The groundbreaking compact between Larry Colton and Tim Boyle has me wondering if a really good book is only made possible by a really good friend.

Colton is a Portland author, and the rare Major League baseball veteran, he cheerfully notes, with more bubblegum cards (two) than games played (one).

Boyle is the president and CEO of Columbia Sportswear. He frequently flies Colton to Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, knowing Colton’s personality and equally self-deprecating backswing will lighten the mood.

They are often joined on those escapades by John Norville, who wrote the screenplay to “Tin Cup”; Kerry Tymchuk, executive director of the Oregon Historical Society; and John Strawn, who is adept at both writing and golf-course architecture.

The featured player at the heart of their latest adventure, however, is Sharon LaForge, a woman living on the Crow Indian Reservation near the Little Big Horn.

Sharon is the flawed heroine of Colton’s best book, “Counting Coup.” She was 17 years old in 1992 when Colton spent 15 months watching her play basketball, and survive the tumult of her teenage years, in Hardin, Mont.

Inspired by “Shadow of a Nation,” Gary Smith’s haunting story about tribal basketball in Sports Illustrated, Colton secured a six-figure advance from Doubleday to spend the year with the Hardin boys’ team. On his second casual visit to a Lady Bulldogs’ practice, Sharon arrived late to the gym.

“After five minutes, I said, ‘That’s the story,’” Colton recalls. “The way she handled the ball. The respect she commanded. The aura around her.”

Colton took a deep dive into the troubled world of Sharon and her teammates. The father of two daughters and a former teacher at Portland’s Adams High School, he knew how to converse with teenage girls.

“He has a gift for friendship,” Strawn says. “It’s why he’s so good at getting people to talk to him.” Colton grew so close to the Crow that he was adopted into the tribe, and inexplicably dubbed “Well Known War Dancer.”

It’s a lucky man who understands where he fits in the story that surrounds him, and Colton didn’t straight away. When he turned in the first draft of “Counting Coup,” Doubleday’s editors were furious.

He had written about girls’ basketball, for God’s sake, ten years before Caitlin Clark was born. “They not only rejected it, but they wanted their money back,” Colton said. “And I’d spent it. I had two daughters in college. I was crushed. Humiliated.”

It didn’t help that Colton knew Doubleday was right: “The book was a piece of crap.” He didn’t revisit the manuscript for two years, redirecting his energy into launching Community of Writers – which provided training on writing for teachers in Portland Public Schools – and, eventually, Wordstock, a book festival to fund the program.

Only then did Colton realize the saga of Sharon LaForge needed the raw intimacy of first-person. “I put myself, and my relationship with Sharon, into the story,” Colton says. He found a new publisher. And when “Counting Coup” finally arrived in 2000, the book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

How did it play in Montana? “On the reservation, they hated the book,” Colton says. “I talked about addiction, dysfunction, abuse. To the Indians, I was another in a long line of white guys who gained their trust, then stabbed them in the back. The book was a disaster for Sharon. As I wasn’t there to hate, they picked on her.”

They’ve stayed in touch sporadically over the years, through Sharon’s troubled marriage, her struggles with addiction, the painful deaths of her two sons. Colton backed out of a movie deal with musician Huey Lewis because he feared a film would knock her for another loop.

While Sharon was in a rehab program in Rainier last year, and taking refuge every other weekend at Colton’s Northeast Portland home, he began drafting a sequel to “Counting Coup,” exploring how the book changed both her life and his.

While she was initially supportive, he said, “She’s always mad at me now. It makes it hard to write the book.”

So did his agent’s rejection of Colton’s book proposal. Last November, he was grumbling about that during a lunch with Boyle in the Bugaboo Room at Columbia Sportswear, when Boyle suggested he take the manuscript straight to Amazon.

“That’s not how it works, Tim,” Colton said. “You go through a publisher because you need an advance. I need an advance to finish this.”

Boyle took that in stride. “Well, then,” he said, “I’ll fund it.”

When he wrote “Idol Time,” his book about the Trail Blazers’ championship season, in 1978, Colton scored an $8,000 advance. He has landed five six-figure advances since then, none as generous as Boyle’s.

“I said, ‘Larry, I have the ability to help you out. Why don’t you write, and I’ll take care of the rest of it,” Boyle told me last week. “Amazon offers tools for writers that can make a career a lot more lucrative. I’m just helping Larry better connect to the digital world.”

When this commitment to Well Known War Dancer becomes public, is Boyle at all concerned about the desperate writers who will be lined up at his door?

“If they have a major-league baseball career and a t-shirt from Adams High School, they’ll have a better chance of connecting,” Boyle says. Then, he laughed. “I wouldn’t do this for anyone other than Larry.”

Or, in truth, Larry and Sharon. Back in 1992, Boyle was hosting a “cast and blast” weekend for major Columbia Sportswear customers at Eagle Nest Lodge, three miles southeast of Hardin. He invited Colton to join him at a dinner that featured – in Colton’s words – “legendary hothead Bobby Knight and NBA Hall of Famer John Havlicek.”

Often audacious but never shy, Colton asked Knight and Havlicek if they’d swing by the Hardin gym the following morning for the high school team’s 6 a.m. practice. They rose early, as did Boyle, and spoke to the girls, all save Sharon, who was home resting a sore back.

“I’ve never met her,” Boyle says. “I’d love to meet her sometime.”

I suspect that, too, can be arranged.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com