and A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Ringer, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, FOX Sports, The New Yorker, and GQ, and was recognized in 2020's "The Best American Sports Writing." None of this, however, matches his career highlight of being the ESPN Radio college intern tasked with delivering Stephen A. Smith his daily bag of Cheez Doodles.
At Lit Hub Weitzman tagged five classic basketball "books that moved me the first time I read them and have stayed with me ever since." One title on the list:
David Halberstam, The Breaks of the GameRead about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
You can’t talk about sports books—let alone basketball books—without paying homage to Halberstam’s masterpiece. On the surface, it’s a standard “A Season with Team X” setup: Halberstam embedded with the 1979–80 Portland Trail Blazers, a team twoyears removed from an NBA title and trying to figure out what came next. Not surprisingly, though, Halberstam turns this story into so much more.
Stuffed with sharp, brilliant and—perhaps most important of all—beautifully written portraits of unforgettable characters like Bill Walton and Maurice Lucas to the team’s legendary coach, Dr. Jack Ramsey, The Breaks of the Game set the standard for all sports books. Halberstam brought the same depth and seriousness to his reporting on the NBA as he did into his investigations on the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War and, in doing so, turned what could have just been a simple story about a basketball team into a sweeping meditation on race, labor, class dynamics and power, but did so way in way that was both fun and easy to consume. This is probably the greatest basketball book ever written. It’s also unlikely ever to be topped.
--Marshal Zeringue
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