Pete Axthelm was an editor for Newsweek. Rick Telander is a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a writer for ESPN Magazine.
"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
"The best description of basketball played in New York City streets
during the sixties and seventies."—Bill Bradley, The New Yorker
"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
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