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The Breaks of the Game
Join Halberstam on his yearlong journey with the 1979 Portland Trail Blazers and witness professional basketball from the inside. This insightful account is evidence of how much basketball has--and hasn't--changed since 1979.
Paperback, 416 pages
Published
February 17th 2009
by Hyperion
(first published 1981)
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The late, great David Halberstam followed the Trail Blazers during the 1979-1980 season, two years after their acclaimed victory over the Sixers.
The Breaks of The Game, the book that resulted, remains one of the best sports books I have ever read and a work that has easily stood the test of time.
The author of more than 20 books on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War, the modern civil rights struggle, the decline of the American auto industry, and the history of America...more
The Breaks of The Game, the book that resulted, remains one of the best sports books I have ever read and a work that has easily stood the test of time.
The author of more than 20 books on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War, the modern civil rights struggle, the decline of the American auto industry, and the history of America...more
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"The Cuckoo Man was Jack Nicholson, the movie star, a devoted follower of Laker basketball who had a seat right next to the Laker bench. In the championship season, when Portland had played Los Angeles, Nicholas had thus sat only about three feet away from the last man on the Portland bench who, in this case, happened to be Lloyd Neal, and everything that Nicholson said, every cry praising Kareem or belittling Walton, thundered in the ears of the Portland players. It was as if he had been c...more
Fascinating book! It's a conversational history of the NBA until 1981, told through the lense of the 1979-80 season of the Portland Trailblazers. As the team's season touches on various characters and issues, Halberstam pauses to explore them. Great character sketches/bios of most of the great players up until that point, the most interesting discussions I've read of the defining issues of the NBAs early years (race, TV rights, team ownership etc), as well as plenty of basketball content -- team...more
Halberstam is a really good writer. He follows the Portland Trailblazers through the 79-80 season, talking extensively with coaches, players, etc. Tells a pretty compelling story. Remember that this is when Magic and Bird are just coming into the league, and noone was sure whether/how long the NBA would survive. Long, interesting story of the history of the TV contract. (Started with ABC/Arledge. He feels screwed when he feels the league unfairly moves to CBS. Invents Superstars to dig in...more
I read this book (shamelessly) because Bill Simmons is in love with this book. I did like the book, but I'm not a huge basketball fan like Simmons is. It is very well written, but it is also, in my opinion, not very logically broken up. The book has 4 parts/chapters with the third being about 360 pages long. In those 360 pages you come to know many basketball players, owners, coaches, and league officials, but it all comes flying at you in one big chunk. I also mistakenly thought (the book jacke...more
I'd always found basketball tedious -- heck, during adolescence I stumbled along at about 5'6" with a sluggish, overburdened physique, looking more like a basketball than a basketball player, until right before I got into college (when I jumped to almost 5'11" and looked still schlumpy but a bit less lumpy). I wasn't fast, or tall, or particularly graceful. When I played sports, I preferred those ones where I could think and practice my way into some relatively competitive state of r...more
At this point in time, this is an interesting piece of history. It's even written in a manner that books, just 30 years later, couldn't be written. Some great NBA characters are presented in the book - Bill Walton, Jack Ramsey, Kermit Washington, but of the three only Washington really seems to be well understood by Halberstam.
