experiences in the sport.

Shirley, a 6-foot-10-inch, three-year starter for the ISU basketball team, said he never planned to write a book, but his life “got to be so odd” that the idea just came.

The result has been described by Booklist, a 100-year-old publication from the American Library Association, as a one of the best three or four basketball books ever. Subtitled “11 teams, 5 countries, and 4 years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond,” the book has also been compared to “Ball Four,” an innovative insight into baseball from the ’70s.

Fresh from a season on the island of Menorca, Spain, Shirley said such comparisons aren’t worthwhile.

“I think there is a temptation now, with players and books, to want to compare everything,” Shirley said. “I think that gets a little old and obnoxious. Jim Bouton’s [Ball Four] was great then, and hopefully mine is different and unique and people will enjoy it for what it is . I would rather just hear that someone enjoyed it and appreciated for what it was and then move on to the next book.”

Shirley is returning to Ames this weekend for a book-signing at Borders, 1200 S. Duff Ave., that starts at 2 p.m.

He said his journals had to be boiled down to get rid of anecdotes about his “toilet clogging up” and reworked enough to the point that “it would have been easier to start from scratch.”

An Academic All-American in his senior year, Shirley graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Iowa State and said it never occurred to him to start writing until after college.

Shirley is now a regular columnist for www.espn.com.

“It’s not that we had bad English classes in high school, we just didn’t do creative writing,” said Shirley, whose former coach, Tim Floyd, talked him into walking on with an academic scholarship. “We read books and wrote books about it, and that stuff is mightily dull, so I didn’t get into that. And then in college my degree was in engineering, so I took exactly one English class, and that was technical writing.”

Shirley, originally from Meriden, Kan., has had brief NBA stints with the Phoenix Suns, the Chicago Bulls and Floyd’s New Orleans Hornets, but the wealth of the book’s content is found in his entertaining interpretation of his life as a career journeyman.

Shirley worried some of his opinions may hurt his career chances. Along with comical thoughts about team’s halftime celebrations, the book features comments about NBA games being boring to watch.

“When I decided to write for ESPN, I obsessed a lot whether it would be detrimental to my basketball career, but I’ve decided that I just can’t take myself too seriously and I have to enjoy these opportunities as they came up,” Shirley said. “I don’t know that David Stern or GMs are that worried about what some white guy from the margins of the NBA has to say about the NBA.”

Still, Shirley said the book “isn’t helping my career by any means.”

There has been a higher-than-expected demand for the book, Shirley said, which has resulted in multiple printings. It reached as high as 55 on the Amazon best-seller list.

“I think there is that temptation, on the part of people who would give me basketball jobs, to think that I’m not taking basketball seriously enough,” he said. “But I’ve always maintained that I only can practice at the most say three hours a day, so, barring me sleeping for 21 hours, I think there is plenty of time for me to jot down a few thoughts.”

Shirley, a member of the 2000 and 2001 Big 12 Championship teams, averaged 10 points and 6.9 rebounds as a Cyclone. He said he rediscovered the reason he plays basketball in Spain, but doesn’t know what life has in store for him next.

“I would assume that I will play for another couple of years,” Shirley said.

“I don’t know how much longer, and I don’t really know what comes after this. I hope I’ll get the chance to write more, but it will be tough to sell people on the idea that I can write about other things than basketball.”