March Madness:
Tall men, short shorts: the 1969 NBA finals: Wilt, Russ, Lakers, Celtics, and a very young sports reporter by Leigh Montville DB 104852
When he was just starting his career as a sportswriter at the Boston Globe, the author covered the 1969 NBA Finals series. Alongside his personal memories of the time, he brings to life the epic matchup between Bill Russell's Boston Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain's Los Angeles Lakers.
Brothers on three: a true story of family, resistance, and hope on a reservation in Montana by Abe Streep DB 105375
A journalist describes a momentous basketball season on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Arlee, Montana. In 2017, despite high local suicide rates and a population struggling with poverty and addiction, the Arlee Warriors would finally bring home the high school basketball state championship title.
Dust bowl girls: the inspiring story of the team that barnstormed its way to basketball glory by Lydia Reeder DB 89622
Author tells the true story of her great-uncle, Sam Babb, who went from farm to farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression, recruiting young women to play for his basketball team. The women left their families, finding a passion for the sport and camaraderie with teammates.
Games of deception: the true story of the first U.S. Olympic basketball team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany by Andrew Maraniss DB 97507
Recounts the history of first-ever US Olympic basketball team, in the 1936 Summer Games in Germany. Spans from the invention of basketball by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, to the events and propaganda surrounding the sport's Olympic debut.
Unguarded by Scottie Pippin DB 105805
Memoir from the six-time NBA Champion with the Chicago Bulls and inductee into the basketball Hall of Fame. Pippen, the youngest of twelve siblings, reveals how he overcame two family tragedies and universal disregard by college scouts to become an essential component of a basketball dynasty.
When the game was war: the NBA's greatest season by Rich Cohen DB 116763
The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies. In When the Game Was War, bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of this incredible season through the four teams, and the four players, who dominated it: Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers, Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, and a young Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls. Taking the reader from rural Indiana to the southside of Chicago, suburban North Carolina to rust-belt Michigan, Cohen explores the diverse journeys each of these iconic players took before arriving on the big stage. Drawing from dozens of interviews with NBA insiders, Cohen brings to vivid life some of the most colorful characters of the era—like Bill Laimbeer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Danny Ainge, and Charles Oakley—who fought like hell to help these stars succeed. In the decades since, the NBA has grown into a multi-billion-dollar organization, with rabid fans all over the globe. For anyone who longs to understand how the NBA came to be the cultural juggernaut it is today—and to relive the magic and turmoil of those pivotal years—When the Game Was War brilliantly recasts one unforgettable season and the four transcendent players who were at the center of it all.