For the past seven years, Paul Shirley was an average professional basketball player.

What has differentiated the former ISU starter from the rest of the world of athletics comes when he steps off the court, and his satire, intellect and experience get put into print.

In his recently released autobiography “Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years as a Basketball Vagabond,” Shirley gives readers a heavy helping of his already mildly famed wit with a compilation of the writings from his personal journals.

Now a regular www.espn.com columnist, Shirley was a member of the 2000 and 2001 ISU Big 12 Championship teams, averaging 10 points and 6.9 rebounds his senior year. He first made a name for himself as a writer with “Road Ramblings,” a blog with Shirley’s musings from the end of the bench as the Phoenix Suns’ 12th man.

His time as a Sun in 2005 lasted six months, but was his longest stint with any NBA team. The book takes readers through his second, third and fourth years as a professional, in which he looks for a home in the NBA but collects checks playing all over the world.

The 336-page book is a revealing and frank look at the unglamorous professional athlete, who faces rejection, minor leagues, and the experience of surviving traffic in Russia. More importantly, it is entertaining from start to finish.

Shirley’s personal experiences drive the book from cover to cover and are constantly salted by his analysis of such experiences, such as seeing a grossly overweight Shawn Kemp in an Orlando Magic jersey, or the almost unconquerable distraction of the Kiss Cam during timeout huddles.

Interwoven are far more serious matters, such as missing the family Thanksgiving for the seventh year in a row and the pain and results of a lacerated spleen and fractured kidney.

In the book, Shirley also expresses his disappointment over not having had close relationships with teammates during college and said he usually doesn’t get along with teammates, citing religion and stupidity as the top two reasons. In college, he writes that the time he spent earning his mechanical engineering degree promoted some of the distance.

He does, however, call former Cyclone star Marcus Fizer “a genuine nutjob” whose injury partially allowed for Shirley’s brief time as a Chicago Bull. Shirley credits coach Tim Floyd as “one of the people [I] respect most in all the world.”

So far, “Can I Keep My Jersey?” has become the second-best-selling sports book on www.amazon.com, falling behind “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” a guidebook on miscellaneous projects, such as how to tie knots, build go-karts and tan animal hides.

The book may not prove as practically useful, but every basketball fan, Cyclone fan and sports fan will, at the very least, be entertained by its content. Readers will also gain worthwhile insight into the life of most professional basketball players.