As a historical artifact this covers the NBA as it was exploding from a league where money wasn't always enough to convince guys to play to what it is now. Th...more
As a historical artifact this covers the NBA as it was exploding from a league where money wasn't always enough to convince guys to play to what it is now. Th...more
I told my dad I was reading this book because its reputation precedes it as one of the best sports books ever written. His matter-of-fact answer: "well, that's because Halberstam is one of the best writers ever." 362 pages later, I can't help but agree. He may not be a hoity-toity modernist prose stylist like those names more often thrown around as candidates for that prestigious title, but he does possess a unique gift to seamlessly interweave logistics and information (about everythi...more
This is one of my favorite sports books. Halberstam is an outstanding reporter and writer, and gets deep inside the heads of the players and coaches on the lackluster 1979-1980 Portland Trailblazers team. There are indelible characters here: Coach Jack Ramsay, Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas, Kermit Washington, Billy Ray Bates, and many others. As they fight to keep their careers alive on the court, Halberstam places them against a backdrop of American race relations and the reality of modern mass me...more
I loved this book. It is now on my list of Fantastical Things to Do Before I Die to write the sequel, meaning I would follow the Trailblazers around for a season and write a book about it, just as Halberstam did two years after the Blazers won the NBA Championship in 1977. But... I'm sure I'll never do it. Even if sports journalism were my chosen field, David Halberstam is an amazing writer who weaves a hundred different lives into one coherent narrative so masterfully that I could never try to ...more
I bought this book because I read somewhere that it was one of the greatest sports books ever written. Halberstam is a good writer and a master of the vignette. He does a great job of giving a sense of his subjects in just a few pages. Still, I'm not that interested in Bill Walton, who figures large, and I wasn't familiar with a number of the players. I did, however, become a fan of Kermit Washington's career.
I was surprised how dated the book seemed; the NBA of the late 70s wa...more
I was surprised how dated the book seemed; the NBA of the late 70s wa...more
This is the third book by David Halberstam which I've attempted to read, and the first that I've finished. "The Best and the Brightest" started well and bogged in the endless details, but I was so young and busy then; perhaps I'd finish it today. "Summer of '49" was a short experiment, too archival and remote to matter.
"Breaks of the Game" is as different from those books as it is from every other sports-book I've ever read--it's quick and lean, with cl...more
"Breaks of the Game" is as different from those books as it is from every other sports-book I've ever read--it's quick and lean, with cl...more
Here is what appears to have happened: Halberstam really wanted to write a book about Bill Walton and the way the Trailblazers teams operated at the height of their collective power ... but by the time he actually tried to do this, Walton had been traded to the Clippers. As a result, he just kind of wrote about how the NBA worked "in general," specifically focusing on money and race. This is, as one might expect, an incredibly well-reported book. What's most impressive is that the part...more
This book is supposedly about the Portland Trail Blazer's 1979-80 season, but really it's about a lot more than that. It's a real look into the world of pro basketball without any sugarcoating. It's about what it takes to run up and down the court for 48 minutes. Halberstam's is unflinching in depicting the struggles of a lackluster team, the relationship of the NBA and television, Bill Walton's first post-Blazers season, and many, many other incredible stories surrounding a seemingly bland s...more
This book is a masterpiece. It's the best sports lit/sports history book I've ever read. So much was changing in the NBA in 1979; it was the birth of the modern league. Young David Stern. Magic and Bird were rookies. Incorporation of the four ABA teams and its players. Transition to a more "black" sport, or at least a less white sport. Crazy salaries for the younger players, while older players and coaches miss out on the money. Television contracts. Expansion teams. Everything was cha...more
I started paying attention to the NBA in 1993 when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls faced Charles Barkley and the Phoenix Suns. Barkley, that year's MVP, became my favorite player and the underdog Suns became my favorite team. From then on, I was a die-hard pro hoops fan who knew every player on every team through the '90s until today. But after reading Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball, I realized I was missing decades of NBA history, particularly the '70s and '80s when the NBA transition...more
What's the word for the quote that precedes the content of a book?
Great one here, totally appropriate to the subject matter, delightfully dated. OJ Simpson -- that great American philosopher -- is quoted saying "Fame is vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character." Not originally his statement, but something he saw someone say on TV once and stuck with him.
This was a pretty entertaining read, many interesting ...more
Great one here, totally appropriate to the subject matter, delightfully dated. OJ Simpson -- that great American philosopher -- is quoted saying "Fame is vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character." Not originally his statement, but something he saw someone say on TV once and stuck with him.
This was a pretty entertaining read, many interesting ...more
A tremendous book, not just a tremendous sports book. Halberstam traveled with the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers during the 1979-80 season, and it was a really interesting portrait of how a professional basketball team operates whether it be the coaching staff, front office, or the locker room and the players.
