One of Memphis's top media personalities provides tales about the Grizzlies move to Memphis from Vancouver and how in such a short time the franchise has gone from being one of the NBA's worst to a playoff team through bold moves that have earned instant respect in the league and city. In addition, the book provides readers with stories from and about prominent names like general manager Jerry West, head coaches Hubie Brown and Mike Fratello, and players such as Shane Battier, Pau Gasol, Mike Miller, and Lorenzen Wright.
Extreme winners are not content with being second. That's equivalent to being the first loser. 'Anybody can live life when things are going well; the real test comes when adversity strikes and setbacks nail you. When that happens, how are you going to respond?' It's been five years since Pat Williams learned firsthand what an oncologist was. Five years since he had to actually prove that he bought into his own message in order to beat the cancer attacking the plasma cells in his bone marrow. Five years since he responded to the diagnosis with a new mission for remission and determined to face his mission with one goal - winning! Now, Williams and Kerasotis share that same focus and passion with readers by identifying 12 qualities of extreme winners and by providing all of the tools they need to implement each one. When put into practice - which readers can do right away - there is no telling what can happen. And there is no telling what they can accomplish.
Documents the story of "Penny" Hardaway, tracing the injuries that halted his progress as a star athlete and his decision to coach the Lester Middle School basketball team in Memphis, where he helped young players to overcome gang violence and domestic abuse to become state champions.
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
A multi-generational family epic detailing history's only known journey from Auschwitz to the NBA When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive. In By the Grace of the Game, Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale. From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.
48 states. 41 national parks. 37,912 miles. A solo grand tour of America. For 9.5 months I traveled in Bertha, my '99 Subaru Forester, seeing everything I had been missing. I collected patches, pins and postcards and blogged and photographed my way across this beautiful country. I hope you enjoy the abridged version of my travels and it inspires you to never stop exploring! Adventure is out there!
"In this book Thomas Aiello considers the special cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South for more than a quarter century between 1947 and 1979. Next to their counterparts in baseball and football, basketball fans enjoyed a unique intimacy with their favorite players, who showed more of their bodies and had nothing covering their face and head. For this and other similar reasons, blackness simply mattered more in basketball than it did in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, professional basketball was 47.5 percent black and becoming known as a "black sport." That being the case, the South's relationship with professional basketball was more fraught, and made the survival of southern teams more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile"--
Taking its place beside the instant classic bestseller The Whole Earth Catalog, this new, practical, comprehensive and profusely illustrated guide will prove invaluable to all consumers looking for a quick, efficient route to the very best information. Over 1,000 black-and-white illustrations.
