The Last Book I Read

I tend to lean, in my personal tastes, towards the alternative side of things: alternative music, independent film, abstract art, maverick journalism, etc. It never occurred to me, but the roots of that may be in my formative years as a sports fan, since I grew up on the American Football League and was a big fan of the American Basketball Association when each was challenging the hegemony of a more established league. In the case of the latter, it was kind of hard following teams like the Kentucky Colonels and Virginia Squires while living in what, at the time, was an NBA city (Buffalo-- though I was a Braves fan, too). It just seemed, from basketball cards and the few brief glimpses I got of their games, that the ABA was much more colorful, and not just because of their red, white and blue ball. I was intrigued by players like Artis Gilmore, Willie Wise, Mack Calvin, Zelmo Beaty, and Louie Dampier-- I mean, those names alone made them seem flashy to me (more so than more dully-named NBA stalwarts like Bob Kaufman, Walt Frazier, and Dave Cowens). But when the ABA folded in the mid-seventies, it was like they disappeared forever, though several of the teams were absorbed into the NBA, as were virtually all of the league's best players. So when I spotted Terry Pluto's oral history of the ABA, Loose Balls, I was excited to revisit those years when I actually cared about things like the three-point shot (invented by the ABA). The book is good, not great, and doesn't quite live up to the cover blurbs promising a broader traipse through the cultural landscape of the seventies. But one certainly gets a good idea of what it was like to play in a rebel league, and the machinations the owners and managers went through to keep the operation afloat for about ten years. In fact, the greatest strength of the book is in how it reveals the incredible risks inherent in running a professional sports team on the cheap (one indication of this is that only three teams played in the same cities every year the ABA was in existence). The other, more inspiring, message is how the players pulled together-- many of them denied a shot at the NBA for arbitrary reasons (too small. too young, etc.)-- and took great pride in proving themselves the equal of their NBA counterparts (which was very evident the year after the merger, when the NBA All-Star teams were dominated by former ABA players). In the end, it's not a great sports book-- it never transcends it's narrative, making it a likely tough go if you don't already have a fair amount of affinity for the subject. But for me it was a revealing trip down memory lane, and I'm glad someone made the effort to collect and share these stories.