(To make it easy for you to buy any of these books if you are interested, I made each image linked to buying the book right on amazon.com or bookshop.org. I do get a commission if you use the links in this post.)

Barkley

By Timothy Bella

Hanover Square Press (2022)

There have been plenty of books written about Charles Barkley. Heck, Charles has written three himself (at least with the help of a ghost writer). I am going to guess, though, that this is the most definitive biography about basketball’s still larger-than-life personality after all these years.

It is an unauthorized biography. Barkley did no interviews with Bella. I reached out to Charles, who texted me this: “I have not read the book. He contacted people close to me and got information by telling them I was aware of the book, thinking it was OK to publish an unauthorized book. I didn’t tell anyone not to talk to him; I was just disappointed he told people I was involved with it.”

I can tell you that Bella — his uncle, Rick Bella, was a fine writer for The Oregonian during my time there — did a tremendous amount of research on the Naismith Hall of Famer.

The author must have read every book and just about every article written about Barkley, plus watched so much video footage and podcast material that his head was spinning. Bella writes that he conducted 374 interviews for the book; among those he had conversations with were Shaquille O’Neal, Phil Knight, Julius Erving, Pat Riley, Doc Rivers, Rudy Tomjanovich, John Stockton, Hersey Hawkins, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Shawn Kemp, Mike Krzyzewski and Daryl-Marie Barkley, Charles’ niece.

Bella’s book brought back a couple of personal memories.

Barkley led Phoenix to the NBA Finals in 1993, the year he won the MVP trophy. The Suns lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in six games. I covered that series. I had also covered the ’92 Finals, during which the Bulls disposed of the Trail Blazers in six games. The post-game riots, er, celebration in Chicago that year resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, 340 businesses looted and 107 police officers injured. Following Game 6, I was invited to ride the Blazers’ team bus from Chicago Stadium to my downtown hotel and gladly accepted. It was a scary situation.

The next year, with the Bulls lead the championship series 3-1 at playing Game 5 at home, Jordan delivered this message to Chicagoans: “If we make it a three-peat on our court, let’s not make it a repeat in the streets.” After the Suns knocked off the Bulls to force a Game 6 back in Phoenix, Barkley quipped, “Ain’t gonna be no riot in this town tonight!”

Another memory: The Suns’ first-round playoff opponent in 1994 was Golden State. With Phoenix ahead 2-0 in the best-of-five series, it swung to Oakland in Game 3. I had gotten to know Charles fairly well. My children’s elementary school was having a major fund-raising drive. Before the game, I asked him if it would be possible to get his shoes from the game for the auction. “Sure, just come by after the game,” he said. As luck would have it, Barkley was unstoppable that night, sinking 23 of 31 shots while scoring a career-high 56 points, at the time third-most ever scored in a playoff game. After the post-game press conference, I followed Charles to the visitors’ locker room, and he handed me the shoes. Charles has the game ball from that memorable experience; hopefully, somebody in Portland has the shoes displayed in their den.

I’m not sure how much of a basketball fan Bella is. For instance, he refers to former Portlander Frank Brickowski, a 6-9, 245-pound bruiser who patrolled NBA backboards from 1984-97, as a “Milwaukee guard.” Over 440 pages, however, the author provides a comprehensive look at Barkley’s life and career, warts and all.

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Out of the Darkness

By Ian O’Connor

Mariner Books (2024)

The subtitle is “The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” which seems appropriate. Rodgers is a living, breathing paradox, at once kind, thoughtful and generous, but also capable of being overbearing, disingenuous and difficult.

I got to know O’Connor while covering the NBA in the ‘90s and have always respected his work as an author and a New York newspaper columnist. I have read three of his other books — on Mike Krzyzewski, Bill Belichick and former Trail Blazer point guard Sebastian Telfair. The former two, in particular, were excellent reads.

O’Connor calls the book unauthorized, but Rodgers did cooperate, granting an interview. The author visited the veteran NFL quarterback at his $28 million Malibu home this past February. (Rodgers was wearing a tank top carrying the name of “Homecourt Pizza,” the business that sponsored his team to a state AAU title when he was in sixth grade. Rodgers lived in Beaverton from fifth to seventh grade. Homecourt Pizza has since closed its doors.)

