I thought, perhaps, that I was just on Sports Guy overload, but I kept reading his columns online while I read this book, and they continued to make me chortle. I began glazing over them about halfway through the book.
It is to our great benefit that ESPN keeps this boorish immaturity out of his columns. The supposedly hilarious footnotes in this book consist of nothing but bad porn star humor, bad 80's movie humor, and Simmmons making jokes about how he can't stop making porn star and drug jokes. It's clear that Simmons has thrived online due to the work of his editors in corralling his babbling and refining his humor. I wanted to learn about all the great players of history in this book, but instead I mostly learned what Simmons thinks is wrong with them. By expanding upon the worst parts of his columns - his obsessive biases towards certain types of players and teams - and mostly ignoring the profound insight he usually incites with his biting humor, Simmons comes off as someone who spent too much time watching pro basketball and now can do nothing but rant about it. As a big fan of the Sports Guy's columns about the NBA, I thought I would be laughing from beginning to end and learning a lot. * More to the point, he’s the only one crazy enough to try to pull it off. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted The Secret of Basketball.Ĭomprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Simmons’s one-of-a-kind, five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. Nowhere in the roundball universe will you find another single volume that covers as much in such depth as this wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining look at the past, present, and future of pro basketball.įrom the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens–and then closes, once and for all–every major pro basketball debate. There is only one writer on the planet who possesses enough basketball knowledge and passion to write the definitive book on the NBA.* Bill Simmons, the from-the-womb hoops addict known to millions as ’s Sports Guy, is that writer.
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