The Breaks of the Game

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The Breaks of the Game (eBook) Pub. Date: 7/17/2012 Publisher: Hyperion
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The Breaks of the Game Pub. Date: 2/17/2009 Publisher: Hyperion

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The Breaks of the Game (Mass Market Paperback - REISSUE) Pub. Date: 2/12/1983 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
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The Breaks of the Game (1st ed) Pub. Date: 10/28/1981 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Overview

The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979–80) in the life of the Bill Walton–led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions.

As Halberstam follows this collection of men through the months, through the losing streaks and occasional victories, the endless trips and the brutal schedules, we come to know them and their world—the other players, coaches, and owners; the competition, drafts, trades, and traditions; the wives, the fans, the media connections—a world of grand dreams, impossible expectations, and bracing realities.

The tactile authenticity of Halberstam's knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed. It's about the influence of big media, the fans and the hype they subsist on, the clash of ethics, the terrible physical demands of modern sports (from drugs to body size), the unreal salaries, the conflicts of race and class, and the consequences of sport converted into mass entertainment and athletes transformed into superstars—all presented in a way that puts the reader in the room and on the court, and The Breaks of the Game in a league of its own.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781401309725
Publisher: Hyperion
Publication date: 2/17/2009
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 89,035
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

David Halberstam

One of the most popular and imitated nonfiction writers around, David Halberstam wrote books that fused narrative storytelling with investigative reporting. The result: stories that hummed with energy and authority and reads as well as -- if not better than -- some novels.

Biography

A journalist, historian, and biographer, David Halberstam brought his idiosyncratic and stylistic approach to heavy subjects: the Vietnam War (in 1972's The Best and the Brightest); the shaping of American politics (in 1979's The Powers That Be); the American economy's relationship with the automobile industry (in 1986's The Reckoning); and the civil rights movement (in 1998's Freedom Riders).

His books were loaded with anecdotes, metaphors, suspense, and a narrative tone most writers reserve for fiction. The resulting books -- many of them huge bestsellers -- gave Halberstam heavyweight status (he won the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1964) and established him as an important commentator on American politics and power.

Halberstam was also known for his sports books. In The Breaks of the Game, which a critic for The New York Times called "one of the best books I've ever read about American sports," he took on professional basketball.

In The Amateurs, he examined the world of sculling; in Summer of '49 and October 1964, he focused on two pivotal baseball events: the Boston Red Sox's exasperating near victory over the New York Yankees for the 1949 pennant, and the 1964 season, when the Yankees lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1999's Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, Halberstam documented the making of a legend.

Always happy to extend his reach well beyond the subject at hand, Halberstam packed his books with social commentary as well as sports detail.

His writing routine was as strenuous and disciplined as that of any of the athletes he wrote about. To sustain his steady output of extensively researched, almost-always-massive books, he allows no unscheduled interruptions: "Most of us who have survived here [New York] after a number of years have ironclad work rules. Nothing interrupts us. Nothing," he once wrote in The New York Times. "We surface only at certain hours of the day."

Good To Know

David Halberstam's first job was as a reporter for a small-town Mississippi newspaper.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  April 10, 1934
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Date of Death:
  
  April 23, 2007
2. Place of Death:
  
  San Francisco, California
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Harvard, 1955

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Anonymous

Posted April 3, 2009

I Also Recommend:

Excellent

I purchased this book after reading Halberstam's "Education of a Coach," which I found entertaining and informative, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I think I liked this book as much as I did because Halberstam was embedded with the team and was able to give an honest account of what he saw without bias. Essentially, Halberstam tells the Portland Trailblazers story, during the course of a year, from the perspective of the players, coaches, and owners. Though I was not familiar with many of the players as I would be today, Halberstam was able to introduce the reader to the characters well. The book spends substantial portions on Bill Walton's story as well as Jack Ramsay's, both of which were fascinating. In addition, I liked the shorter stories Halberstam writes about some of the other players such as Kermit Washington and Maurice Lucas.

Though I have not read an extensive amount of sports books, I would place this book alongside "Friday Night Lights" by H.G. Bissinger as my favorites due to the fact both writers were with the teams and told the story as they saw it. Today, with reporters unable to gain the access these two writers had, I find these two books to be refreshing.
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