Sports Basketball

When college basketball teams make it to the NCAA tournament, they say they're "going to the dance". John Feinstein's riveting new book is the story of the last dance: the Final Four. There is no event in sports quite like it. The Final Four draws millions to their televisions and thousands to a chosen city; attendance is topped only by the Super Bowl. It is the epicenter of sports madness, a circus of media, coaches, and fans swirling around the four teams talented enough to have made it to the end.

Linspired reveals the remarkable journey of the ultimate underdog, Jeremy Lin, superstar of the New York Knicks and the first American-born player of Chinese/Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

Back in his old basketball league, before the car accident, 13-year-old Carlos Cooper owned the court, sprinting and jumping and lighting up the scoreboard as his opponents (and teammates) watched in amazement. But now, Carlos feels completely out of his league on his new wheelchair basketball team, the Rollin’ Rats. After all, how can he make a layup when he’s still struggling to learn how to dribble? But when the city’s crooked mayor threatens to tear down the Rollin’ Rats’ gym, Carlos realizes that he can’t stay on the sidelines forever.

Want entertaining and enlightening basketball stories from legends? Then Inspiring True Stories from Basketball Legends is the perfect answer. Many basketball players want to be the best athletes they can be, but they lack the access to the people who reached the top of the sport. Well...the inspiring true success stories and success principles from the basketball legends changes that because you can tap into their mindset and thought processes.

At the age of 15, high school sophomore and basketball player David Cooks experienced a spinal aneurism, leaving him a T-6 paraplegic. Refusing to let the wheelchair determine the man, he made the decision to persevere from the very beginning - and he never let go of his passion for life the game of basketball. In Getting Undressed, David describes his journey to independence and purpose, and how “getting undressed” for change can pose huge challenges, literally and figuratively, while creating opportunities for victories.

Set against a backdrop of social change during the 1970s, State is a compelling first-person account of what it was like to live through both traditional gender discrimination in sports and the joy of the very first days of equality - or at least the closest that one high school girls’ basketball team ever came to it.

Point guard Caitlin Clark took the world of college basketball by storm when she began playing for the University of Iowa in 2020, earning 27 points in her first game alone. By the end of her college career, Caitlin broke the record for total NCAA career-scoring points by scoring 3,951 points over her four years as an Iowa Hawkeye. The high-scoring athlete grabbed the attention of the world—over 14 million viewers tuned in to watch her playoff games in April of 2024.

It’s not long before Nate realizes that basketball is his sport. But Nate has an ax to grind with star players Colin and Bo, who have disrespected him for years. Nate believes that outplaying those two is the most important thing . . . until he learns that life is about more than getting ready for the next game.

When filmmaker Christian Monroe runs into fiery - and frustrating - Elise Templeton at a party, the night quickly becomes the hottest one-night stand of their lives. But then her boss hires Christian to make a publicity film about Elise, and suddenly they're in each other's space. All day. Every day. And things are getting hotter....

Meet Miss Cortez, a woman with Down syndrome who dreams of playing in the NBA.... She wants to defeat all the negative stigma that comes with disabilities.

Welcome to Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, in a working-class corner of the Bronx, where a driven coach inspires his teams to win games and championships - and learn Russian history and graduate and go on to college.

The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and Black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in US culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly Black sport, White fans - including especially himself - think about and talk about Black heroes, Black scapegoats, and Black bodies. Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999.

In Carl Martin’s take-no-prisoners examination of big-time college basketball and the money machine it has become, he peels back the veneer. Now for the first time the soft underbelly of big-time college hoops is probed by someone who has actually been there, done that. Martin tells the full and true story of what drove his father’s obsession to open his heart and his wallet to those kids. What really happened before and after the roll-over accident that triggered an FBI investigation of the University of Michigan’s Fab Five and triggered a nationwide scandal?

Julius Erving, aka Dr. J, was a wizard with the basketball, performing feats the world had never seen before: midair spins and whirls punctuated by powerful slam dunks, which he was the first to glamorize. In a career that lasted from the 1970s well into the 1980s, he was one of the first players to make extemporaneous individual expression an integral part of the game, setting the style of play that has prevailed ever since. He's also long been respected as a gracious, dignified, and disciplined man. As there are great men of history, there are great men of sports, and Dr. J is just such a man.

Pete Axthelm follows the 1969 - 70 season of the New York Knicks and provides a parallel focus on basketball as it was then played in the black neighborhoods of New York City. Throughout, he writes clearly, intelligently, and passionately about the game, bringing alive the players’ efforts, accomplishments, and failures.

Cosa fa del basket uno dei giochi più belli al mondo? Tutto. Flavio Tranquillo racconta il suo amore per il Gioco, quello vero, in un saggio emozionante come una gara 7 delle Finals Nba: quattro quarti - senza dimenticare post e pre game - per scoprire la storia, i protagonisti e le strategie attraverso l'occhio esperto di chi la palla a spicchi l'ha sempre vissuta da vicino, cercando di trasmetterne il fascino e la magia di uno sport in cui il singolo può emergere ma, alla fine, ciò che conta davvero è sempre e solo la squadra.

The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessities of hatred.

Highlighted by the ESPN basketball documentary Black Magic, Ben Jobe's life and philosophy are captured in Staying Ahead of the Posse. This is history in the flesh, the history of basketball and the Civil Rights Movement, of desegregation and economic exploitation, of African independence and the modern-day plantation that is the American sports industry in general and the NCAA in particular. Ben's 40-plus years of coaching, teaching, nurturing, and mentoring intersected with and was influenced by all those factors.

Harvey Araton is one of New York's - and the nation's - best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous - except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years.