Basketball Books

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Book SynopsisThis is the biography of NBA Hall of Fame player Elgin Baylor, an innovator in his sport, a civil rights trailblazer, and a superstar. It is the story of how a kid from the streets of segregated Washington, DC, who didnât attend college until he was over twenty, revolutionized basketball.Trade ReviewElgin Baylor, one of the premier superstars in the NBA, gets his first biography courtesy of Bayne, a Washington, D.C., sportswriter, who makes the case for considering Hall of Famer Baylor among the most elite players with his signature gravity-defying 'hesitation' jump shot. Born in 1934 in segregated D.C., Baylor didn’t play basketball until high school, quickly gaining notice on the Phelps Vocational High School team. When the High Court struck down integration in1954, Baylor transferred to another school, where a press notice called him 'literally unstoppable,' before joining teams at the College of Idaho and Seattle University, scoring big points and media attraction. During the 1958 NBA draft, Baylor was selected first overall and signed with the Minnesota Lakers, only to face Jim Crow laws when it came to hotels; the Lakers sat out a game in hopes of influencing team owners to create a nondiscrimination policy. Bayne writes expertly of Baylor’s golden era with the newly relocated Los Angeles Lakers, his team-up with sharpshooter Jerry West, their rivalry with the Boston Celtics, his play in seven NBA finals and 11 All-Star games, and his decision to retire in 1971 due to bad knees. Bayne’s gracious biography of a media-savvy, high-profile ex-sportsman shows the man as much more than his patented spin moves and one-legged jumpers. * Publishers Weekly *While often cited by current NBA superstars as being one of basketball’s most athletically gifted and influential players of all-time, Elgin Baylor (b. 1934) is not a household name for many of today’s fans. This biography from Bayne (Sky Kings) chronicles Baylor’s on-court heroics during the 1960s as a Minneapolis and then L.A. Laker, giving insight into why the versatile, acrobatic, high-scoring power forward is so revered within NBA circles. Baylor’s greatest games during the peak of his playing career, his mostly friendly rivalries with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, and the Lakers’ status as perennial bridesmaids to the hated Boston Celtics are covered in impressive detail. . . .VERDICT Surprisingly, this is the first biography devoted to the Hall of Famer. * Library Journal *The new book Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball gives us a look at the revolutionary man from his early childhood to his time both on and off the court in the NBA. The first biography on the Hall of Famer, author Bijan C. Bayne takes us through Baylor’s life giving us the most rounded look at a man that stood tall in basketball and in life. Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball is out now. Get out and read something on one of the architects of the game. * North Pole Hoops *I was prompted to read Bijan C. Bayne's biography, simply titled Elgin Baylor with the realization I knew virtually nothing of this basketball icon. Not only was he playing in pre-ESPN days, with all the adulation that prompts, he was also a modest man. Elgin was a high school and college phenom when black athletes were just starting to emerge from mainstream media invisibility. Jackie Robinson had begun the change, but in Washington DC, an African American teen was ignored by the city's dailies. Unlike today. I think I was started hearing about LeBron James at his conception. Bayne's biog reveals Baylor as a decent family man, politically involved and responsible. More than anything else, for over a decade (the 60's), he dominated nearly every game in which he played. . . . It is sufficient to recall Elgin as a man well placed in the pantheon of basketball greats. * WBAI-FM *The basketball fan . . . might like unwrapping [this book as a gift], Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball by Bijan C. Bayne (foreword by Bob Ryan). * QSaltLake *Sometimes I am amazed at how many basketball fans are unaware of elite players from earlier eras. It appears that these people think there was no professional basketball players before Micheal Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came into the league in the 1980's. One of these forgotten players was considered one of the best all time in the 1960's, Elgin Baylor. His story is captured in this excellent biography. . . .Elgin Baylor was one of the first true superstars of the NBA, with his best years coming during the late 1950’s and early1960’s for the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers. This biography of the man by Bijan C. Bane is the most complete book about Baylor. It is a well-researched and well written account of Baylor’s entire basketball career. . . .Bayne captures the spirit of Baylor’s game with exciting accounts of the skills he would show off. . . .Like Baylor’s game, the book is filled with beautiful passages similar to this one. . . .[T]his is an outstanding book on a man that is often overlooked when the greatest players in the history of the game are mentioned. While that is a shame, this book does justice to show that Baylor truly is one of the game’s elite players and the reader will come away with much respect for both Elgin Baylor the player and the man. * The Guy Who Reviews Sports Books *The basketball fan on your list might like unwrapping Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball by Bijan C. Bayne (foreword by Bob Ryan). * Tribune *One of the NBA’s most underrated superstars has never been the subject of a biography until now. Bayne, author of previous books about American sports, race and ethnicity, explains how the soft-spoken Baylor was a more influential proponent for racial equality than his demeanor would indicate. * Sports Biblio: The Athletic Experience in Books, History and Culture *Bijan Bayne’s latest contribution to basketball history fills a perplexing gap: that is, why wasn’t there a good, well-researched biography of Elgin Baylor before this? Although Bayne doesn’t answer the question, he does provide a readable, interesting, and significant biography of one of the greatest and most innovative players who ever played . . . Bayne has utilized a great number of resources (newspapers, magazines, and books) to put together a reasonably seamless and well-organized look at Baylor. . . .[T]his is a book that deserves reading by historians of basketball and American culture. * Journal of Sport History *Fifty years ago Los Angeles Lakers great Elgin Baylor would have not needed an introduction anywhere, and certainly not in a book review. . . Baylor and his legion of fans, however, need not worry. His place is safeguarded in American sports legend thanks, in part, to basketball writer Bijan C. Bayne, who recreates for today’s reader interesting factoids in his book, Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball. * Sport in American History *Elgin Baylor has long deserved a book like this highlighting his exceptional career that startled the basketball world when it sprang to life in the late 1950s. He was more than a pioneer with a game that was immune to the future. It was a nasty, racist age, and he reigned supreme with great dignity. They could play the game for a thousand years, and Elgin would still be relevant. Basketball owes him much, as does society in general. Kudos to Bijan C. Bayne for bringing Baylor's story back to life for future generations. -- Roland Lazenby, author of Michael Jordan: The LifeBijan Bayne has demonstrated he is a wise student of basketball with his elegant, richly-detailed biography of the often overlooked hoops innovator, Elgin Baylor. Bayne’s absorbing book will make you want to dig up old videotape of Baylor’s greatest aerial moments. It will certainly give you a better appreciation of Elgin Baylor the man. -- Kevin Merida, managing editor of The Washington Post and co-author of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence ThomasBijan Bayne has written one of the best basketball biographies in the history of the genre about one of the greatest players the game has ever known. A marvelous narrative that reads like a novel. Do yourself a favor and read this book. -- Kyle Keiderling, award-winning sports biographer and author of Heart of a LionElgin Baylor was difficult to guard on the basketball floor and even harder to write about. He was the elusive superstar. Bijan Bayne, with his exhaustive research, makes a huge breakthrough here: He tells the most complete story of one of America’s greatest sports icons. -- Dan Raley, former Seattle Post-Intelligencer sportswriterTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Foreword Introduction Chapter 1 From Streetball to Spingarn Chapter 2 Superstar or Secret Schoolboy? Chapter 3 “I Was Scared to Death, It Was My First Flight.” Chapter 4 How The West Was Won Chapter 5 I Am Not an Animal…Put in a Cage Chapter 6 New Frontiers: The NBA’s First Modern Player Chapter 7 The First Superstar Chapter 8 A Leader of Men Chapter 9 “The More I Was Determined To Prove The Doctors Wrong” Chapter 10 Wilt: The Unlucky Number 13 Chapter 11 Jazz Duet Chapter 12 Clipper Command Chapter 13 Rabbit Redux Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisA historic look at the fabled 198384 Boston Celtics and an unforgettable season.Ronald Reagan declares the Soviet Union an Evil Empire. The Apple Macintosh personal computer makes its debut. Michael Jackson's Thriller album dominates the pop charts. And Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics capture the NBA championship over Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and the Los Angeles Lakers. It was 1984, and for the NBA and the nation, the year was full of milestone moments.In Dynasty Restored: How Larry Bird and the 1984 Boston Celtics Conquered the NBA and Changed Basketball, Thomas J. Whalen explores this fascinating and dramatic season. The NBA had been struggling, seen as a minor sports league and suffering from poor attendance, lagging television ratings, and embarrassing drug scandals. The Celtics were beset by locker room turmoil, disruptive coaching, ownership changes, and underperforming stars. But Whalen reveals how that all changed when Bird and his fellow Big Three frontcourt teammates Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, along with newcomer Dennis Johnson, banded together to lift the venerable franchise to its fifteenth world championship and helped to transform the league into a global entertainment brand.Dynasty Restored offers insight into the personal barriers Larry Bird had to overcome to achieve NBA stardom, discusses the personal tensions that existed on the team between Bird and McHale, and gives a probing analysis of the unique pressures Black Celtics players faced in a post-Boston Busing Crisis environment. And it shows how this singular season turbocharged the Celtics and the professional game to unprecedented heights.