Rodgers did not try to prevent friends from talking with O’Connor, who conducted 250 interviews for the book, including with Rodgers’ parents, to whom he has been estranged for the past nine years. The author oddly seemed to serve almost as an intermediary in the relationship, talking to both sides about it and perhaps helping draw the quarterback closer to a reconciliation his parents desperately want.

The book provides plenty of insight into Rodgers’ remarkable rise from a small-town kid from Chico, Calif., and Butte JC 15 miles down the road to the pinnacle as a Super Bowl champion and four-time NFL MVP.

Rodgers could be rough on friends and family, exiling them to “the island” if he felt they had done him wrong. O’Connor talked to several who were jettisoned there, including Aaron’s parents and two brothers, to whom he is also estranged. The two hardest words for Rodgers to utter throughout his life, O’Connor writes, have been “I’m sorry.”

But Rodgers is super intelligent, clever and funny, the author writes, displaying many examples of such traits. Rodgers is obsessively driven to achieve goals, including recovery from an Achilles tendon injury that laid him up for all but four plays of what was to be comeback season with the New York Jets in 2023.

Even on crutches, Rodgers was the Jets’ team leader last season, voted by his teammates as most inspirational at season’s end. He worked his ass off to get ready for the 2024 campaign, a tribute to his perseverance and dedication to his craft.

The book is full of great anecdotes and inside information on one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. For state-of-Oregon readers, there is plenty of good stuff about his time as a youth in Beaverton. It is a very good read.

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Long Time Coming: A Black Athlete’s Coming of Age in America

By Chet Walker with Chris Messenger

Grove Press (1995)

Former NBA player Dave Gambee gave me this book to read, written by his one-time teammate, the great forward of the Philadelphia 76ers and Chicago Bulls. Walker, who died in June at age 84, had given Gambee the book he wrote nearly 30 years ago.

Reading it today, it’s amazing how much of what he writes resonates with today’s NBA, and really, with today’s world. He talks about how different the NBA and society were in the ‘90s compared to the era of his coming of age as an adult in the ‘60s. He speaks of gains in racial equality but continued frustration with racism. He notes the incredible amount of money players were getting in the era of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley next to the comparably meager salaries of players of an earlier era.

The youngest of 10 children raised primarily by their mother, Regenia Walker, Chet spent his first 10 years in Mississippi, then moved to Michigan with his mother to flee the racist south of the ’50s. Basketball was his way out of poverty. “The Jet” played collegiately at Bradley, led the Braves to the NIT championship as a sophomore and wound up being the school’s career scoring leader and a two-time consensus first-team All-American.

Walker was a seven-time All-Star in his 13-year career, a starter and star on the Philadelphia team that went 68-13 and won the NBA championship in 1966-67. He had his best individual seasons and was more well-known for his final six years in the league with the Bulls, playing opposite Bob “Butterbean” Love at forward and with Jerry Sloan and Norm Van Lier in the backcourt. Walker’s teams made the playoffs every season through a career in which his averages in the regular season and playoffs were nearly identical — 18.2 points and 7.1 rebounds in the former to 18.2 points and 7.0 boards in the latter. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012.

In his memoir, Walker doesn’t dwell much on his stats or on-court accomplishments. The first in his family to graduate from college, he talks about the strong effect his mother — and the absence of his father — played in his life. There is great depth in his words as he talks about the indignities he suffered as a boy in the South, of the kindness of people of both black and white races in his life, on his interest (and eventual decision for non-affiliation) with the Black Muslims and Black Panthers in the ‘60s despite sharing some of their beliefs. He was a strong supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and participated in much civil rights work. Walker was among the pioneers who joined Oscar Robertson in the lawsuit that eventually won NBA players the right for free agency.

Chet never married nor had children, though he speaks with remorse of an abortion by a girlfriend of his during his NBA playing days. I sensed a sadness in his thoughts; a pride in what he accomplished, but a yearning to have been able to do more off the court for his race, and for mankind.

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Summer of ’49

By David Halberstam

HarperPerennial (1989)

David Halberstam delivered wonderful prose. He could write about watching paint dry on a wall and find a way to make it interesting. So when I saw this book on a shelf at Barnes & Noble, I went for it.

