We’re counting down my ten most dog-eared, beaten-up, food-stained sports books — not necessarily the best or most important, just the ones I’ve gone back to again and again. Each day until September 10 (when I will be announcing my new book — just a few more days! I’m so excited to tell you!), I’ll share one of these beloved books (and, because why not, I’m also pairing each with a fountain pen from my collection).
Reminder: During the countdown, we’re offering 10% off at the JoeBlogs Store, and we’ve added some new PosCast merch in there! Simply enter PENNANT10 as your discount code at checkout.
No. 7: A Season on the Brink
Author: John Feinstein
Signs of wear: Creases galore, torn page 143, torn back cover.
Just beat out: Lords of the Realm, John Helyer; Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano; Playing for Knight, Steve Alford.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Steve Alford’s Playing for Knight. Looking back at it now, I shouldn’t be surprised … the book was co-written by friend John Garrity, who is one of the greats. Anyway, it’s a perfect follow-up read to Season on the Brink.
Shea’s Basketball (and Other Things) is just one delight after another.
It crushes me that I couldn’t find room for Lords of the Realm on the list. It’s one of those rare books that I read both for business (whenever I want to write something about the greed of baseball owners, Lords is my first stop) and pleasure (every couple of years or so, I put Lords on my bedside table so I can read a couple of chapters before falling asleep. It’s that entertaining).
Looking back, I don’t think Bob Knight was a particularly complicated figure. People used that word A LOT when describing him: Complicated. Complex. Multilayered. Etc.
I don’t think any of that is quite right.
Shrewd? Sure. Strategically savvy? Absolutely. Powerful motivator? I think so.
Complicated, however, means “difficult to understand.” Knight was not difficult to understand. He was a great basketball coach. He believed himself to be an impeccable leader of men. He had a rage problem. That pretty much covered it. There wasn’t a thing that Bob Knight ever did that made you think, “Oh, I don’t understand why he did that … that doesn’t at all seem in character.”
He threw a chair in a righteous fit? That fits.
He wanted his players to graduate and live productive lives? Absolutely.
He motivated through fear? You betcha.
He motivated through love? Yeah, there was some love, too.
I think we use the word “complicated” to describe sports people the same way that we use chess to describe brilliant strategic maneuvers. “These coaches are really playing chess out there!” No, they’re not. And Bob Knight wasn’t complicated. Knight bullied players he cared about and cared about players he bullied. A million coaches are like that — Knight was just the most extreme version. Plus, there was that temper of his. That uncontrollable temper.
I don’t love Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink” as a character study of Knight. That part’s fine. What I love is that John did what most sports books (and nonfiction books in general) promise but rarely deliver: He took us behind the curtain. We saw Knight in all his glory, all his bluster, all his meanness, all his quiet moments of grace. It was a remarkable piece of reporting.
Knight gave Feinstein the sort of access no prominent coach or athlete had ever before or probably will ever again give a writer. I think he did for a simple reason — as already mentioned, Knight believed himself an impeccable leader of men. I feel sure he believed John’s book would show that.
The Fountain Pen: Grifos “Fly Me to the Moon”
I love a pen with a story. The Fly Me to the Moon fountain pen was designed by the son of Grifos’ Chris Stephens — he saw one of the fish leather’s that his father was using in his fountain pen design and said, “Oh, that one looks like the lunar surface. And, like that, he was inspired to design a space fountain pen to honor Samantha Cristoforetti, the first Italian woman astronaut to go into space.
BONUS!!
I got a note from the great (Brilliant Reader) Rick Telander, catching us up on his amazing “Heaven is a Playground.” I thought you’d get a kick out of it:
I still talk to many of the guys from that Brooklyn summer over half a century ago. Albert King, Lionell Worrell, Winston Karim (my landlord and a great, funny sweet guy), Martin, Pablo Billy, etc., from Subway Stars, and even the great Fly Williams himself — shot 3 or 4 times (he isn't sure), recently out of prison, still being Fly the way he's always been.
But major props to Pete Axthelm and The City Game and David Wolf and Foul: The Connie Hawkins Story. Those two books blew my mind--pure foundations for Heaven.
Also key: ``Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power'' by Kenneth B. Clark, and ``Talley's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men'' by Elliot Liebow.
The latter was written originally by Liebow as a Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology at Catholic University. Liebow hung out on a certain street corner area in Washington, D.C. from January 1962 to July 1963, talking to the men who frequented it, and from his work, I learned so much about a journalistic technique that embedded one in a community, enabled locals to talk freely to you and ultimately accept you as a regular, thereby speaking without constraint or pre-judgement.
I embraced that style for Heaven — it worked for me and my personality and my curiosity and my half-formed documentary desires. I was moved by what Swedish social scientist Gunnar had said way back in 1944 after conducting a large study on America's race problem, that there was ``an astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the part of the white public in the North.'' That included me.
I took to heart the playground stories I gleaned from Axthelm and Wolf. And from Clark, the first Black president of the American Psychological Association, I learned about becoming an ``involved observer,'' as he called it, and I learned of the heartbreak and hope and despair of Black America, particularly in famed pockets of New York City.
I questioned what my goal was and whether I could interpret observations and facts and turn them into something bigger--truth, for me and the reader (a long shot). Plus, I was only 25, unknown, unheralded, couldn't type, not one journalism class, clueless even about writing such a thing as a BOOK. Plus, nobody wanted that alleged book.
The publisher that had contracted me for almost nothing went out of business. Nobody had any clue as to why I was doing a book in the first place. I often wondered myself.
Clark's words helped me. He wrote:
“Truth is more complex, multifaceted, and value-determined than is the usual fact. Fact is empirical, while truth is interpretive. Fact is, in itself, unrelated to value; it merely is. Truth, as the understanding--in the fullest sense--of fact, is related to value and, for that reason, more fully human.''
So in my primitive way, I went out onto the deeply foreign big city asphalt looking for truth and, I suppose, a bit of my own humanity.
Note to Brilliant Readers: I’m TRYING to take a vacation, but you know me … I can’t help sneaking in a few half-baked, off-the-cuff Notebook posts. This week, so far, it has been Bochy magic and the unhittability of Aroldis Chapman and me remembering some guys. If you want those in your inbox, just click yes in the poll — or just read them online.
