| Author | Thread |
| AUTOADVERT |
|
NumberTwoPencil
Posts: 20936 Alba Posts: 0 Joined: 10/31/2003 Member: #481 USA |
3/31/2015 8:27 PM LAST EDITED: 4/3/2015 1:36 AM
Charley Rosen is not my favorite basketball journalist right now but . . . I don't hate on him. He's had an amazing career, coaching basketball and as a sports journalist and novelist. From my point of view, he earned the right to be wrong and to have half-crazy unsupported opinions, oh, a hundred years ago. He's written several of my favorite books about basketball, he co-wrote Phil Jackson's best basketball book, and he's the author of several rather amusing basketball novels. He's a few years older than Phil, maybe 75 and, yeah, sometimes he drifts about and doesn't watch enough games and coasts on his past but come on, he's earned it. If you only know him from his cranky and sometimes ill-informed Hoops Hype columns, you are missing out on the good parts of Charley Rosen.
Players and Pretenders, Rosen's account of coaching the ill-fated Bard College(!) basketball team in the 70s, is a classic. It's funny, smart, filled with great basketball writing and it makes perhaps the best case for college sports I've ever read. http://www.amazon.com/Players-Pretenders-Basketball-Couldnt-Straight/dp/0803259646 Perfectly Awful, an account of the horrific 1972-73 76ers season is also a classic of sports writing. Rosen makes a case for the mid-70s 76ers being as awful and awfully managed as our current beloved Knicks. http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Awful-Philadelphia-Horrendous-Hilarious/dp/0803248628 (University of Nebraska press brought Perfectly Awful and Players and Pretenders back into print a few years ago. There are nice paperback editions around. The Strand probably has them.) Rosen has also written several non-fiction books and novels about gambling and gambling scandals in college basketball in the 50s. I recommend both The Wizard of Odds and Scandals of '51, both of which are still in print. His novel about a depression-era all-Jewish professional basketball team is also a classic sports novel, certainly one of the better basketball novels of all time. http://www.amazon.com/House-Moses-All-Stars-Novel/dp/160980371X The book he co-authored with Phil Jackson, More than a Game, is, yes, more Phil than Charley but it's easily Jackson's best book about basketball and well worth your time if you want to know where Phil is coming from and what he cares about how he thinks about basketball strategy. (It's being reissued with some updated materials but you can find used copies around.) http://www.amazon.com/More-than-Game-Phil-Jackson/dp/0743444116 I'll stop there. I guess I've totally blow my cover. You guys are impostors. I AM CHARLEY ROSEN. |