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The Breaks of the Game

4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 · rating details · 2,207 ratings · 121 reviews

"Among the best books ever written on professional basketball." The Philadelphia Inquirer

David Halberstam, best-selling author of THE FIFTIES and THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, turns his keen reporter's eye on the sport of basketball -- the players and the coaches, the long road trips, what happens on court, in front of television cameras, and off-court, where no eyes have fo...more

Mass Market Paperback, 467 pages

Published February 12th 1983 by Ballantine Books (first published 1981)

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Jan 17, 2009 Jeff Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 American media , Halberstam ret...more

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Mar 01, 2011 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars

"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 chosen...more "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 chosen by the gods to bedevil them. At the halftime the Portland players had filed into the dressing room and one of the other players, impressed that so famous and yet now so manic a presence was seated so close to them, asked Ice if he knew who his neighbor was. No, he said, who? "Jack Nicholson, Ice," someone had answered. "You mean the little fellow, not much hair?" Neal asked. "Yes." "Who's he?" "A movie star. Did a picture One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." "Oh yeah," said Ice, "I know who he is, that guy." The others were not so sure whether Neal had seen the movie or not, they could never tell about Ice, whether he was smarter than they thought but playing dumb, or dumber than they thought but playing smart. In the second half Nicholson had kept up his cheering, loud, partisan, a noise which fell relentlessly upon the Portland bench. Then, late in the game, at a crucial moment, the game hanging in the balance, the Lakers had made a run and Kareem had gone out for a shot and as he did, Walton had gone up too and he had blocked it, and even as Walton reached the apex of his jump, his hand outstretched, the entire Portland bench had been aware of an even more dramatic moment: Lloyd Neal rising up out of his seat, huge now, intimidating, a great dark-visaged figure pointing a massive and threatening finger in a massive threatening hand at the suddenly tiny Nicholson. The others had watch this tableau, it seemed frozen in time for them, as if to symbolize the team's new invincibility, that they would not be beaten, not by Kareem, not by Los Angeles, not even by rich and celebrated actors, for there was Ice screaming at Nicholson, "Take that, mother-fucking cuckoo!" The moment had become part of the unofficial team history, a symbol of its triumph, and Nicholson, star of Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces and other great American films, had become simply The Cuckoo Man. (less)

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Dec 16, 2011 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: basketball

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

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Feb 11, 2009 Yofish rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 into thei...more

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Mar 04, 2013 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star-books, read-in-2013

It's easy to see why this book is so highly regarded by so many people "in the know"; it feels like a model of the form, often duplicated but rarely as successful. It's now SOP for a championship-winning team to have a book or two published about it by beat writers of the team's local papers, but somehow those always seem like disappointments, ephemeral and superficial. Perhaps you need someone who is not associated with the game to get a true perspective, to give the game its proper scope in th...more It's easy to see why this book is so highly regarded by so many people "in the know"; it feels like a model of the form, often duplicated but rarely as successful. It's now SOP for a championship-winning team to have a book or two published about it by beat writers of the team's local papers, but somehow those always seem like disappointments, ephemeral and superficial. Perhaps you need someone who is not associated with the game to get a true perspective, to give the game its proper scope in the social fabric. That's where David Halberstam, reporter par excellence, comes in.

That The Breaks of the Game is one of the (if not THE, full stop) best books about sports I've come across is me just writing blurb copy for another reissue, joining The Sports Guy among others in my unbridled enthusiasm. Halberstam's accomplishment here is bigger than that: he's able to take a wide-angle view of the sociological changes hurtling toward the game. The rising salaries, the infiltration of sports agents, the relatively swift change from a mostly-white game to a mostly-black game, the influence of television, the rapid (and detrimental) expansion of the league, and the daily grind of the modern athlete all get explored with care and depth.

The NBA now is a game of mini-dynasties: most teams are able to win two, sometimes more, championships in clusters. But in the late 1970s, following the unprecedented run of Celtic hegemony and right before the Lakers and Celtics were about to dominate the '80s, you had teams winning titles and then burning out quickly. Halberstam is able to explain the economic realities pushing against the ability to keep a title-winning team together. The 1976-77 Blazers have been described as "the perfect team," and the '77-78 team was well on their way, but an injury here and a contract dispute there is all it took to render the team mediocre. We were deprived of something when that happened.

