Basketball Books
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around our “Big League City” status as a permanent NBA town. It’s also difficult to let go of my long-held belief that all team names should be plural, (”The Thunder are ___?” Kevin Durant is a Thunder?”) but that ship has clearly sailed.
Other sports, notably baseball and boxing, have inspired more books that are reliably considered classics. Pro basketball might not have as impressive a pedigree as those 19th century games, but several books on the subject are well worth the attention of fans fighting their way through a lottery-bound season.
The great David Halberstam tackled the subject of sports in between brilliant books on politics, history, media, and American culture. One of his most overlooked works is The Breaks of the Game, a genuine masterpiece that profiles the troubled NBA of the late 1970s and early 80s.
Halberstam followed Bill Walton’s Portland Trail Blazers in the seasons following their 1977 championship as the team, and the whole league, almost imploded from controversies and injuries. While Walton is one of the book’s fascinating characters, with the same infuriating personality on display 30 years later in his TV color commentaries, the heart of the book is the tragic figure of Kermit Washington.
In one of professional sports’ ugliest moments, Washington nearly killed opposing player Rudy Tomjanovich during a bench-clearing brawl with a wild but too-perfect punch. The soft-spoken, thoughtful Washington was haunted by his almost unforgiveable act for years, and his internal scars are shown by Halberstam to be almost as awful as Tomjanovich’s physical ones.
Halberstam was a genius at telling revealing stories through the words of his interview subjects, and the tales of this gritty, pre-skybox, pre-Michael Jordan era give a fascinating background to the well-oiled corporate machine of today’s NBA.
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