Kadir Nelson remembers the time, around the age of 4, that he first touched a basketball.

“One of my uncles once came back from playing a game around the corner in Atlantic City, [New Jersey,] and he was talking to my grandmother,” the author and artist recalls via Zoom from his home in Riverside, California. “Somehow the ball ended up in my hands, and I bounced it, and I just fell in love with basketball at first bounce.”

Nelson aims to share his love of the sport in Basket Ball: The Story of the All-American Game (Little, Brown; Jan. 13). The book is a history of the game for young readers, written by Nelson and illustrated with dozens of his oil paintings of cagers past and present. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a backboard-shattering slam dunk.”

It combines two of Nelson’s passions: basketball and art. He fell in love with the latter as a child, too—he learned the fundamentals of art at 11 from an uncle who was an artist and teacher; the same uncle would teach him to paint with oils when he was 16. He went on to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and launched a career as an artist, creating visuals for films, album covers, and magazines (including, famously, the New Yorker).

He had more than 15 children’s books under his belt as an illustrator before he decided to fly solo with the 2008 book We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball—a project that might not have happened if it weren’t for his basketball obsession.

“Through high school and college, I did a lot of basketball paintings because of my love for the game,” he says. “But I painted so much of it, I wanted to take a break. I was inspired to create artwork for—and tell the story of—Negro League baseball after seeing the Ken Burns documentary [Baseball] while I was in college. So I did one Negro League painting, and that grew into over 40 paintings. The book took seven, eight years to complete.”

The new book was inspired by his editor at Disney-Hyperion, Stephanie Lurie, who saw two paintings he had done for a pair of U.S. postage stamps honoring basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. She asked Nelson if he’d be interested in writing and illustrating a children’s book about the history of the sport.

“I thought the timing was right,” he says. “I was ready to delve back into basketball. Given that it had been such a big part of my life, it made a lot of sense for me to create a series of works that would pay tribute to and celebrate it.…I didn’t just want to tell the story of basketball through words and pictures. I wanted it to feel like you are also in the game. You’re up close.”

Nelson says he wanted to include not just action shots but images of every aspect of the sport, whether small or larger than life. One of the first paintings in the book depicts Charles Barkley in his Philadelphia 76ers era, tying his shoes before a game. But there are plenty of pictures of athletes in motion.

“Because I have experience playing basketball, it gave me a strong understanding of how to communicate movement through images,” Nelson says. “I understand what it feels like to stretch or to push yourself or to move through space as athletes do. When you see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reaching and really deploying his skyhook, I understand the mechanics of what it takes to perform that action—though not as expertly as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar!”

The book begins with the sport’s invention in 1891 by Canadian teacher James Naismith, then segues into its earliest teams, including the often forgotten “Black fives,” segregation-era teams composed only of African American players. “When it comes to the history of basketball, it was a mirror of what was going on in the country where not everyone was working together, playing together, living together, or having the same shared experiences,” he says.

From there, Nelson takes on topics including the Harlem Globetrotters, the birth of the NBA, and the history of its rowdier cousin, the American Basketball Association, or ABA. (The two leagues merged in 1976.) He chronicles some of the sport’s most famous teams, including the Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, and the 1992 U.S. men’s Olympic “dream team.” An “overtime” section stresses the importance of women’s basketball, which is currently having a moment with WNBA stars like A’ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark. “I’m really happy to see how the WNBA has been flourishing over the last few years in particular,” Nelson says. “Women have been in basketball since it was invented.”

One section of the book is devoted to basketball “revolutionaries,” two of whom Nelson got to meet when he was 15 and his mother took him to a celebrity golf tournament.

“I brought some drawings that I’d made of Michael Jordan that I was hoping he would sign,” Nelson recalls. “While I was waiting at one of the holes, I turned around, and sitting by himself in a golf cart was Dr. J [Julius Erving]. I went up to him and said, ‘I know these aren’t drawings of you, but would you mind signing them? I’m a big fan.’ He grabbed a pen and signed it, and said, ‘Wow, you have a nice touch.’ I shook his hand and his fingertips basically touched the inside of my elbow.” (Nelson also scored an autograph from His Airness later that day.)

Nelson wants to educate kids who might not know that the sport was originally called “basket ball,” two words, or that the 24-second shot clock was not always part of the game. But basketball’s long and fascinating history isn’t all he hopes young readers will take away from the book.

“I want folks to put down their phones and enjoy the book—even pick up a basketball or ball of their choice and go outside and play and do something in the real world,” he says. “That’s really what this book celebrates. It is a celebration of what we can do as human beings when we work together.”

And if his readers find that the book kindles their interest in art, Nelson would be even happier.

“All of this artwork was created by a human being,” he says. “It’s not artificial intelligence. This is very practical, physical artwork, paint and canvas. These are things being made by hand, by human beings. I really want kids to continue that tradition and not take any shortcuts with all the digital tools we have at our fingertips these days.”

Nelson continues to love basketball, of course, but as April and the NBA playoffs approach, who is he hoping will take home the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy?

“Honestly, I don’t have a team,” he says. “I’m not a guy who sits and talks about who’s going to win the championship, because who knows? I’m much more a fan of the history of the game. Whoever is playing great basketball is who I’m interested in watching, but I’m not rooting for one team or another. The game itself is enough of a celebration for me.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.