What are your favorite books

about basketball?

Torg Fav Basketball Books

Kent Chezem and I list and discuss our favorite hoops books in this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast, March 8, 2020 edition.

In preparing for this pod, I realized that I have read a lot more basketball books than I previously thought, probably at least 100.

I came up with nineteen books I thought were worth mentioning.

First, a commercial. My book, The Coach’s Wife has a lot of basketball in it and is on sale via Amazon for less than ten bucks.

1. Season on the Brink by John Feinstein. 1986.
2. The Losing Season by Pat Conroy
3. Born to Coach by Rick Pitino 
4. The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
5. Sprawlball by Kirk Goldsberry
6. Wooden, A Coach’s Life by Seth Davis
7. The 21st Century Basketball Practice by Brian McCormick
8. Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem  (I met Kareem in the St. John’s locker room at Madison Square Garden)  AND Becoming Kareem by Obstfeld 
9. When the Game was Ours by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson with Jackie MacMullan (appears on ESPN’s show Around the Horn)
10. The Legends Club by Feinstein
11. The Last Amateurs by Feinstein
12. My Life on a Napkin by Rick Majerus
13. Sum it Up by Sally Jenkins 
14. The Last Seasonby Phil Jackson
15. I just bought Seven Seconds or Less about the Suns by Jack McCallum. 
16. Lebron INCby Brian Windhorst. He also wrote Return of the King. 
17. Showtime by Jeff Pearlman
18. Basketball, A Love Story. 
19. The Book of Basketballby Bill Simmons

In doing this work, here are the books I’m going to look into reading: 

1. Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection
2. Assisted by John Stockton
3. How Lucky Can You Be (Meyer) by Buster Olney
4. Bleed Orange about Boheim
5. The Pistol 
6. Fab Five 
7. Boys Among Men by Abrams 
8. Seven Seconds or Less Jack MaCullum 
9. Basketball on Paper Dean Oliver 
10. A Coach’s Life by Dean Smith with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins

Questions for Discussion:

1. Which of my favs overlaps with yours?
2. How did you rank these books?
3. What do we get out of reading these books?
4. What are these books about that we can talk about? Three point line. 21st Century Basketball. How would we describe our college basketball practices? How have we departed?
5. Which of these coaches have we met? How at all, have these books or the coaches influenced us?
6. I mostly left out technical X and O books like these:

• Knight and Newell’s pair of books, Tex Winter’s Triangle Offense, Wooten’s Coaching Basketball Successfully, Dean Smith’s Multiple Offenses and Defenses, Tim Grover’s Jump Attack

I counted 42 books on Amazon written by John Feinstein:

• The Back Roads to March, Where Nobody Knows Your Name (baseball), The First Major, A Good Walk Spoiled, The Legends Club, Season on the Brink, Quarterback, The Last Amateurs, A Season Inside, The Last Dance, The Punch (about the Rockets), Forever’s Team about Duke 78, A March to Madness about ACC

What are your favorites? Which ones are we wrong about? We hope you’ll join the conversation!