Halberstam, who died in 2007 at age 83, won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1964 and was well-known as a historian and political journalist, but later in his career he turned to sports. In 1981, he wrote “Breaks of the Game,” chronicling the 1979-80 season for the post-Bill Walton Trail Blazers. Nearly a decade later came “Summer of ’49,” a look at the Boston Red Sox of Ted Williams and the New York Yankees of Joe DiMaggio and their race to the American League pennant.

The subject intrigued Halberstam because he had been a 15-year-old Yankee fan who followed the club since he was five and faithfully listened to Mel Allen calling games on the radio.

“Forty years later, when I decided to do this book, I was meeting men I had once admired as heroes,” Halberstam writes. “As I interviewed them, I saw them as mortals — 70-year-old mortals at that.”

The only player who declined an interview with Halberstam was DiMaggio, maintaining an aloofness he carried through the rest of his life.

It was a much different world in 1949, only four years beyond the end of World War II. Television was in its infancy. The newspaper was king. Free agency was still a quarter-century away. Tightwad owners kept player salaries at barely living wage, though DiMaggio was paid $100,000 that season, becoming the first player ever with a six-figure salary.

“But slowly, the old order was changing,” he writes. “Television was making everyone richer and it was turning the players into personalities. … soon they began to establish identities that removed them somewhat before the reach of management.”

DiMaggio and Williams were the game’s biggest stars, the “Yankee Clipper” nearing the end of his career, the “Splendid Splinter” at the middle of his. Halberstam writes eloquently about each, but also about the teams’ complementary players, Yankee broadcasters Allen and Curt Gowdy and even the print media of the day who covered the two teams.

Williams had an adversarial relationship with the Boston media and, in fact, with the Red Sox fans. Dave Egan of the Boston Record was partially responsible. He was relentlessly critical of Williams’ play — however impossible that seems. I found it interesting that Egan’s personal life was less than perfect.

“Egan was often too drunk to write his column,” Halberstam writes, conjuring memories of a sportswriter I worked with early in my newspaper career. Sometimes the writer would come back to the office very late after a game — clearly having made a pub stop in between — and beckon a part-timer to “be my fingers tonight” as he dictated his story.

Perhaps taking a cue from Egan and others, Boston fans were rough on Williams, who chose to take it personally.

“Williams refused the most basic courtesy of the era — to tip his cap after a home run,” Halberstam writes. “DiMaggio had the hat-tip down perfectly. He did it lightly and deftly, without looking up, as he moved past home plate toward the dugout. He never broke stride, thus satisfying the fans without showing up an opposing pitcher.”

Halberstam writes about intrinsic differences between the teams’ star players.

“Williams intellectualized the game far more than DiMaggio did,” he writes. “This is not to diminish DiMaggio’s own considerable powers of analysis, but a moment would come when he simply played. Williams never stopped thinking, analyzing. The methodological difference led to some practical differences — for instance, over the issue of whether to take certain pitches. Williams would never, no matter what the situation, go for a pitch that was even a shade outside the strike zone. “DiMaggio was different. He believed that, as a power hitter on the team, he sometimes had an obligation to swing at imperfect pitches. On certain occasions a walk was not enough; it was a victory for the pitcher. Williams understood DiMaggio’s point, but felt that if, even under duress, he swung at what he thought was a bad ball, that it might cause deterioration of his batting eye. It was all or nothing. For him to swing at any bad ball was a victory for the pitcher.”

Joe’s younger brother Dom was centerfielder of the Red Sox and a terrific player in his own right. The smaller (5-9, 170) bespectacled seven-time All-Star hit .307 and scored 126 runs that season. The brothers, children of Sicilian immigrants, were raised of good stock.

“The fame that came to engulf her children somewhat perplexed Rosalia DiMaggio,” Halberstam writes. “She was pleased that they did well, but it was more important to her that they were respected as men, not just as players. She was, thought Dominic, a wonderful, old-fashioned woman of immense strength, yet she never raised her voice. She was guided by an unshakable religious faith. She told her children stories from the Bible, all with a proverb, all with a purpose. She constantly set standards of behavior that they were to live up to.”

Willams won the AL MVP award that season, but the Yankees won 97 games and edged the Red Sox by a game for the pennant. Baseball fans who like reading about the game’s lore will lap this one up.

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