The players deal with injuries and not just that, but deal with pressures from the team to get back on the floor and deal with pressures from other players trying to take their s...more
The players deal with injuries and not just that, but deal with pressures from the team to get back on the floor and deal with pressures from other players trying to take their s...more
After Bill Simmons raved about it I was expecting this to be great. It's not. It's a shoddily-organized, rambling, kinda boring story from a guy who benefited from incredible access to the team.
Also, it's filled with language that I assume seemed progressive and unracist at the time, but which now is really uncomfortable to read. He talks a lot about "the blacks" on the team and how athletic they are, etc.
Pluses: you get to hear a lot of interesting stuff about ...more
Also, it's filled with language that I assume seemed progressive and unracist at the time, but which now is really uncomfortable to read. He talks a lot about "the blacks" on the team and how athletic they are, etc.
Pluses: you get to hear a lot of interesting stuff about ...more
The greatest book covering sports that I have come across. Halberstam, as he is wont to do, covers an NBA that is simultaneously verging on collapse, meteoric rise, or fading into obscurity. The ancillary factors are all present from the drug culture of the sport and the racism facing a sport funded mostly by white men, played predominantly by black men, and struggling for acceptance in the wake of the Civil Rights era.
I usually don't read sports books but the late David Halberstam was such a good writer. I picked this book up in the free bin at local library. What a treat! I finished reading it in two or three sittings---it is that good. It helps that I followed the Clippers when they were in San Diego and he writes about Big Bill Walton--one of San Diego's finest---good stuff.
Halberstam's look at the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazers, specifically, and the NBA, generally, is good, but a bit too vague in its treatment of money, race, loyalty and personality to get four stars from me. Still, the book really is less about the Blazers than it is about money, race, loyalty and personality, and for that it's worth reading. This is the team that had Bill Walton, briefly, and a bunch of dudes I've never heard of, but managed to win it all in 1977. Then, contract arguments, je...more
As an unabashed Trail Blazers fan, I'm not sure what I was expecting going into this book. Joining NBA fandom more recently, I was hoping for some background to the years I missed by not being born until '85. I also expected a genuine understanding of the foundation of the franchise I love. I didn't really find either of those pieces in this book. It felt vivid yet incomplete. The players are three-dimensional but I found the fluid, chronologically disorganized pace of the book to be a bit off p...more
Fascinating account of Halberstam's year with the Portland Trail Blazers after the breakup of one of the greatest teams of all time. Halberstam's accounts of some of the individuals involved, particularly Kermit Washington, are fascinating. Probably the best basketball book I have ever read.
Extremely well written work. Makes you feel like you were actually in the locker room with the team. It is amazing how meticulous the detail is. One would expect a book written about a sports team in 1980 to be outdated, but many of the problems that Halberstam writes about are still the same.
Bill Simmons puts this book at the top of his sports list. I liked both Money Ball and the Blindside better. So Breaks of the Game lists 3rd among my non-fiction sports book reads. Among fiction sports books The Kid Who Only Hit Homers narrowly edges out Friday Night Lights.
All in all this was an interesting read. That said, for whatever reason it seemed to be a struggle for me to get through it. I would recommend only to those who are big-time basketball fans or those who have fond memories of the Trailblazer teams of the late 70's.
Possibly the most well researched and well considered sports book out there. Halberstam's unapologetic and thorough journey through a season with the 79/80 Trailblazers is an absolutely fascinating look into a league struggling to find its feet.
If you're interested in the NBA or sports in general then this is a must read.
If you're interested in the NBA or sports in general then this is a must read.
What I thought would be a thrilling chronicle of a basketball season turned out to be long vingettes of anyone even tangentially connected to the Blazers, with terse scoring recaps interspersed at random intervals. Probably better suited to the hardcore basketball fan generally, if not a Blazers fan specifically.
Halberstam was already one of the finest writers of his generation, and he did nothing to harm that reputation with one of the best books about sports--to say nothing of basketball--ever written.
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David Halberstam (April 10, 1934–April 23, 2007) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War and his later sports journalism.
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, ...more
More about David Halberstam...
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, ...more
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