What might surprise veteran readers of the "year with the XX team"-genre is how little the author here describes actual basketball events. Because Halberstam was not by trade a sportswriter, his forays into basketball play-by-play, while accurate, read like an author who's spent many hours with coaches and general managers and is now trying out the snappy vernacular for himself; it's not hard to follow him but you can tell it's not in his wheelhouse. Much of his narrative, probably two-thirds, is concerned with the ancillary issues that had led the NBA by the late 70s to an existential crisis point, and that is where his vast repertorial experience pays off. Halberstam gets all the principals to speak candidly about their situations, allowing him to paint three-dimensional portraits of the '79 Blazers, and lends the swift implosion of the championship team a tragic grandeur.

When Halberstam died in 2007, Bill Simmons eulogized him by saying he "grew up" with the people in this book, that they were so vividly drawn they felt like friends he revisits every few years. I echo his sentiment. It didn't hurt that Halberstam had some larger-than-life personalities to work with (Bill Walton, Jack Ramsay, Maurice Lucas, etc.), but he got some players known for their reticence (such as Kermit Washington) to open up as well. Even the team's head trainer is given his proper place in the narrative.

It's also a trip to read a book that takes place right before the game really took off commercially. As Breaks takes place during the 1979-80 season, that means certain NBA royalty never show up: Jordan, Olajuwon, Drexler, Barkley, Ewing, etc. Bird and Magic are rookies (to hear players speak contemporaneously about what these two players might become is particularly amusing). To imagine a game as yet affected by these global players is charming, but could have made the book feel, for a reader like me born after its publication, like a stodgy time capsule, a relic. What amazed me was how much Halberstam got right about what the game was becoming, and how applicable it still is. The numbers might have skyrocketed (top players in 1979 are still looking for deals in the hundreds of thousands annually; the TV networks, none too excited about the NBA, offer packages in the tens of millions), but the issues haven't changed.

Any sports fan owes it to himself to read this book, but The Breaks of the Game's appeal extends far beyond that.(less)

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Aug 29, 2011 Joey H. rated it 3 of 5 stars

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

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Jun 16, 2009 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 readiness--ba...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 readiness--baseball, tennis, golf.

(I wasn't allowed to play football on a team, for fear of injury, 'though given my body type that sport might have been the most apt selection, but Mom was adamant, so I instead played exceedingly dangerous backyard games well into my teens. My brother snapped a collarbone in one of those games, and since he cried almost every game I didn't pay him any mind until about an hour later, when the persistence of his tears made me take stock of my response and assist him home, and then to hospital.)

But when I lived overseas, on a very small island in the Pacific, most afternoons the guys on the island fell into hours-long games of either baseball or basketball. Eventually, in the latter sport, I got seduced. They were so enthusiastic, so pumped to be playing, it always energized me, sitting on the sidelines, talking trash and (most days) grading papers. I started playing. And I wasn't particularly adept--didn't have the long years of chops habituated into my muscle memory--but I was suddenly, for the first time in my life, really friggin' tall. I had two inches on the next tallest guy. And, holy shit, I understood within just a couple games what all the fuss was about: with the relative freedom opened up by this startling shift to a "natural talent," I could hold the ball and see the patterns unfold around me, and this allowed me to start picking shots, figuring passes--even developing something of a strategy that amplified my size/talents, and I became like Michael Jordan. I was big enough to intimidate every bastard on the court, which allowed me to get better, and better, and better. I was the first draft choice every afternoon. It was pretty much guaranteed that my team would end up winning. I LOVED basketball.

And then one of my pals from the Peace Corps visited for a week. Doug was 6'4", and he'd actually played ball back in the States, and... suddenly I was barely Pippen. We were for that one dreadful week always pitted against each other, and the team play suddenly became more complicated, but individually Doug just took me down again, and again, and again. I kept playing after he left, but we slowly shifted more to baseball, and back in the States I returned to my previous, longstanding apathy.

Reading Halberstam's fascinating, gloriously written book about a season with the Portland Trailblazers just after their glory years with Bill Walton I've again fallen into a swooning appreciation for the game. Halberstam gives you that kind of height, allows you to take stock of the bigger picture so that you can breathe and really see and engage with and relish the many, many facets of the game previously invisible to you. Even as I recognized only a scant few of the celebs in the narrative, knew next to nothing about the history of the game, could barely parse the strategy in any given game let alone over the course of the season or in a contrast of playing systems between two coaches, hadn't any predetermined interest in the economic transformations of this sport (or all sports) under the big market eye of television . . . I *still* fell in love with the game. Like the best sports books (Richard Ben Cramer on Ted Williams, David Remnick on Ali, Michael Lewis on the statistical reexamination of baseball), the fan will be delighted but so will the curmudgeon -- Halberstam has written not just a study of a given team or team sport but a fantastic, far-ranging study of a complex social system (which echoed and was informed by and helped alter the broader American context, particularly around issues of class and race), of people working, of a colorful cabinet of wondrous personalities.

