The only good thing about getting a nasty flu? Easy: Lots of time for reading monster tomes like Bill Simmons’ “The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy”. Thanks to a sentinel from the legion of The 2009 Killer Viruses, i was able to knock down all 697 pages of this thing – every “what if” scenario, every drop of gushy sycophantry about the Boston Celtics, every cheap shot at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, every improved list of reasons why, every obtuse pop-culture reference that would’ve sent me scurrying to access Wikipedia had i possessed the ability to crawl out of bed. Everything.
It’s not quite like proclaiming you’ve finished “Finnegan’s Wake,” but pride can be taken in the solace that this reader was perhaps among the first 100 to finish the volume on The Continent and probably the only one in Hungary. Apparently one needn’t have read “The Book of Basketball” to review it, as evidenced by the barrage of reviews (pretty much all of which landed firmly in either the “Simmons damn near the greatest sportswriter ever” or the “Simmons is overrated and, frankly, passé” camp) that somehow appeared throughout the blogosphere within 24 hours of the book’s release on Amazon.com. (Come on, there’s no way ESPN Books sent out *that* many review copies.)
If you’re clueless as to what the vitriol contained in the above-cited negative review is all about, well, you’re not alone. One can’t help but wonder, however, just how much of “The Book of Basketball” Charles P. Pierce looked at with an open mind and how much he, you know, *read* of this book. (Is it possible that Pierce’s 2000 book “Sports Guy,” apparently titled without knowledge of what a barely-known blogger was doing in Boston, has something to do with it…? Nah.)
Yes, all the deadpan humor, friend-referencing and fierce homerism so characteristic of The Sports Guy’s columns over at ESPN.com are in here, but Simmons and editor Gary Hoenig realize that “The Book of Basketball” wasn’t to be a simple rehashing of internet work or stapled together newspaper column-like bits, but a freaking *book* for Hemingway’s sake.
And kudos to them, because “The Book of Basketball” is exactly what Simmons (and basketball) fans deserve: The Sports Guy’s writing – coupled with his insane encyclopedic knowledge of the game – refined.
