Book of Basketball
Almost done reading “Book of Basketball” by Bill Simmons. Why “almost”? The book is 697 pages; which is one of the reasons I didn’t buy it, but I ended up being given it as a Xmas gift. I’m not one to shy away from “big books”- a year ago, I read Tragedy and Hope by Caroll Quigley which was over 1,200 pages. But I thought that as much as I love pro basketball, I’m not that big enough of a fan to tell you the difference between Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson- besides one’s black and one’s white. Simmons does a solid job of making the book more factual than most sports commentary and yet still give it a lot of color. I admit I skimmed through sections of the book- esp about stars from the 50-70’s, but I learned a fair deal. Lots of interesting stories on how top players like Jordan, Oakley, and others interacted, a dose of statistics, but also key themes on how certain qualities matter more than the statistics we track (best embodied by Bill Russell’s career). Simmons was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel and the humor shows through.
There is one story told in this book that I cannot stop laughing about. Perhaps it was how the story was framed. In a section detailing the pros/cons of Isiah Thomas (a very detailed summmary of Isiah’s on-the-court strengths, along with his front-office woes- didn’t know he dereailed the CBA)… one of the Pros listed towards the end was ‘gotta love someone who chokes his own trainer’. This is explained in a footnote where Simmons explains one of his favorite videos is where Isiah takes an elbow from Karl Malone, flips out, and winds up choking his own trainer. This probably shouldn’t be funny, but the way it wound up in a “Pro” (ie: positive section) about Isiah’s intensity, the thought of Isiah - who as a genial/smiling quality about him (but is also hyper competitive) strangling this person who is trying to staunch the blood flow on live TV- and that being one of Simmons favorite moments was too much!! Also the deadpan detail added by Simmons as this being the NBA’s only inexplicable choking, with the Spreewell-Carlsiemo one only being somewhat inexplicable.
A fun read!
