100 books like The NBA In Black And White

OK, I’m stretching a bit to include this on my list.

John Thompson made his mark on basketball as a college coach, not from his two years as Bill Russell’s back-up with the Celtics. But I’ve got a personal interest here: I was a student sportswriter at Georgetown from Coach Thompson’s second year as coach, and as a junior and senior got to attend his weekly press conferences with the student press. I’ve often said I learned more about life from those meetings in Coach’s office than I did from any other class at Georgetown.

I feel the same about this book, written with Andscape senior writer Jesse Washington. If you read this book you probably won’t agree with all of it, but I have no doubt that you’ll learn from it. 

In They Cleared the Lane, Ron Thomas, a journalist and HBCU professor, tells the stories of players and coaches who blazed a trail for African Americans back when only the ball was brown.

He introduces us to pioneers like Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Sweetwater Clifton, the “First Three” Black players who broke the NBA’s color line in 1951; Hal “King” Lear, Dick Gaines, Wally Choice, and Cleo Hill, who couldn’t crack the NBA’s racial quotas and stereotypes and starred instead in the Eastern League; John McClendon, who literally learned the game from its inventor, Dr. James Naismith, and is the acknowledged king of Black college coaches; and the first generation of Black superstars like Maurice Stokes, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain.

If you want to learn on whose shoulders the modern NBA rests, this is the book to read. 

I was on lunch break one day in 2010 walking through Union Station in DC when I saw a very tall, elderly Black man seated at a table in the B. Dalton bookstore with a stack of books in front of him.

I smiled at him and he back and me, and then the man with him said, “Do you know who this is?” I said no. The man said “It’s Earl Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA.” It occurred to me then, as it has many times since, that most Americans know about Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in professional baseball, but until that moment I didn’t know who did the same in basketball.

And it wasn’t until 10 years later, when I finally read the book that Mr. Lloyd graciously signed for me, that I wished I’d talked with him about his remarkable… show more.

This book describes the history of African Americans in professional basketball from the early years of racially segregated barnstorming teams, to the partial integration in the early pro leagues, to the slow acceptance of Blacks in the NBA in the 1950s, to the modern day.

But while Ron Thomas relates the personal stories of the main actors, Douglas Stark, who has spent his career in positions with sports museums including the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, offers an historian’s perspective and examines the social and historical context behind each step in the evolution. Bit by bit, we see the game and our society change as we learn how we got to where we are today. 

Bill Bradley was as far from a typical college and NBA superstar as can possibly be imagined. He was 6’5” but could barely dunk. In a race between the tortoise and the hare, he would be the tortoise. Yet, with an uncanny set of shooting, passing, and rebounding skills, he became the nation’s top high school prospect, with more than 70 colleges, including every powerhouse in the sport, offering him a scholarship. Instead, he chose to play at lowly Princeton, in one of the game’s weakest conferences—the Ivy League—where he averaged more than 30 points a game over the course of his career, becoming a two-time first-team All-American and, in his senior season, national player of the year, leading the Tigers to the 1965 NCAA tournament’s Final Four, in which he scored an unheard of 58 points against Wichita State and was named the tournament’s MVP—the only player to this… show more.

Fader’s book presents a side of Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo that I never knew about, focusing less on his stellar NBA career and more on his family and all the hardships he has faced, from growing up in immense poverty to grappling with his identity to struggling to adjust to life in America.

Through outstanding reporting, Fader tells a story that is both heartfelt and inspiring in ways I didn’t expect when I first dove in. This is one of my favorite books ever. 

A great book about leadership and business. I pick it because it’s on the reading list suggested in The Art of Profitability. I learned that focus is important. Bill Russell was one of the greatest basketball players of all time because he worked harder and played smarter than everyone else. However, he also recognized that he doesn’t play every position. He needs to have a great team, one that adapts to the competition. He needs them all to play at his level and he was able to do that, winning the NBA Finals a record-breaking 11 seasons. One way to build a successful side hustle (or portfolio of side hustles) is to recruit a great team to help you.

An 11-time NBA champion, Bill Russell revealed the insecurity of being a super tall, lanky, Black man that can’t avoid notice. He wrote honestly about racism and civil rights in America. He mentioned great Celtics players and described the NBA’s early days. His description of the physical demands of traveling and playing so many games made me realize his job was hard work. Read it just to find the passage where Russel describes—better than any writer ever has—that rare, amazing feeling you get when teammates are in sync, everything is clicking, and a team plays at its peak.

I rushed out to buy Kriegel’s bio of Pistol Pete when it hit stores in 2007.

I’d always found Maravich fascinating as a basketball player—the guy is still the all-time leading scorer in Division I men’s basketball history, and he played just three years of college ball—but didn’t know much about his life.

I wondered: How was there enough material for Kriegel to write a full-length book about him? Turns out, more than enough for Mark to write a brilliant book that, like so many great sports stories, is really about fathers and sons.

In this thoughtful, philosophical autobiography, the winningest player in NBA history uses his storied career with the Boston Celtics as a cogent window into the broken promises—mostly racial—of the American Dream. Co-written with historian Taylor Branch, whose trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize, Russell, who has devoted as much of his life to activism in the cause of social justice as to the game of basketball, shares the life lessons he has learned on the court, from his schoolboy days in Louisiana to his All-American stint at the University of Seattle, to his record-setting career with the Celtics, where he won an astounding eleven championship rings in thirteen years. This book was published in 1979, but its insights are as relevant and penetrating today as they were then.