Holiday Books - Fans’ Notes
By JASON ZENGERLE
THE BOOK OF BASKETBALL
The NBA According to the Sports Guy
By Bill Simmons
Illustrated. 715 pp. Ballantine Books. $30
THE ART OF A BEAUTIFUL GAME
The Thinking Fan’s Tour of the NBA
By Chris Ballard
Illustrated. 228 pp. Sports Illustrated/Simon & Schuster. $26
Pity the sportswriter. Like the fletcher and the wheelwright, he seems fated to become that most tragic of figures — the craftsman rendered obsolete by technology. His predicament was ably summed up by one sports fan a few years ago: “Unlike the old days, we can watch every minute of every game on TV. We can watch the postgame press conferences. We can watch highlights and sound bites on ESPN. We can argue about the team with other fans on message boards and blogs. By the time most newspaper stories are published, the news always feels a little dated.”
The fan who offered these thoughts is actually a sportswriter himself: Bill Simmons, who writes the Sports Guy column for ESPN.com. But notice the “we.” Simmons writes about sports from the fan’s perspective. He avoids the press box, instead watching games from the stands or, more typically, on TV in his “man cave.” He prefers quoting his drinking buddies to quoting athletes. And his cultural references run more toward Paris Hilton than Paris in the ’20s. In other words, Simmons writes about sports the way fans — especially 20- and 30-something white guys who are in three fantasy leagues and dream of having their bachelor parties in Las Vegas — talk about them. And in the 12 years he’s been writing as the Sports Guy, he’s become, arguably, the most popular sportswriter in America, now scoring about 1.4 million page views a month. In the process, he’s pioneered a new (and, perhaps, the only currently vital) genre of sportswriting: the fan as scrivener.
Now Simmons has written “The Book of Basketball,” a 700-page best seller about his favorite sport that showcases the strengths — and, alas, the fundamental weakness — of this genre. On the plus side of the stat sheet are Simmons’s passion for and knowledge of the National Basketball Association. When he was just 4, his father, a Celtics season-ticket holder, began taking him to Boston Garden, where he watched a procession of basketball legends, most importantly Larry Bird. “I spent my formative years studying the game of basketball with Professor Bird,” Simmons writes. Over time, he supplemented what he learned from Bird by marinating himself in hoops media: in his bibliography he says he consulted nearly 100 books and about 400 game tapes, along with “every relevant N.B.A. feature from 1954 through 2000 in Sports Illustrated.” YouTube is singled out for its “unbelievable help.”
All this research has given Simmons an unusually keen eye for the game, which he uses to try to resolve some of basketball’s thorniest debates — from judging Wilt versus Russell to ranking the top players of all time. (He stops at No. 96, leaving room to add four younger players over the next few years.) Simmons knows his “Moneyball” and isn’t averse to statistics, but he’s not in awe of them, either. “Basketball isn’t baseball,” he writes. “Basketball is an objective sport and a subjective sport, dammit.”
So, for instance, when justifying his ranking of Moses Malone as the 12th-best player in history, Simmons doesn’t just point out that Malone is “the greatest offensive rebounder ever by any calculation”; he explains how an undersize center with hands so small “he could barely palm a basketball” achieved that statistical feat. Malone “figured out a loophole in the rebounding system”: rather than trying to go around or over his man to crash the boards, he would lurk along the baseline, so that “when he felt like a shot was coming up, he’d slyly sneak under the backboard, start backing up, slam his butt into his opponent to create the extra foot of space he needed, then jump right to where the rebound was headed.”
Of course, if Simmons brought only passion and knowledge to the table, he wouldn’t be any different from one of the countless superfans calling in to their local sports radio shows. What makes him such a successful sportswriter, after all, is that he can flat out write. “The Book of Basketball” is a few hundred pages too long, but it’s never boring. Because practically every page features Simmons performing feats like perfectly encapsulating the career of Patrick Ewing (“a second banana masquerading as a first banana”) or vividly psychoanalyzing Kevin McHale’s habit of raising his arms in victory after Celtic road wins (“the one N.B.A. legend who felt obligated to rub his armpits in the collective faces of 18,000 fans”), the book is guaranteed to hold a reader’s interest.
