The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds

by Pete Axthelm, Rick Telander (Introduction)

Overview

Pete Axthelm follows the 1969–70 season of the New York Knicks and provides a parallel focus on basketball as it was then played in the black neighborhoods of New York City. Throughout, he writes clearly, intelligently, and passionately about the game, bringing alive the players’ efforts, accomplishments, and failures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803259348
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	02/01/1999
Pages:	218
Sales rank:	397,177
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Pete Axthelm was an editor for Newsweek. Rick Telander is a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a writer for ESPN Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

"The master prose stylist portrays parallel basketball worlds in New York City: Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks won the 1969-1970 championship, and the playgrounds of Harlem, where stars such as Earl (the Goat) Manigault burned brightly but too briefly."—Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated

"Superb . . . [Axthelm] combines Knick history, player backgrounds, seasonal anecdotes and court triumphs with another phenomenon—city basketball in the crowded ghettoes of the nation. The areas he focuses on primarily are the asphalt playgrounds of Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. There basketball has its special code of behavior, its pecking order and its own culture heroes. . . . A few city playground aces have made it to college . . . , and a few have found an escape route to the Harlem Globetrotters or the Eastern League. But many others have become strung out on poverty or drugs or have been imprisoned. . . . The book offers absorbing insights into the most unique and gripping of all city sports."—Rex Lardner, New York Times

New York Times - Rex Lardner

"The best description of basketball played in New York City streets during the sixties and seventies."—Bill Bradley, The New Yorker

The New Yorker - Bill Bradley

"Superb . . . [Axthelm] combines Knick history, player backgrounds, seasonal anecdotes and court triumphs with another phenomenon—city basketball in the crowded ghettoes of the nation. The areas he focuses on primarily are the asphalt playgrounds of Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. There basketball has its special code of behavior, its pecking order and its own culture heroes. . . . A few city playground aces have made it to college . . . , and a few have found an escape route to the Harlem Globetrotters or the Eastern League. But many others have become strung out on poverty or drugs or have been imprisoned. . . . The book offers absorbing insights into the most unique and gripping of all city sports."—Rex Lardner, New York Times

— Rex Lardner

New York Times

"The best description of basketball played in New York City streets during the sixties and seventies."—Bill Bradley, The New Yorker

— Bill Bradley

The New Yorker

Rosen's novel is a particularly American form of tragedy, in which the characters do not have to fall from great heights to fall from grace.
—The New York Times Book Review

Allen Barra