Sports Illustrated's Chris Ballard probably couldn't have happened into a worse time to release a book about the NBA. The economy is bad. ESPN's Bill Simmons released a tome on the league last month which reached the New York Times' non-fiction best-seller list. The fawning NBA fan has already possibly purchased the LeBron James quasi-autobiog, and the statheads have likely buried themselves in the Pro Basketball Prospectus 2009-10 or Wayne Winston's Mathletics. There are a lot of options, and typically little interest in basketball books.But fans who whistled by Ballard's effort -- The Art of a Beautiful Game: The Thinking Fan's Tour of the NBA, published by Simon & Schuster -- are missing a great view into the league we love. With a certain mix of comfort and curiosity, Ballard has put together a wonderful collection of NBA insights straight from the horses' mouths.
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The idea is that Ballard visits with various league personalities in order to fully investigate the major tenets of the game: the dunk, the pass, the rebound, defense. And it is a bit heavy on the stars, the ones you can hear from every Thursday night on TNT, the ones who scores of beat writers quote over the course of a season. LeBron, in fact, graces the cover. (Who's the last star to make two book covers in one summer?) Ballard talks to Steve Nash, who is always insightful but hardly tells us anything new in this book. He talks to Kobe Bryant, and to other people about Kobe Bryant. Much of this we have heard before.
But it almost seems like those are concessions to the casual fan, the gateways into which Ballard pulls the reader into the real "art" and "thinking" in the game. Take the chapter on Shane Battier's defense, for example. Ballard goes in deep with Battier, offering a blow-by-blow from the undersung Rocket's personal manual. If the Secret of Battier was spilled by the infamous Michael Lewis story last All-Star Break (a story which is discussed briefly in the book -- Battier reveals that no NBA player ever mentioned having seen the piece), the Secrets of Battier are unleashed by Ballard. The way in which Battier defends by neither blocking nor stealing the ball. The level to which Battier knows what his opponents will do before they do it. How he uses his hands in proximity to the opponent's face in order to freak them out. How he felt about Ron Artest. What he thinks of Tracy McGrady. (For the proper T-Mac critic, there is a load of material in this chapter. One particularly bemusing line, in a discussion of how Artest would switch himself onto Battier's man in a fit of confidence: "It's better than Tracy McGrady. I'd be on one side of the court and he'd be pointing, 'Pick him up! Pick him up!' So I'd have to run all the way across the court to guard a guy like Kobe. It's gone from one extreme to another.")In similar fashion, Ballard digs into the vagaries of the rebound, discussing with Ben Wallace the importance of lateral leaping. (It's a bit reminiscent of Bill Russell's autobiography Second Wind, where Russell recounts discussing the lateral geometry of the rebound with teammate Sam Jones.) Ballard gets various elite rebounders to share their tricks -- tipping a contested ball back into the air, knowing where baseline jumpers will come off. There's also some Dwight Howard material (he's goofy! he could do more!) in this chapter which simultaneously feels behind and ahead of the curve. And that's really a challenge in sports literature these days: with the media explosion facilitated by the internet and 24-hour sports news on television, so many anecdotes that would previously have been reserved for the long-form -- in magazines or books -- are already well-known within days of their happening. That's what helps make Ballard's investigation and nuance so comfortable a read: he never settles for a straight rehash, instead looking for perspective and depth. This isn't completely absent on the internet, but the practice is waning. It's presence here in Ballard's book is refreshing. (A great example: the reasoing behind Damon Jones's decision to nickname former teammate Michael Redd "Bombs Over Baghdad." Does it have to do with civilian casualties? You bet!)
Perhaps the best factor in Ballard's favor, especially in comparison with the other notable basketball books currently in prominent position at Barnes & Noble and Borders, is that he's a major character without being the focus. Not to disparage the wonderful Simmons, but Ballard has not written something that is part autobiography, part basketball book. The only cult of personality here revolves around the players, current and former. The closest Ballard gets to personal journal is during his visit to trainer David Thorpe at IMG Academy, and even then Pain is really the central character. While there's a place for author as character, time will look kindly on author as documenter, especially in this case, as Ballard has done a lovely job documenting some timeless NBA stories. This is a book NBA fans will appreciate today and in 20 years.
