Martin Rickman: We’ve done movie songs. We’ve discussed karaoke. We’ve even fixed the pro bowl. It’s about time we get intellectual with it. Let’s talk about books. Sports books. I don’t know about you, but those were gateway books for me. I read a ton when I was little anyway, and this helped get me into history in general. In the pre-Wikipedia age, you couldn’t just go down a search rabbit hole to learn a ton. If I wanted to know about a player, sometimes all I had was his ghostwritten autobiography, or a fun David Halberstam book.
So let’s take the approach we’ve normally been taking. You pick a book, I’ll pick a book. And we’ll just keep going and see where we end up. It’ll be great.
What’s your first selection, good sir?
Brian Grubb: Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association, by Terry Pluto
Two reasons:
1) It’s a fun look at a really wild time in basketball history, and if you’re looking for a book to read this summer while sitting out on your patio with a beer or iced tea, you could do a whole lot worse. You really haven’t lived until you’ve read about the exploits of Marvin “Bad News” Barnes.
2) I asked for this book for Christmas one year, and my mom walked up to a soon-to-be-confused Barnes & Noble employee and said, “Excuse me… do you have Loose Balls?” Top five book of all time based on that moment alone.
MR: It isn’t the *best* sports book, but it’s one that has mattered the most to me as a fan and as a person who never grew any taller than 5’6. It’s In the Land of Giants: My Life in Basketball, by Muggsy Bogues.
I loved Muggsy Bogues when I was little. I was a runt, even from the time I was born, so some of my first and best basketball memories were watching that super fun and ’90s as heck Hornets team go to work. Back then I had no idea I’d eventually go to Wake Forest like Muggsy, or buy a house in Charlotte. I just loved how open he was about his height, and how he was still able to do great things despite being the shortest guy on the court.
Bogues still does local law firm commercials around town, and he’s shorter than the lawyers, by, like, a lot. I ran into him at the ACC Tournament in 2008 and didn’t really have anything sufficient to get him to sign, so I had him sign a makeshift tournament bracket I drew up on the back of a halftime box score (Florida State vs. UNC). I opened the book up today, and that signature was right inside. At least I kept that one in a safe place.
BG: Playing for Keeps, by David Halberstam
The Breaks of the Game is the more famous Halberstam basketball book, and I swear to God I will read it someday (I’m not even sure how I haven’t, honestly), but Playing for Keeps holds a special place in my heart because it was the first time I realized what an asshole Michael Jordan is. This is all common knowledge now, and it was probably common knowledge when the book was released, but at the time — I was like 16 or 17, I think — I was blown away.
The funny thing is that I read this book again a few years ago and I had a completely different perspective on it. The first time it felt like a biography of Michael Jordan. The second time it kind of felt like a historical document about the NBA, both in the way players have followed the Jordan blueprint since then and in the way everyone and everything gets compared to him now. (See, every conversation about the Warriors this season.) It’s always cool to get that from a second look.
MR: A Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein
I read this book way younger than I probably should have, and even when I picked it up for the first time, my dad warned me the language was a little bit extreme. It was – because that’s what Bob Knight the Coach did, and that’s how he communicated with other human beings, through curse words and a lot of yelling. This book was pretty amazing to a kid who always grew up loving college basketball, but didn’t exactly know what was going on inside the teams, and what that day-to-day looked like for those guys. While I’m not really an Indiana fan, it’s was a super fun look, and we’ve seen so many books since then do the “a year inside” look at programs and franchises. Only this one has Bob Knight, who was one of college basketball’s most colorful characters.
But mostly I’m just mad you took Playing for Keeps away from me because that was going to be my next pick. Those stories about Jordan are amazing, and I’m surprised Uproxx hasn’t done a “10 things you might have forgotten about Michael Jordan from David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps” post yet.
BG: The Summer Game, by Roger Angell
There are a lot — a LOT — of good books about baseball, which is kind of a funny thing to say right after we started with four-straight basketball books, but I’m going with The Summer Game here because Roger Angell is the best baseball writer. He’s still the best baseball writer today, at age 95, which is insane. But he was really the best baseball writer back in 1972, when this collection of essays was published. Please especially note the essay “Four Taverns on the Town,” in which Angell watches and reports back from a different New York bar for all four games of the Dodgers’ 1963 World Series sweep of the Yankees. It’s a wonderful piece of writing, first of all, and it’s worth a read or re-read as we ease our way into a new season. But I also love it because World Series games weren’t played at night until 1971, which means Roger Angell figured out a way to spend four October afternoons watching baseball in bars for work.
That, as they say, is some good hustle.
MR: Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
It’s so good. There’s drinking and drugs and sex and dirty jokes and it’s a baseball book, and if you read it as a kid, you felt like you’re getting away with something, like sneaking in some secret time watching MTV after your parents went to bed. Plus it chronicles Bouton’s 1969 season, which is nice.
This is one of those times when we aren’t even saying these are the best books ever. They’re just a few books we like, and we had a hard enough time getting it down to three books apiece. So we’ll open it to the comments – what’s your favorite sports book(s) and why? We love recommendations, and I’m sure there will be some you guys love that we haven’t had the chance to read (or even heard of). Reading is sports.
