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 media and corporate businesses. This book completely changed the way I watch pro basketball. If you want to know more, I wrote a much longer review of it that can be read here: http://dougmerlino.net/great-basketba...