But that ultimately is what’s so frustrating about it. Simmons has the writing chops to transcend the genre he’s established and maybe even turn out something that approaches his (and pretty much every sentient basketball fan’s) favorite hoops book, David Halberstam’s “Breaks of the Game,” but he doesn’t seem to want to. Thus, at various points in the book, he’ll arrive at some remarkable but overlooked chapter in N.B.A. history — like the episode in which the players selected for the 1964 All-Star Game threatened to sit it out two hours before tipoff unless the league agreed to a pension plan — and simply express his disbelief that no one has made an Emmy-winning documentary about it, instead of going to the trouble of telling the story himself. Similarly, his reliance on pop culture references, one of the hallmarks of the fan-as-scrivener genre, has become a crutch. He spends three pages on a pointless analogy between Kobe Bryant and the cheesy ’80s movie “Teen Wolf” and compares the Suns’ desperate efforts to trade Amare Stoudemire to Spencer and Heidi’s shopping “their fake wedding pictures,” as if anyone reading his book in five years will know who Spencer and Heidi are (something Simmons himself acknowledges in a jokey footnote).
Indeed, despite its doorstop-worthy heft, “The Book of Basketball” is very ephemeral, so much so that in an epilogue, Simmons admits that the Lakers’ winning the N.B.A. championship in June “sent my book into a tailspin,” since he’d finished his manuscript before the playoffs and had thus ranked Bryant too low (No. 15) on his list. In writing a book that seeks to mimic the conversations and arguments that take place among fans, rather than, like Halberstam, telling stories that fans might use to make and inform those arguments, Simmons has produced something that already feels a little dated.
Chris Ballard admirably reaches for timelessness with “The Art of a Beautiful Game.” Although he makes a few requisite head fakes in the direction of the new paradigm — subtitling the book “The Thinking Fan’s Tour of the NBA” and relating an odd anecdote about LeBron James’s flatulence — thisis a conventional work of sportswriting. Ballard, who writes about the N.B.A. for Sports Illustrated, sets out to explain and deconstruct various facets of the game, like blocking shots and running the point, and he turns to the players he covers for help.
Sometimes this leads to moments of insight. His chapter on the “killer instinct” delves into the psyche of Kobe Bryant, “the most competitive life-form on the planet.” Forget any labored “Teen Wolf”analogies; Ballard tells us everything we need to know about Bryant — why he’s so successful and why so many people hate him — with the story of Rob Schwartz, an undersize bench warmer on Bryant’s high school team whom Kobe forced into playing one-on-one games after practices and then routinely throttled, sometimes 80-0. Amazingly, Bryant still does this sort of thing. “If you scored on him in practice,” one of his former Lakers teammates tells Ballard, “he would just keep on challenging you and challenging you until you stayed after and played him so he could put his will on you and dominate you.”
Meanwhile, Ballard’s chapter on free-throw shooting reveals the mental toll it can take on a player with the sad tale of Nick Anderson, the Orlando Magic guard who notoriously blew Game 1 of the 1995 N.B.A. finals by missing four straight foul shots in the final seconds of regulation. For the rest of his career, Anderson, who had been a 70 percent free-throw shooter before choking, was a nervous wreck at the foul line. This ultimately caused him to become less aggressive on the court (for fear of winding up at the line) and eventually led to his early retirement. The missed free throws, Anderson tells Ballard, were “like a song that got in my head, playing over and over and over.”
But these — along with other, less interesting vignettes — only serve to illuminate basketball truths so blindingly obvious that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the game already knows them. Do we really need Ballard to tell us that “sometimes a dunk is more than a dunk” or that “shooting is a matter of confidence”? Indeed, Ballard’s book helpfully reminds readers why the revolution in sportswriting that Simmons kick-started was necessary in the first place. But it also highlights what’s missing from that genre. After reading “The Art of a Beautiful Game” and “The Book of Basketball,” I found myself wishing that Simmons, rather than merely holing up with a bunch of books and game tapes, had tagged along with Ballard on his reporting trips. After all, the strongest parts of “The Book of Basketball” are those that involved things Simmons experienced himself — whether as a youngster watching Bird at the Garden or as a journalist interviewing Bill Walton and Isiah Thomas. If these two books teach us anything, it’s that even the best newfangled sportswriter can learn something from a conventional one — namely, that it pays to get out of the man cave more often.
Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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