Download or read book Basketball Great Writing About America s Game written by Alexander Wolff and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the street game to March Madness to Jordan and LeBron, the greatest writing about the grit, grace, and glory of basketball Made in America, basketball is a sport that stirs a national passion, reaching fever pitch during the NCAA's March Madness and the NBA Finals. Masterfully assembled by longtime Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff, Basketball spans eight decades to bring together a dream team of writers as awe-inspiring and endlessly inventive as the game itself. Here are in-depth profiles of the legends of the hardcourt--Russell, Kareem, Bird, Jordan, and LeBron--and storied franchises such as the Knicks and Celtics, along with dazzling portraits of the flash and sizzle of playground ball and more personal reflections on the game by some of America's finest writers, among them Donald Hall, John Edgar Wideman, and Pat Conroy. Highlights include James Naismith recalling how he invented the game that would go on to conquer the world; John McPhee capturing the ever-disciplined Bill Bradley as a Princeton Tiger; Peter Goldman's indelible portrait of the life and death of a Harlem Globetrotter; and Michael Lewis's account of the brave new world of NBA analytics. Classic journalism about inner-city basketball by Pete Axthelm, Rick Telander, and Darcy Frey is joined by stories of the game's popularity across America, from the heartland of Hoosier country to an Apache Reservation in Arizona. Cover: Copyright © 1996 by NBAE. Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images.
Download or read book Basketball Great Writing About America s Game written by Alexander Wolff and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the street game to March Madness to Jordan and LeBron, the greatest writing about the grit, grace, and glory of basketball Made in America, basketball is a sport that stirs a national passion, reaching fever pitch during the NCAA's March Madness and the NBA Finals. Masterfully assembled by longtime Sports Illustratedwriter Alexander Wolff, Basketball spans eight decades to bring together a dream team of writers as awe-inspiring and endlessly inventive as the game itself. Here are in-depth profiles of the legends of the hardcourt--Russell, Kareem, Bird, Jordan, and LeBron--and storied franchises such as the Knicks and Celtics, along with dazzling portraits of the flash and sizzle of playground ball and more personal reflections on the game by some of America's finest writers, among them Donald Hall, John Edgar Wideman, and Pat Conroy. Highlights include James Naismith recalling how he invented the game that would go on to conquer the world; John McPhee capturing the ever-disciplined Bill Bradley as a Princeton Tiger; Peter Goldman's indelible portrait of the life and death of a Harlem Globetrotter; and Michael Lewis's account of the brave new world of NBA analytics. Classic journalism about inner-city basketball by Pete Axthelm, Rick Telander, and Darcy Frey is joined by stories of the game's popularity across America, from the heartland of Hoosier country to an Apache Reservation in Arizona.
Download or read book Basketball written by Joe Jares and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The City Game written by Pete Axthelm and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA fascinating chronicle of New York basketball, from the concrete courts of the city’s parks to the bright lights of Madison Square Garden/divDIV/divDIVThe New York Knickerbockers, one of the NBA’s charter franchises, played professionally for twenty-four years before winning their first championship in 1970, defeating the Los Angeles Lakers in a thrilling seven-game series. Those Knicks, who won again in 1973, became legends, and captivated a city that has basketball in its blood./divDIV /divDIVBut this book is more than a history of the championship Knicks. It is an exploration of what basketball means to New York—not just to the stars who compete nightly in the garden, but to the young men who spend their nights and weekends perfecting their skills on the concrete courts of the city’s parks. Basketball is a city game, and New York is the king of cities./div
Download or read book Games of Deception written by Andrew Maraniss and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *"Rivaling the nonfiction works of Steve Sheinkin and Daniel James Brown's The Boys in the Boat....Even readers who don't appreciate sports will find this story a page-turner." --School Library Connection, starred review *"A must for all library collections." --Booklist, starred review Winner of the 2020 AJL Sydney Taylor Honor! From the New York Times bestselling author of Strong Inside comes the remarkable true story of the birth of Olympic basketball at the 1936 Summer Games in Hitler's Germany. Perfect for fans of The Boys in the Boat and Unbroken. On a scorching hot day in July 1936, thousands of people cheered as the U.S. Olympic teams boarded the S.S. Manhattan, bound for Berlin. Among the athletes were the 14 players representing the first-ever U.S. Olympic basketball team. As thousands of supporters waved American flags on the docks, it was easy to miss the one courageous man holding a BOYCOTT NAZI GERMANY sign. But it was too late for a boycott now; the ship had already left the harbor. 