I will probably still be unmaddened by March college ball, and remain almost vigilantly bored by my brother prattling at me about this or that NBA game. But the book rocks, regardless. (less)

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Sep 13, 2011 Jacob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

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. There's also a...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Mitchell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

This book is about the Portland Trail Blazers' 79-80 season, the year after Walton left in a cloud of accusations of malpractice. Two years before, Portland had won their only championship with a Walton led team that specialized in fast breaks started by superb outlet passes. The next year, they were 50-10 when Walton finally had to stop playing because of his foot, in which was later discovered to be a stress fracture. I got this book mainly because Bill Simmons references it occasionally as be...more This book is about the Portland Trail Blazers' 79-80 season, the year after Walton left in a cloud of accusations of malpractice. Two years before, Portland had won their only championship with a Walton led team that specialized in fast breaks started by superb outlet passes. The next year, they were 50-10 when Walton finally had to stop playing because of his foot, in which was later discovered to be a stress fracture. I got this book mainly because Bill Simmons references it occasionally as being the best basketball book of all time, and I thought it was going to cover either the championship season or the season after. However, it starts with the rookie camp in 1979. This isn't to say that Halberstam didn't spend a lot of time on the previous two seasons; he certainly did.

Reading this, it is easy to imagine the author hanging out in the background during the season, taking notes, talking to players and coaches, always listening. Apparently, that's exactly what he did. In the book, he spends maybe 1/100 of the book actually talking about their actual season. Instead, Halberstam spends almost the entire book giving background on the different people that come up in the course of the season. Players, coaches, owners, agents, even sports TV producers all get the treatment as Halberstam delves into their past and examines how they ended up where they are and what their motivations were. This includes some of the superstar players of the time that only played against the Blazers. It gave the book a rather disjointed, stop-and-go feel as there would be a couple pages about the season followed by 10-20 pages about some new person that has popped up. It didn't really help me feel like I was getting anywhere in the book, as I always had the backbone of the season in mind despite all the tangents.

A couple things really stood out. 1) Besides the super-duper stars, I recognized only a handful of the names of the players. I thought that I was pretty familiar with the NBA, and after reading the Book of Basketball, even felt like I was up on my history. I wasn't. 2) Race was a huge issue. It's hard to me to gauge how things are nowadays being white, but I'd like to think that race isn't such a pervasive issue in so many aspects of life. Maybe I'm fooling myself. In any case, I was surprised at how much race played into so many things that Halberstam wrote about. Contracts, TV deals, scholarships, ticket sales, player stats.. everything seemed to have an undertone of racial tension.

I enjoyed the book and learned a lot, not only about the NBA, but the US in general around the turn of that decade. It wasn't exactly an easy read, but I'm glad that I stuck with it. (less)

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Jul 24, 2011 Christian Holub rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 everything conceiv...more

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Jul 19, 2012 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

A solid read, good, but, for a book high on many lists of the best sportswriting ever (why I chose to read it), it doesn't make that leap to greatness, at least for me. It's not that it's about a team that played 33 years ago; a good writer, and Halberstam is that, can make just about any topic interesting. It's just that there are long digressions that take you away from the flow of the story and sometimes their placement appears haphazard. Sometimes within those digressions and flashbacks ther...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Doug Merlino rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Nov 28, 2010 Megan rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Aug 26, 2009 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars

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 was all black/white...more

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Jul 31, 2012 Matthew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game chronicles the turbulent season of the Portland Trailblazers two years removed from their Championship season.

The book doesn't tell the story of the cohesive team as much as the individual stories that make for a tediously long NBA season.

Incredible insight into the responsibility these grown men feel being paid a princely sum to play a child's game. From the coaches to the general manager to the lead scout the player personnel feel the pressure of the surmoun...more

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Jan 06, 2012 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviews, sports, journalism, pulitzer

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 clean characters whose essential natures jum...more

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May 09, 2009 Chuck rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 particular tea...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Sriram Krishnan rated it 5 of 5 stars

http://meadowmuffinsofthemind.com/200...