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Book SynopsisHow money, guts, and greed built the Warriors dynasty -- and then took it apart The Golden State Warriors dominated the NBA for the better part of a decade. Since the arrival of owner Joe Lacob, they won more championships and sold more merchandise than any other franchise in the sport. And in 2019, they opened the doors on a lavish new stadium. Yet all this success contained some of the seeds of decline. Ethan Sherwood Strauss''s clear-eyed exposé reveals the team''s culture, its financial ambitions and struggles, and the price that its players and managers have paid for all their winning. From Lacob''s unlikely acquisition of the team to Kevin Durant''s controversial departure, Strauss shows how the smallest moments can define success or failure for years. And, looking ahead, Strauss ponders whether this organization can rebuild after its abrupt fall from the top, and how a relentless business wears down its players and executives. The Victory Machine is a defining book on the modern NBA: it not only rewrites the story of the Warriors, but shows how the Darwinian business of pro basketball really works.

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Book SynopsisMemphis Hoops tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player-turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers. Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago. In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

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Book SynopsisThe true story of how professional Australian Rules Football found an unlikely new source of talent in the United States.Though most Americans automatically think "rugby" when they hear or read the phrase "Australian football," the two sports actually have very little in common besides tackling and kicking. "Footy," as this unique sport is known in Aussie circles, bears more resemblance to American athletics, requiring the skill and grace of basketball combined with the physical toughness and endurance of American-style football. The only thing it apparently didn't require was actual Americans. Until now.Scouts from the Australian Football League (AFL) realized that a key position on their teams-called the "ruckman"-required both the height and ball handling skills readily found in American basketball players. What began as an unlikely experiment of cross-breeding sports talent has led to a growing expedition of NBA hopefuls from NCAA athletic programs-including Oklahoma State, Morehead State, and the University of Arizona-looking to make their way in a game most of them had never even seen played before.In Jumping at the Chance, longtime Aussie football fanatic Gil Griffin delivers a riveting account of these American athletes who go to the other side of the world in search of their dreams of glory. From learning an entirely foreign sport from the ground up, to coping with what it means to be a team member in a different culture, to gaining not only acceptance but ecstatic support from the rabid footy fans, their stories are much like Australian Rules football itself-sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, always inspiring.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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