1936 was a turbulent time in world history. Adolf Hitler had gained power in Germany three years earlier. Jewish people and political opponents of the Nazis were the targets of vicious mistreatment, yet were unaware of the horrors that awaited them in the coming years. But the Olympians on board the S.S. Manhattan and other international visitors wouldn't see any signs of trouble in Berlin. Streets were swept, storefronts were painted, and every German citizen greeted them with a smile. Like a movie set, it was all just a facade, meant to distract from the terrible things happening behind the scenes. This is the incredible true story of basketball, from its invention by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, to the sport's Olympic debut in Berlin and the eclectic mix of people, events and propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic that made it all possible. Includes photos throughout, a Who's-Who of the 1936 Olympics, bibliography, and index. Praise for Games of Deception: A 2020 ALA Notable Children's Book! A 2020 CBC Notable Social Studies Book! "Maraniss does a great job of blending basketball action with the horror of Hitler's Berlin to bring this fascinating, frightening, you-can't-make-this-stuff-up moment in history to life." -Steve Sheinkin, New York Times bestselling author of Bomb and Undefeated "I was blown away by Games of Deception....It's a fascinating, fast-paced, well-reasoned, and well-written account of the hidden-in-plain-sight horrors and atrocities that underpinned sports, politics, and propaganda in the United States and Germany. This is an important read." -Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Newbery Honor winning author of Hitler Youth "A richly reported and stylishly told reminder how, when you scratch at a sports story, the real world often lurks just beneath." --Alexander Wolff, New York Times bestselling author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama "An insightful, gripping account of basketball and bias." --Kirkus Reviews "An exciting and overlooked slice of history." --School Library Journal
Download or read book Dream Team written by Jack McCallum and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team. As a writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum provides the definitive account of the Dream Team phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial selection process. He takes us inside the team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull sessions where superstars like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird debated the finer points of basketball. And he narrates a riveting account of the legendary intrasquad scrimmage that pitted the Dream Teamers against one another in what may have been the greatest pickup game in history. In the twenty years since the Dream Team first captivated the world, its mystique has only grown. Dream Team vividly re-creates the moment when a once-in-a-millennium group of athletes came together and changed the future of sports—one perfectly executed fast break at a time. With a new Afterword by the author. “The absolute definitive work on the subject, a perfectly wonderful once-you-pick-it-up-you-won’t-be-able-to-put-it-down book.”—The Boston Globe “An Olympic hoops dream.”—Newsday “What makes this volume a must-read for nostalgic hoopsters are the robust portraits of the outsize personalities of the participants, all of whom were remarkably open with McCallum, both then and now.”—Booklist (starred review)
Download or read book Above the Rim written by Jen Bryant and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Elgin Baylor, basketball icon and civil rights advocate, from an all-star team Hall-of-famer Elgin Baylor was one of basketball’s all-time-greatest players—an innovative athlete, team player, and quiet force for change. One of the first professional African-American players, he inspired others on and off the court. But when traveling for away games, many hotels and restaurants turned Elgin away because he was black. One night, Elgin had enough and staged a one-man protest that captured the attention of the press, the public, and the NBA. Above the Rim is a poetic, exquisitely illustrated telling of the life of an underrecognized athlete and a celebration of standing up for what is right.
Download or read book The Secret Game written by Scott Ellsworth and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing The true story of the game that never should have happened--and of a nation on the brink of monumental change In the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of James Naismith, the game's inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become the highest-scoring college team in America--a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. Yet his players faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads. Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasn't the Blue Devils, but an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Composed of former college stars from across the country, the team dismantled everyone they faced, including the Duke varsity. They were prepared to take on anyone--until an audacious invitation arrived, one that was years ahead of anything the South had ever seen before. What happened next wasn't on anyone's schedule. Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation's sporting past. The riveting, true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how a group of forgotten college basketball players, aided by a pair of refugees from Nazi Germany and a group of daring student activists, not only blazed a trail for a new kind of America, but helped create one of the most meaningful moments in basketball history.
Download or read book The Book of Basketball written by Bill Simmons and published by ESPN. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The NBA according to The Sports Guy—now updated with fresh takes on LeBron, the Celtics, and more! Foreword by Malcom Gladwell • “The work of a true fan . . . it might just represent the next phase of sports commentary.”—The Atlantic Bill Simmons, the wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining basketball addict known to millions as ESPN’s The Sports Guy, has written the definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA. From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major pro basketball debate. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball. Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.
