Jan
14
2010
Review: The Book of Basketball
I have no love for basketball. I hated playing it in gym class all those years ago and get little enjoyment from playing it today. It is one of the few professional sports I have never seen live and one I really have no interest in seeing live. I know very little about the game and, frankly, do not care to know much more. That March Madness always overshadows the joy of Spring Training is a genuine tragedy. Reading “The Sports Guy” Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball, though, unavoidably drew me toward the game, at least for a few days. It was quite a chore, not least because this book is epic, weighing in at over 700 pages. 700 pages is a tall order for any single topic. But for basketball it comes close to a crime.
Simmons is a basketball freak. Seriously, I doubt there could be a greater fan of the game. Basketball is his life, his religion. From the time he was a young child he was absorbed in the game and over the years his passion has not diminished a bit. His knowledge of the game, its teams and its players is encyclopedic. And in The Book of Basketball he offers his take on just about every important question in basketball history: Who were the greatest players? Which were the greatest teams? What is the single greatest key to winning? Will there ever be a better player than Michael Jordan? And on and on.
The answers to these questions are nothing if not thorough. The quest to find the best players in the history of the game leads him to offer rather extensive looks at nearly 100 players, culminating in the inevitable conclusion that Michael Jordan has to be at the top of the list. The quest to find the greatest team is, thankfully, considerably shorter, though still extensive. I can’t deny there was some level of interest as I read through these long lists of players, seeing what distinguished one from the next and discovering how each of them made their mark on the game. Yet at the end of a list of 100 players, the majority of whom are no more than names to me, it is difficult to distinguish one from the next. My head was left spinning. Interesting at the moment, but gone a day or two later. It is just too much to absorb!
Parenthetically, The Book of Basketball highlights one of the pitfalls of e-books. I happened to read it using my Kindle and found myself skipping a lot of end notes I otherwise might have read. There are hundreds (and hundreds and hundreds) of end notes, but with the Kindle there is often too much effort involved in searching them out. And so I just took a pass on most of them. Had I been reading the printed book, I’m sure I would have done a lot more flipping back-and-forth. There are many things the Kindle does well; end notes is not (yet) one of them. If Apple does come out with a tablet book-reading device, I bet we’ll see a far more advanced and usable system. Here’s hoping!
The Book of Basketball is often profane, with rough language and regular jests about pornography, strip clubs and the like. Simmons appears to be caught in perpetual adolescence. Or maybe he just knows his audience. Why is it that sports are so often accompanied with base humor? Regardless, the regular inappropriate quips grow really old really fast, detracting from the otherwise enjoyable witty flavor Simmons employs. The guy has a terrific sense of humor; it’s too bad that he chooses to misdirect it so often.
In the end, I’d say this book is for basketball fans only, and even then only the biggest fans. To dedicate to basketball the amount of time it takes to read a book like this hardly seems worth it to me. Baseball, perhaps (but probably not). Basketball? No way.
Verdict: Read it only if you’re a super-mega-ultra basketball fan.
9 Comments
The notes aren’t even endnotes in the paper version; they’re footnotes, so they’re very easy to read.
Wow. That’s even more of a bummer.
Tim,
2 Things:
1. Simmons uses footnotes really well- not so much for sourcing but for humorous asides. My guess is that you actually missed quite a bit of humor in the book because of it (though I haven’t read the book). If you can’t get your hands on one of them old-fashioned paper copies of the book, you could check out this article he wrote after Manny Ramirez was traded from the Red Sox to the Dodgers a couple years back. As you probably know now from reading his book, Simmons is a Boston native and Boston sports fanatic. It gives a good sense of his use of footnotes.
2. I’d suggest that not only is this a book for basketball fans, but for Simmons fans- and there are many of them. If you go to espn.com, you’ll see that he’s right there on the front page next to Rick Reilly- that’s saying something given the massive popularity of espn in general and Reilly in particular. He has at least one weekly podcast, and somewhat of a whole cult following exemplified in his reader mailbags. People who buy the book know what they’re going to get when they read it: they’re going to get Simmons writing style, and thus, Simmons humor style.
I’ll settle for the occasional podcast or online column myself!
Andrew
Andrew is right, Simmons does use footnotes for humorous asides. Unfortunately, they were full of more of his perverse humor. I read the book, loved much of it (I’m a basketball fan and a Simmons fan), but there were points where it just got bad. Tim should probably be glad he missed them.
I think, perhaps, the verdict should read (Except for NBA Mega-fans).
I’ve played/followed basketball all of my life, but I really loath the NBA. There have only been a few times that I’ve really found myself enjoying NBA games that I’ve watched in the post-Jordan era. The NBA has become much more about celebrity than the sport itself. And the rules are set up in such a way as to encourage high scoring. Give me a good old fashioned defensive battle over a shootout most nights. Not all… but make the shootouts be on account of extremely spectacular play (like the night a college teammate of mine went 8/8 from 3 and 14/18 from the field on the way to 40 points… and the team shot 17/26 from 3 (65%) and 33/52 from the field). Or like the first of our national championship game won 84-82 on a jumper with .2 seconds… excellently played game where the defense was supurb… but couldn’t hold down the offense.
College is the purest form of sport (and, for that matter, D-III). The players are playing for the love of the game, not for money. But I digress…
The celebrity nature of the NBA leads to its profane nature. Yes, these guys are good athletes… but they’re placed on pedestals. In the same way that Tiger Woods is just a good golfer (and not an expert on marital infidelity, cars, watches, etc), NBA players are just good athletes.
It’s ironic though… I find myself thinking less of Michael Jordan as a basketball player as I lose respect for him as a person. That really shouldn’t be the case… his personal life has little to do with his ability to put a ball through the hoop.
Just for the fun of it, Simmons article in this month’s ESPN The Magazine contains 3,000 more words of edits and additions to this book. He makes a big deal of asking for 5,000, but the editors limiting him. Anyway, he is already planning an expanded second edition.
[...] I stated in my review of The Book of Basketball, basketball is far from my favorite sport. If I were to get into the game, and if I were to find [...]
Just wanted to say that I think your project of reading the NYT bestsellers is an awesome idea. Also wanted to say three things about the Simmons book. (1) Some people already noted that the endnotes are footnotes in the paper version. Simmons noted this on his Twitter account and encouraged people to buy the paper version instead of the Kindle for this very reason. (2) Simmons is also on record saying that the book is not designed to be read straight through. It’s more of a keep-it-on-the-back-of-the-toilet kind of book. So even the author agrees with your assessment that no one really wants to slog straight through 700 pages of this book. (3) Agree with you and others that Simmons should learn to be funny without being crude. He’s a good writer, but relies too much on being crude to be funny. One effect of this is that his humor is going to be dated in a few years.
[...] The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons [...]