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.

Dave Kindred has covered dozens of Super Bowls and written about stars like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. But a high-school girls basketball team—the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois—stands apart from the rest.

In Dikembe Mutombo: The Inspiring Story of One of Basketball’s Greatest Centers, you'll learn the inspirational story of one of basketball's greatest defensive players, Dikembe Mutombo. Mutombo had an illustrious NBA career, retiring with eight All-Star selections and four Defensive Player of the Year awards. His impact on his teams as a defensive anchor cannot be understated.

In Five Banners, Feinstein tells the inside history of Coach K’s forty-two-year career at Duke and its five NCAA championships, from the first, against Kansas in 1991, to the most recent, in 2015 against Wisconsin. With unparalleled access to Coach K, the team, and its staff, Feinstein takes listeners on a mesmerizing ride into the locker room and onto the court. Full of intimate details, personal memories, and previously untold on- and off-court stories, it is a book that only Feinstein could write.

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.

An all-access pass to the practice courts of the NBA, Net Work combines McClanaghan’s hard-earned wisdom - both on and off the court - with rare glimpses into the dues-paying life of professional athletes determined to stay at the top. McClanaghan shares stories of working one-on-one with some of basketball’s greatest names, explaining how each athlete works to shore up his offensive and defensive weaknesses; perfect his nutrition; treat injuries; build mental toughness; and find occasional refuge from the glare of the spotlight.

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.

Danny Jordan is one of two lucky winners of the US Basketball Writer's Association's contest for aspiring journalists. His prize? A trip to New Orleans and a coveted press pass for the Final Four. It's a basketball junkie's dream come true! But the games going on behind the scenes between the coaches, the players, the media, the money-men, and the fans turn out to be even more fiercely competitive than those on the court.

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.

A list of legends is significant not only for who makes the list, but who gets left off of it. If there are no obvious omissions, then the list of candidates was probably less than legendary in the first place. Not so in the case of the Syracuse University Orangemen. Calling roll on Syracuse’s all-time basketball greats can take up the greater part of a day. The school produced its first All-American, Lewis Castle, in 1912. More recently, Carmelo Anthony, one of the best freshmen to ever play college basketball, led the 2003 Orangemen to the school’s first NCAA championship.

“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.

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of the game or have never set foot on a court, How Basketball Can Save the World will empower you to become more resilient, tolerant, and wise in your relationship with yourself, others, and the world around you.

John Feinstein has already taken listeners into the inner circles of top college basketball programs in The Legends Club. This time, Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball's lesser-known Cinderella stories - the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA. Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament but of making it past their first or second round games.

Sixteen-year-old Bethany Greene, though confident and self-assured, is what they call a late-bloomer. She’s never had a boyfriend, date, or first kiss. She’s determined to change that but after her crush turns her down cold for Homecoming—declaring her too inexperienced—and all her back-up ideas fall through, she cautiously agrees to go with her best friend’s boyfriend Jacob. A platonic date is better than no date, right? Until Saylor breaks up with said boyfriend.

Cincinnati, Ohio, lives and dies by college basketball, with two elite Division I rivals separated by a mere three miles. Rory’s dad just secured a new coaching gig at the University of Cincinnati, so it means yet another school and move for her, only this time to her dad’s hometown. Rory’s life revolves around basketball; she’s never had a close friend outside of it. Could this be a chance for a fresh start?

Experience Jeremy Lin’s rise to basketball superstar, free for a limited time! Who would have thought that an Asian-American, who stood just 5' 3" tall as a freshman in high school, and eventually went to Harvard to major in economics, would become the NBA's most talked about star in decades? But that's exactly what happened to Jeremy Lin. Undrafted out of college and subsequently waived in short order by both the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, Lin was signed by the underachieving New York Knicks. The rest is history.

The last American company to truly compete with Nike in the billion-dollar basketball sneaker market was And1, a rags-to-riches enterprise founded by three friends in Philadelphia who used grassroots marketing and an audacious approach to connect with young consumers. That was nearly 20 years ago. Can And1 possibly catch lightning in a bottle again? Zach Schonbrun inspects the rise, fall, and current relaunch of one of the most fascinating American brands of the 1990s, led by Cape Capener.

Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed.

Teresa Edwards has won more Olympic medals than any other basketball player in history with four golds and one bronze. She is the youngest woman to win a gold medal in basketball - and the oldest. She’s a WNBA pioneer and has been inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Now, for the first time, she shares the story of her greatest loss - and her most incredible victory.

They don’t set up any better than this. The greatest basketball player of all time–Bill Russell–and his juggernaut Boston Celtics, winners of ten (ten!) of the previous twelve NBA championships, squeak through one more playoff run and land in the Finals again. Russell’s opponent? The fearsome 7’1” next-generation superstar, Wilt Chamberlain, recently traded to the LA Lakers to form the league’s first dream team. Bill Russell and John Havlicek versus Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.