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What to read next if the Knicks win made you basketball-curious.
A mini reading list.
Today in New York, you cant get to lower Manhattan because the streets are clogged with Knicks fans.
My town is still on fire from their historic championship win last weekend.
People who could not name a single NBA player a month ago (ahem, it me) have sprouted expertise and regional patriotism overnight.
Thanks to Jalen, OG, Josh, and Karl, the street vibes havent been this good since Obamas win in 2008.
Yet I anticipate the complaint of the serious sports fan.
Where will all this goodwill go after the parade ends? A lesson of this historic season is that one could love basketball all year, not just when the games are being projected on the sides of bodegas.
But say you have a nebbish temperament, and poor hand-eye coordination.
Literary sports-writing is a long American tradition.
But in the wake of Grantlands demise, its been harder to find diamonds in the genre.
There are some great basketball books out there.
And diehards always have ESPN.
But if youre a casual reader on the bench, you might check out some of these features first.
Heres what to read if youre almost ready to commit to basketball.
1.
Hanif Abdurraqibs Notes on Hoops, The Paris Review Abdurraqibs 2021 column for the Review revisited the golden age of basketball movies.
His close reads of classics like Love & Basketball and White Men Cant Jump note the elegance of the sport, and situate b-ball in a rich American history.
Observations range from the pithy (In most sports movies, no one can actually play the sport) to the personal ([Like Mike] is, at least in part, about loneliness, about placelessness, about wanting to pull the curtain back on a world where a kid feels worthy of being desired).
A great place to start, considering hes one of our best bards, fullstop.
2.
Katie Heindls Basketball Feelings, Substack This newsletter, launched on TinyLetter in 2018, tries to reconcile life with basketball while expounding on the cultural, political, historic, and ideological intersections of the sport.
Heindls is a devoted but philosophical fandom.
Shes as inclined to meditate on miracles as offseason turbulence.
Shes also written about womens basketball for The Believer, and recently published a breathless Knicks play-by-play for SB Nation.
Her coverage is detailed, ardent, and soon to be collected in a book from Transit.
I especially love her more tender musings, like this one.
3.
John McPhees A Sense of Where You Are, The New Yorker This lengthy profile from a 1965 New Yorker zones in on Bill Bradley, an Ivy League hooper who was once considered the best of the best and brightest.
Later turned into a book, the essay was one of the first to give a human face to the world of college sports.
Though mighty hagiographic, McPhees ability to break down a players gifts makes a poetic case for the game.
4.
Giri Nathan, Defector A staffer and co-founder at one of our last good sports writing hubs (Defector, ftw!), Nathan regularly writes about tennis and basketballoften in a witty register that makes the players feel like friends.
Ive loved his exuberant coverage of this years finals.
(And the glorious aftermath.) Nathans hoop creds are also well-established.
He profiled Abdurraqib for Vulture around the publication of the latters memoir, Theres Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.
And, on a general note? Defector is the place to go for all good hoop writing, au courant.
Maitreyi Anantharaman is writing stylish reports about the WNBA.
And a great bench of freelancers is making this all-American game feel dramatic, approachable, and excitingeven to filthy casuals.
5.
John Edgar Wideman, Hoop Roots I leave you with a long read.
Wideman, one of our more prolific and fascinating novelists, wrote a rangy memoir of his own court time back in 2003.
Combining reflections with love letters with poetry, this strange amalgam reconstructs the authors days as a college champ.
Another great lay-up for the abstract fan.
Brittany Allen Brittany K.
Allen is a writer and actor living in Brooklyn..