Major novelists such as Bernard Malamud and supremely accomplished journalists like Roger Angell have applied a high literary gloss to baseball, turning the sport into a field of dreams for ambitious scribes. Basketball, in contrast, lags far behind in its literary prestige.
I cannot think of a single novel about basketball that I would recommend, and there are only two works of nonfiction on the sport that one might call “great”: Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, a twinned account of the 1969-70 championship season of the New York Knicks and the city’s near-mythical playground legends, and A Sense of Where You Are, John McPhee’s profile of the Princeton phenom Bill Bradley. As George Plimpton, who wrote about his amateur forays into boxing, baseball, football, golf, and even hockey, once said, the smaller the ball, the better the book.