Download or read book Pippa Park Raises Her Game written by Erin Yun and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CONTEMPORARY REIMAGINING OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR MIDDLE GRADERS Life is full of great expectations for Korean American Pippa Park. It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look. So when Pippa gets a mysterious basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself by following the "Rules of Cool." At Lakeview, Pippa juggles old and new friends, an unrequited crush, and the pressure to perform academically and athletically while keeping her past and her family's laundromat a secret from her elite new classmates. But when Pippa begins to receive a string of hateful, anonymous messages via social media, her carefully built persona is threatened. As things begin to spiral out of control, Pippa discovers the real reason she was admitted to Lakeview and wonders if she can keep her old and new lives separate, or if she should even try.
Download or read book Pickup Artists written by Lars Anderson and published by Verso. This book was released on 1999 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiling basketball on the blacktops, at its most basic level, this book chronicles the unusual lives of some of the nation's best players--figures both forgotten and never heard of--in fast-paced words and pictures. 16 photos.
Download or read book More Than Just a Game written by Madison Moore and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how Black players came to shine on the basketball court.
Download or read book By the Grace of the Game written by Dan Grunfeld and published by Triumph Books. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multi-generational family epic detailing history's only known journey from Auschwitz to the NBA When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive. In By the Grace of the Game, Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale. From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.
Download or read book The Capital of Basketball written by John McNamara and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebration of Washington D.C. basketball is long overdue. The D.C. metro area stands second to none in its contributions to the game. Countless figures who have had a significant impact on the sport over the years have roots in the region, including E.B. Henderson, the first African-American certified to teach public school physical education, and Earl Lloyd, the first African-American to take the court in an actual NBA game. The city's Spingarn High School produced two players – Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing – recognized among the NBA’s 50 greatest at the League’s 50th anniversary celebration. No other high school in the country can make that claim.These figures and many others are chronicled in this book, the first-ever comprehensive look at the great high school players, teams and coaches in the D.C. metropolitan area. Based on more than 150 interviews, The Capital of Basketball is first and foremost a book about basketball. But in discussing the trends and evolution of the game, McNamara also uncovers the turmoil in the lives of the players and area residents as they dealt with prejudice, educational inequities, politics, and the ways the area has changed through the years.
Download or read book Football Great Writing About the National Sport written by Various and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men’s Journal’s “Ultimate Football Reading List” “First-rate” sports writing on American football from an all-star line-up that includes Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Lewis, and more (Wall Street Journal) Since football’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century, the standout writers on the sport have gone behind and beyond the spectacle to reveal the complexity, the contradictions, and the deeper humanity at the heart of the game. In a landmark collection, The Library of America brings together the very best of their work: gems of deadline reportage, incisive longform profiles of football’s storied figures, and autobiographical accounts by players and others close to the game. Celebrating the sport without shying away from its sometimes devastating personal and social costs, the forty-four pieces gathered here testify to football’s boundless capacity to generate outsized characters and memorable tales.
Download or read book How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius written by Nick Greene and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, entertaining deconstruction of basketball, drawing on the expertise of board-game creators, magicians, therapists, and more Basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world—an insanely complicated game built on a combination of athleticism, craftiness, rules, intangibles, and superstardom. However, while it’s enjoyable to watch, the real reason it works is because it’s a game of culture, art, and all the things that make us human. How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius deconstructs the sport from top to bottom and then puts it back together again, detailing its intricacies through reporting and dozens of interviews with experts. These experts, however, are a diverse group: wine critics weighing in on LeBron’s ability to delegate on the fly, magicians analyzing Chris Paul’s mystifying dribbling techniques, cartographers breaking down Steph Curry’s deadeye three-point shooting. Every chapter treats basketball to a multi-disciplined study that adventures far beyond the lines of the court, examining key elements of the sport from some surprising and revealing angles. There’s a reason it has conquered the world, and every game is a chance to learn about pop culture, fashion, history, science, art, and anything else that bounces our way.
Download or read book Hoops written by Thomas Aiello and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representations of race. Today, basketball’s influence seeps into film, music, dance, and fashion. Hoops tells the story of the reciprocal relationship between the sport and the society that received it. While many books have celebrated specific aspects of the game, Thomas Aiello presents the only contemporary cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional mens and womens competition. He argues that the game has existed in a reciprocal relationship with the broader culture, both embodying conflicts over race, class, and gender and serving a s public theater for them. Aiello places cultural icons like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant in the context of their times and explores how the sport negotiated controversies and scandals. Hoops belongs on the bookshelf of every reader interested in the history of basketball, sports, race, urban life, and pop culture in America.
