‘‘Just imagine what it was like to be him,’’ Walton added. ‘‘It was 50 years of him being 18 inches taller than everyone and having the brain that he had. Imagine being this jazz head coming up during black power. This is just a dude who has a different head.’’
A 42-year-old man with small hands and a dream.
A story of growth, regression, and divergent paths.
"But mostly, Joan sat for hours in her favorite spot of their old living room couch where she breastfed Phil. It felt sometimes like he was resting in the crook of her arm. And other times, her breasts would drip milk and she’d sit with a throbbing ache in her chest. Her husband returned twice a week, a different person each time as if trying on new identities: laughing, angry, sedate, stoic. Sometimes he brought the rocks with him. Sometimes Joan would have to go out on her own looking for them."
The mysterious death of one of college basketball’s most promising coaches.
Bill Bradley was a Rhodes scholar, a three-term U.S. Senator and a presidential candidate. But before all that, he was the best college basketball player in the country.
The death of Bobby Phills, an NBA player who made one terrible mistake.
For a few weeks a few years ago, Jeremy Lin was on top of the basketball world. Now he’s riding the bench, being taunted by Kobe Bryant, and trying to figure out what the hell happened.
What happened to one of the most hated basketball players in NCAA history after playing a single season at Georgetown.
The team’s grand, analytics-driven experiment led by a business school grad who won the GM job after giving a “PowerPoint presentation that Sixers executives now recall as an ‘investment thesis.’”
The pecking order of All-Star Weekend sex-with-basketball-player-or-rapper hopefuls.
On former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith, who died Saturday, and his battle with dementia.
Irina Pavolva is trying to steer the Brooklyn Nets through a rough patch. Will she make it?
“I was in the visiting clubhouse waiting to interview one of the Oakland A’s this year when one of the players called, ‘Here, pussy’—as though he were calling a cat. But of course, he hadn’t lost Fluffy; he’d found a woman in his locker room.”
To save himself, a basketball recruit testified against his mother.
A 2011 profile of LeBron James, originally meant to run in Port, that was killed by Nike.
How Javaris Crittenton went from basketball phenom to standing trial on a murder charge.
Eddie Griffin made it to the NBA. Then his life began to unravel.
How a bipolar diagnosis follows you from the top to the bottom of professional basketball.
The catfishing of Chris Andersen.
The story of a high school basketball star’s sexual abuse conviction and its aftermath, told from all sides.
An oral history of the 2002 Western Conference finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings.
Previously: Jonathan Abrams on the Longform Podcast.
A profile of the Los Angeles Clippers owner, an oft-sued real estate baron with a documented racist streak and a penchant for heckling his own players, on the occasion of him winning an NAACP lifetime achievement award.
On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.
A brief history of the world and the late 1990s Chicago Bulls.
"This is the version of him that has no future or past. No ex-wife or kids, no off-court life. He lives in the United Center. He doesn't fuss with food or water. There are whole months in the air, between the floor and the rim. This moment of quiet and loud gets stuck on repeat. Michael Jordan shoots, swishes, but a lot of times he just stands, lit. An occasional swivel. Rotates like a figurine. Television size. He could dribble his basketball in the palm of your hand."
The story of a very bad basketball team.
