Loose Balls

The American Basketball Association (ABA) epitomized the swinging 1970s, and this book, set up as a series of interviews with players and coaches, lets you hear first-hand from the men who experienced it.

The modern NBA owes much of its exuberance and excitement to this oft-forgotten league. Learning about how the ABA transformed professional basketball makes me love this book so much. 

I love the Studs Terkel genre of storytelling, where the interviews themselves are ordered to tell a story without the author getting in the way. Terry Pluto’s book is a Studs Terkel version of the story of the ABA, an outlaw basketball league that was even crazier in real life than in caricature.

Hearing from the players and administrators themselves brought the ABA to life for me in a way that it never had in more traditional histories. I know, reading such stories, that there are things that get omitted in first-person accounts, but I can’t help but prefer to… show more.