Heaven Is a Playground: 4th Edition

by Rick Telander

Overview

Heaven Is a Playground was the first book on the uniquely American phenomenon of urban basketball. Rick Telander, a photojournalist and former high school basketball player, spent part of the summer of 1973 and all of the summer of 1974 in Brooklyn living the playground life with his subjects at Foster Park in Flatbush. He slept on the floor of a park regular’s apartment, observing, questioning, traveling, playing with, and eventually coaching a ragtag group of local teenagers whose hopes of better lives were often fanatically attached to the transcendent game itself. Telander introduces us to Fly Williams, a playground legend with incredible leaping ability and self-destructive tendencies that threatened to keep him earthbound. Another standout was Albert King, a fifteen-year-old phenom whose shy, quiet demeanor masked an otherworldly talent that eventually took him to the NBA. This edition also includes Telander’s perspectives on the arrival of an NBA team in Brooklyn. Heaven Is a Playground is one of a kind—a funny, sad, ultimately inspiring book about Americans and the roots of the sport that they love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613213940
Publisher:	Sports Publishing LLC
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Edition description:	4th ed.
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	959,489
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rick Telander is a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated and ESPN: the Magazine. Telander has won the Illinois Sportswriter of the Year Award nine times, and in 2018 he was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the author of eight books, including In the Year of the Bull.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction to the Skyhorse Publishing Fourth Edition 1

Introduction to the Bison Books Edition [2004] 6

Introduction to the 1974 Edition 10

Chapter 1 May 16

Chapter 2 Early June 38

Chapter 3 Mid-June 60

Chapter 4 Late June 73

Chapter 5 Early June 94

Chapter 6 Mid-July 117

Chapter 7 Late July 124

Chapter 8 Early August 152

Chapter 9 Mid-August 161

Chapter 10 Late August 182

Chapter 11 Early September 204

Chapter 12 Mid-September 219

Epilogue (1975) 229

Postscript (1988) 232

Afterword (2004) 237

Epilogue for the Fourth Edition: "Hoops Comes Home" 247