A well-crafted story that will appeal most strongly to baseball aficionados.
Parallel tales of two of baseball’s greatest lions in the winters of their careers.
By the late 1950s, writes Shapiro (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together, 2003, etc.), baseball, though still popular, was in trouble. Attendance had fallen precipitously since the ’40s, and the game was being supplanted by football as America’s favorite professional sport. Enter veteran baseball executive Branch Rickey, who at age 74 attempted to save baseball by creating a third major league, the Continental League. This new league, envisioned Rickey, would be free of the self-interested and self-destructive myopia of the current major-league owners and would share resources, prospective players and the ever more lucrative revenue from television. In short, the new league would be competitive, which the previous leagues were not. The impetus was the New York Yankees and their wizened manager Casey Stengel, who had made an art of mangling the English language while proving to be a master baseball tactician. Under Stengel, the Yankees had won seven World Series, with consistently dominating performances that made baseball boring. With the “reserve clause” in place, in which players were tied to a team for life, not much promised to change. While Rickey pushed for such change, Stengel, approaching 70, was under pressure to continue the Yankees’ winning ways. Both men, each nursing an oversized ego, believed they would succeed because they willed it; in 1960, both men failed. Rickey would find the likely owners for the new league franchises no more open to innovation than the established league owners, and the Continental League would die with the expansion of the National and American Leagues. To save his job, Stengel had to win the 1960 World Series; he did not and was promptly fired. Eventually Rickey and Stengel, both of whom loved the limelight, faded from public awareness. Shapiro expertly enlivens these two larger-than-life characters and captures in fine detail an important era in baseball history.
A well-crafted story that will appeal most strongly to baseball aficionados.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8247-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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