The NBA’s popularity skyrocketed starting in the early 1980s. The heightened salience of the growing, fast-paced sport in American popular culture has created its own literary canon, including these four standouts.
‘The Breaks of the Game’ by David Halberstam (1981)
David Halberstam embedded himself with the 1979-1980 Portland Trail Blazers and describes the daily travails of a team struggling to return to championship form. It is “one of the best books I've ever read about American sports,” said Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at The New York Times.
‘The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James’ by Scott Raab (2011)
Esquire’s Scott Raab follows LeBron James in the years before and after he left the Cleveland Cavaliers in a book that doubles as a kind of memoir of the writer’s tumultuous personal life. It’s a story of a “truly talented writer pouring his heart and soul into a book about a city he loves,” said John Krolik at Cavs: the blog.
‘Hoop Dreams: A True Story of Hardship and Triumph’ by Ben Joravsky (1995)
Joravsky movingly chronicles the lives and challenges of the celebrated film documentary’s protagonists, Arthur Agee and William Gates, both of whom hailed from troubled Chicago neighborhoods. “Hoop Dreams” is “at once a heart-wrenching and uplifting story of survival,” said Publisher’s Weekly.
‘Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s’ by Jeff Pearlman (2014)
The 1980s-era Los Angeles Lakers won five NBA championships, and Pearlman covers the dramatic achievements of the team on the hardwood in addition to its off-court exploits. The book functions as an “excavation of a long-lost era, as well as a pulsing, utterly relevant roadmap into our twenty-first-century sports celebrity culture,” said Dave Zirin at The Nation.