Sports Basketball

The riveting inside story of college basketball's fiercest rivalry among three coaching legends - University of North Carolina's Dean Smith, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, and North Carolina State's Jim Valvano - by the king of college basketball writers, number-one New York Times best seller John Feinstein.

A life-changing guide to achieving your goals, by the 2013 NCAA champion college basketball coach and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Rick Pitino is famous as one of the most dynamic and successful basketball coaches of our time, leading the University of Louisville Cardinals to the NCAA basketball championship in 2013, and is renowned for writing the #1 New York Times best-selling success and leadership book, Success is a Choice.

A man of deep passion and intensity, George Karl earned his bad boy reputation while playing at the University of North Carolina, a rap that continued through the five years he spent with the San Antonio Spurs - and long after he stopped playing. Karl's beery nights, fistfights, and barking followed him into a 35-year coaching career. In a game defined by big stakes and bigger egos, rabid fans and an unforgiving media, Karl was hired and fired a dozen times.

In Tales from the Duke Blue Devils Locker Room, readers will laugh, dream, and sweat alongside the players of one of the most successful and storied college basketball teams to ever take to the hardwood. In this treasure trove of Duke history, Jim Sumner brings to life the legendary games and unique players that have come to define this championship team.

One of the most storied college basketball programs in America, the Kansas Jayhawks have produced some of the greatest legends to ever roam the hardwood. In this newly revised edition of Tales from the Kansas Jayhawks Locker Room, fans can sift through a treasure trove of first-hand memories from the players and coaches who made history at the University of Kansas.

Wes Miller grew up in the shadow of the Atlantic Coast Conference, college basketball's most powerful league. But as a high school senior, none of those elite programs offered him a scholarship - they thought he was too small and too slow. After a year at a mid-major program, he chose to attend North Carolina without a basketball scholarship. Over the next four years, Miller's hard work resulted in a major role on the Carolina team. He earned a starting spot as a junior, displacing more highly touted players. He began his senior year with a mission - to chronicle all aspects of his final season in Chapel Hill.

Ken Rappoport’s Tales from the North Carolina Tar Heels Locker Room is a compilation of the best notes, quotes, and anecdotes from North Carolina lore. Meet a coach nicknamed 'Bloody Neck', a player called 'The Blind Bomber', and a team known as the 'White Phantoms'. And, of course, there is Michael Jordan. Tales from the North Carolina Tar Heels Locker Room captures the anecdotes and memories that have defined this team from the early 20th century up through their success in the 2000s.

Tales from the Indiana Hoosier Locker Room covers over a century of Indiana University basketball. Current and former Hoosiers talk of the excitement, the disappointment, and the celebration that has turned IU basketball into a statewide religion. The history of the Indiana program is revealed through the memories of the school’s hundreds of lettermen. Without a doubt, this is a must-listen for every March Madness and college basketball fan.

i>Red and Me is an extraordinary book: an homage to a peerless coach, showing how he produced results unlike any other; an inspiring story of mutual success, in which each man gave his all, and gained back even more; above all, it may be the best depiction of male friendship ever put on the page. Who would have guessed that such different men could have become such a tightly bonded pair? Few did guess it. Now Russell tells it.

These exciting and informative books will turn any young listener into a sports fanatic! Learn all about the history of the world’s most entertaining sports like football, basketball, and soccer.

From the first jump ball to the final second on the clock, women can finally bring together nascent hoop dreams and their desire to relate to the b-ball obsessed men in their lives.

Through extensive research and interviews with those closest to Iverson, acclaimed Washington Post sportswriter Kent Babb gets behind the familiar, sanitized, and heroic version of the hard-changing, hard-partying athlete who played every game as if it were his last.

In Golden Days, acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum uses these two teams - the Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain/Elgin Baylor Lakers and the Stephen Curry/Kevin Durant/Draymond Green Warriors - to trace the dynamic history of the National Basketball Association, which for much of the last half century has marched memorably through the state of California. Tying together the two strands of McCallum's story is Hall of Famer West, the ferociously competitive Laker guard who later became one of the key architects of the Warriors.

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way. Upon Further Review takes classic arguments conducted over pints in a pub and places them in the hands of writers, athletes, and historians. From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, it answers age-old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar.

At one time Lew Alcindor was just another kid from New York City with all the usual problems: He struggled with fitting in, with pleasing a strict father, and with overcoming shyness that made him feel socially awkward. But with a talent for basketball and an unmatched team of supporters, Lew Alcindor was able to transform and to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport–team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's.

When Kevin Garnett shocked the world by announcing that he would not be attending college - as young basketball prodigies were expected to do - but instead would enter the 1995 NBA draft directly from high school, he blazed a trail for a generation of teenage basketball players to head straight for the pros. That trend would continue until the NBA instituted an age limit in 2005, requiring all players to attend college or another developmental program for at least one year.

Steven Adams overcame extreme odds to become a first-round prospect in the 2013 NBA draft. From there he signed a major contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder - making him New Zealand's highest-paid athlete ever - and went on to forge a reputation for his intense, physical style of basketball. Adams takes you inside the draft process from the fascinating whirlwind tour of pre-draft workouts with dozens of teams to the draft itself where dreams are made or dashed and the Gatorade bottles on every table are glued shut.

As the crack epidemic swept across inner-city America in the early 1980s, the streets of Baltimore were crime ridden. For poor kids from the housing projects, the future looked bleak. But basketball could provide the quickest ticket out, an opportunity to earn a college scholarship and perhaps even play in the NBA. Dunbar High School had one of the most successful basketball programs, not only in Baltimore but in the entire country, and in the early 1980s, the Dunbar Poets were arguably the best high school team ever.

The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is the “revelatory” (New York Times), “deeply empathetic” (New Yorker) true story of four teenagers attempting to escape the cycles of poverty, crime, and despair in 1990s Brooklyn by getting recruited to play college basketball. With poignant intimacy, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of these young men, including the future superstar Stephon Marbury, who are among the most promising players in Coney Island.