What Gammons captured in Beyond the Sixth Game, David Halberstam captures with remarkable reportage in his The Breaks of the Game. The team is the 1980 Portland Trailblazers. The team of course, won the title in 1977 – with some perfect chemistry it seemed, Bill Walton at the height of his powers, and Maurice Lucas providing some key help, and a starting lineup of guys age 26 and under. Like the 1975 Red Sox, the future seemed limitless. Like the MLB of th...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: awesome-books, makes-ya-think, the-best-of-the-best

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 seas...more

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Oct 28, 2009 Christopher Mezzetta rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 changing and...more

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Nov 10, 2012 J. Alfred rated it 3 of 5 stars

Like all good sports books, this one recognizes that sports are about more than just sports. This one goes over all kinds of issues: I'd describe the storytelling technique as 'tidal.' That is, in telling the story of one particular Blazers season, Halberstram begins with the story, then flows over into telling backstory on one particular player or other team, then goes a step or two more with the main story, then flows the other way to talk about money or social ethics or whatnot. It is an asto...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Dan Rimoldi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, go-sports, non-fic, read-in-2013

Can finally say that I read this one. As a basketball junkie, it was long overdue. Two basketball books have been all-time favorites of mine: Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns and Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine. But those books would likely not be possible without Halberstam's chronicle of the '79-'80 Blazers season. Halberstam helped legitimize the entire sport at a time when it needed all...more

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Nov 28, 2010 Andy added it

Shelves: nonfiction, sports

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 transitioned...more

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Feb 17, 2012 Tom Gase rated it 3 of 5 stars

Look, David Halberstam is one of my favorite writers of all time, and I know a lot of people ranked this book very high (Sports Illustrated had it in its Top 20 off all time for sports books), but I just thought it was okay. Halberstam has done way better (See Summer of 49, The Best and the Brightest, Teammates) than this book, which chronicles a season of the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazers. Very well-researched as usual from Mr. Halberstam, but I thought this book strayed from the main point a l...more

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Oct 07, 2009 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 characters empathically studied at a...more

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Dec 19, 2007 John Diaz rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 spot. Other p...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sports

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist David Halberstam tells the story of the National Basketball Association through the 79-80 Portland Trail Blazers, a team collapsing only two years after their championship season. The timing couldn't have been better. The ABA had recently merged into the NBA, which is the beginning of the modern era of the game, right as money, tv, and race were changing the face of the game, and players hadn't yet seen the media as a way to build their commercial image. I can't...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Kenny Li rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-2013

There is only one way to describe this book: the best book ever written about basketball. Written over 30 years ago, I wish I had read it earlier. It is gold among silver.

This book is about professional basketball and like many books about pro ball, it follows an NBA team's season.

When one watches basketball, they see basketball being played. But, what goes on behind the curtains? In this book, David Halberstam tells you in his magnificent book.

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Jun 05, 2010 Jacob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

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 players and coaches and business f...more

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May 18, 2010 Luke rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sports

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.

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About David Halberstam

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, writing for...more 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, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.

In the mid 1960s, Halberstam covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at the New York Times. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.

Halberstam put an enormous effort into his book about Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest. Synthesizing material from dozens of books and many dozens of interviews, Halberstam focused on the odd paradox that those who crafted the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same men were unable to imagine and promote any but a bloody and disastrous course in the Vietnam War.

Thousands of readers began The Best and the Brightest feeling that the U.S. must pursue the war in Vietnam until "victory" was achieved, but became convinced by Halberstam's book that the U.S. could not win and therefore should withdraw from Vietnam.

After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another "big" book and in 1979 published an informative book about some of the major media outlets in America. The Powers That Be gave compelling profiles of men like William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.

Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the pennant race battle between the Yankees and Red Sox called Summer of '49.

After publishing two books in the 1960s, Halberstam published three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was on a pace to publish six or more books in that decade before his death. In the wake of 9/11, Halberstam wrote perhaps the most sensitive and insightful book about that tragedy, detailing Engine 40, Ladder 35, in the tome, Firehouse.

In 1980, an escaped convict from New York, Bernard C. Welch, Jr., murdered Halberstam's brother, Michael J. Halberstam, a Washington, D.C. cardiologist.[1] Halberstam refused to comment publicly about this incident.

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