Lost in the Game

A Book about Basketball

Thomas Beller

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478023449
• Print ISBN:
  9781478018834
  9781478016175

For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today's most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball's role in city life and its impact on the athlete's psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game's inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Court on Horatio Street
• Spree
• Damian Lillard’s Game-Winning Shot
• The City Game
• James Harden’s Transcendent Step-Back
• Homicide at the Playground
• Coach
• Anthony Davis and the Plight of the Modern NBA Big Man
• The Maserati Kid
• The NBA Kaleidoscope
• Most Definitely
• The All-Star Game Diaries
• The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle
• Here We Go Again: On the 2018 Cavaliers-Warriors NBA Finals
• Loitering Backstage at the NBA
• The Earth Is Round and Kyrie Irving
• The Nets
• Lost in the Game
• The Pleasures of the Old Man Game
• The Warriors’ Torrential Victory
• French Math at the NBA Draft
• Zion’s Burst
• Pandemic Playgrounds
• The Jokić Files
• Bol Bol on an Escalator
• Outscoring My Father