Loose Balls

Author: Terry Pluto
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439127522
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association. What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association. The NBA may have won the financial battle, but the ABA won the artistic war. With its stress on wide-open individual play, the adoption of the 3-point shot and pressing defense, and the encouragement of flashy moves and flying dunks, today's NBA is still—decades later —just the ABA without the red, white and blue ball. Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports—told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

Loose Balls

Author: Jayson Williams
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Sex, Booze, Violence, Racism, Easy Money, Hard Fouls & Cheap Laughs in the NBA Autobiography of Jayson Williams, the all-star centre for the New Jersey Nets, one of the best players in the NBA, probably the strongest, and definitely the funniest man in basketball. His irreverent take on life, on and off court, have drawn comparisons with Dennis Rodman but the difference is that Williams is actually very funny.

Tall Tales

Author: Terry Pluto
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803287662
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
An account of the NBA from 1956 to 1966, after the introduction of the 24-second shot clock, highlights those who dominated the sport during its "glory days," including Red Auerbach, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Boston Celtics.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066231
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Roll Model

Author: Jill Miller
Publisher: Victory Belt Publishing
ISBN: 1628600748
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 790

Book Description
Pain is an epidemic. It prevents you from performing at your best because it robs you of concentration, power, and peace of mind. But most pain is preventable and treatable, and healing is within your grasp. Hundreds of thousands of people around the globe have taken life “by the balls” and circumvented a dismal future of painkillers, surgeries, and hopelessness by using Jill Miller’s groundbreaking Roll Model Method. The Roll Model gives you the tools to change the course of your life in less than 5 minutes a day. You are a fully equipped self-healing organism, and this book will guide you through easy-to-perform self-massage techniques that will erase pain and improve your performance in whatever activities you pursue. The Roll Model teaches you how to improve the quality of your life no matter your size, shape, or condition. Within these pages you will find: • Inspiring stories of people just like you who have altered the course of their lives by using the Roll Model Method • Accessible explanations of how and why this system works based on the science of your body and the physiological effects of rolling • Step-by-step rolling techniques to help awaken your body’s resilience from head to toe so that you have more energy, less stress, and greater performance Whether you’re living with constant discomfort, seeking to improve your mobility, or trying to avoid medication and surgery, this book provides empowering and effective solutions for becoming your own best Roll Model.

Bubbleball

Author: Ben Golliver
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647003644
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
A captivating account of the NBA’s strangest season ever, from shutdown to championship, from a prominent national basketball writer living inside the bubble When NBA player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, the league shut down immediately, bringing a shocking, sudden pause to the season. As the pandemic raged, it looked as if it might be the first year in league history with no champion. But four months later, after meticulous planning, twenty-two teams resumed play in a "bubble" at Disney World-a restricted, single-site locale cut off from the outside world. Due to health concerns, the league invited only a handful of reporters, who were required to sacrifice medical privacy, live in a hotel room for more than three months, and submit to daily coronavirus testing in hopes of keeping the bubble from bursting. In exchange for the constant monitoring and restricted movement, they were allowed into a basketball fan's dream, with a courtside seat at dozens of games in nearly empty arenas. Ben Golliver, the national NBA writer for the The Washington Post, was one of those allowed access. Bubbleball is his account of the season and life inside, telling the story of how basketball bounced back from its shutdown, how players staged headline-grabbing social justice protests, and how Lakers star LeBron James chased his fourth ring in unconventional and unforgettable circumstances. Based on months of reporting in the exclusive, confined environment, this is an entertaining record of an extraordinary season.

The Smart Take from the Strong

Author: Pete Carril
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803264489
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
“The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.” So said Pete Carril’s father, a Spanish immigrant who worked for thirty-nine years in a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, steel mill. His son stood only five-foot-six but nonetheless became an All-State basketball player in high school, a Little All-American in college, and a highly successful coach. After twenty-nine years as Princeton University’s basketball coach, he became an assistant coach with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. In 1997 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Coach Carril inspired his teams with his own strength of character and drive to win, and he demonstrated time and again how a smart and dedicated team could compete successfully against bigger programs and faster, stronger, more athletic players. His teams won thirteen conference championships, made eleven NCAA Tournament appearances, and led the nation in defense fourteen times. Throughout his reflections on a lifetime spent on the basketball court and the bench, Carril demonstrates deep respect for the contest, his empathy and engagement with the players, humility with his own achievements, a pragmatic vision of discipline and fundamentals, and an enduring joy in the game. This is an inspiring and wonderful book, even for those who never made a basket.

On the Ball

Author: Brian Pinkney
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1368004466
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Book Description
Owen loves playing ball. But it doesn't always "love" him back. And after a particularly disastrous day on the field, Owen is benched. He is feeling so low that he doesn't even notice the ball rolling through a hole in the fence until it's gotten away. In his effort to get it back, he discovers that he has more skills than he realizes.

Swing Your Sword

Author: Mike Leach
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 0983337187
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Newly-minted Mississippi State head coach Mike Leach tells his captivating story––from rural Wyoming to law school to the upper echelons of the SEC. SWING YOUR SWORD is the first ever book by one of the most fascinating and successful coaches in sports today. A maverick who took an unlikely path to coaching through law school, Mike Leach talks about his unorthodox approach to coaching and the choices that have brought him success throughout his career. A lover of the game who started creating formations and drawing his own plays as a kid, Leach took his Texas Tech Red Raiders to numerous bowl games, achieving the #2 slot in national rankings and being voted 2008 Coach of the Year before being unceremoniously fired at the end of the 2009 season. The scandalous nature of his dismissal created a media frenzy and began a personal battle between Leach and his accusers that remains unresolved.

Pitfall

Author: Cameron Bane
Publisher: WildBlue Press
ISBN: 1942266189
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
“Action, gunplay, and well-crafted storytelling . . . for those whose hearts pump hot for shoot-’em-up adventures like Taken and John Wick.”—Robert Liparulo, bestselling author of the Dreamhouse Kings series Life has never been easy for former Army Ranger John Brenner. The wounded Iraqi war vet and ex-cop must rely on his wits, his fists, and a wry sense of gallows humor to make it through each challenging day. For at his core, this transplanted West Virginian is a throwback to an antebellum time: he is a southern man of honor. But his latest mission may be his last. The task seems straightforward—find industrialist Jacob Cahill’s missing teenage daughter and bring her safely home. But for John, nothing ever goes quite as planned. What begins as a simple disappearance morphs into something far more insidious as he finds himself plunged into a horrifying world of organ harvesting, torture, mutilation, and madness. Every dark trick John learned in his former trade of dealing death to the deserving will be brought to bear as he tries to keep his promise of bringing the girl back alive. In doing so, not only will his skills be tested to the breaking point, but his very sanity as he battles a grasping evil that stretches across the globe . . . “The star of this page-turner—former Army Ranger John Brenner—well, let’s just say in terms of skill, wit, and ability to kick some serious butt, Jack Reacher better watch out!”—Robert Liparulo, bestselling author of the Dreamhouse Kings series