Summer 2024 Book Reviews
(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.)
By Jack McCallum
Hachette Books (2024)
The protagonist of this book is former NBA great Oscar Robertson, but it’s not an Oscar biography. It’s as much a sociological look and primer on African-American history and racism in Indiana in the 1950s and beyond.
With an all-black lineup, Crispus Attucks High won back-to-back state championships in the mid-‘50s behind the stellar play of Robertson, who would go on to a Hall-of-Fame career as a player and notoriety as the leader of the anti-trust suit that led to free agency in pro basketball.
Jack McCallum covers a lot of ground in this book, which is enjoyable to read on a lot of levels. There is plenty on the early life of “the Big O,” but he provides much information, too, on Milan High, the small-town team that was inspirational for the fabled sports movie “Hoosiers” and intersected with Oscar’s run at Crispus Attucks.
Initially, the author’s intent was a different focus altogether.
“It started out as another book — on Marion (Ind.), which had won an Indiana state championship (in the 1920s) and, four years later, there was a lynching,” says McCallum, who lives in Bethlehem, Pa., 60 miles from Philadelphia. “I started out thinking, ‘What a great book that would be.’ Then as I thought about it, it seemed too ugly of a subject.”
So McCallum veered toward Crispus Attucks.
“More in my wheelhouse,” McCallum tells me. “I knew Oscar. I grew up in the 1950s. It seemed like a better fit. I didn’t know everything. I had to find it out as I went. I knew vaguely that they had won two state championships. But the more I looked into it, I was intrigued with the underpinnings of the Indianapolis school system, which reflected the way it is today (with) the scare of a minority overtaking America.”
McCallum, 75, is retired after a long, distinguished career as NBA writer for Sports Illustrated. Our paths crossed many times in the 1990s and 2000s. I have always appreciated his friendly demeanor, his quick wit and his evocative and provocative writing style. Robertson turned down Jack’s request to cooperate for the book, which didn’t surprise him.
“I had been through it before,” McCallum says. “I talked to him a number of years ago for a ‘Where Are They Now?’ piece, and he wasn’t real cooperative.”
McCallum said Robertson had “some ancient argument” with Sports Illustrated — a la Michael Jordan -- but also may have had in mind a story he had recently written for SI.com about Robertson’s role in the Robertson v. NBA lawsuit.
“I ran into a roadblock with his daughter, who seems to think that I have some kind of agenda,” McCallum says. “I had no agenda at all about Oscar. I admire the man. It was a totally positive story about him, which I included in my emails to them.”
Writing an unauthorized book is a mixed blessing. You don’t have direct input from the subject, but you’re also not bound by his words or desires.
“I wasn’t altogether disappointed,” McCallum says. “It was kind of OK. I didn’t want to write a biography. When you talk to one person, you are saying everything has to be focused through him. It was kind of OK. My job with SI was always to get people. Did I feel guilty about it? Yes, I did. But I don’t think it hurt the book.”
Of the six high school teammates of Robertson still alive, McCallum interviewed five. He also had ample time with Bobby Plump, the star of the Milan team that not only won the 1954 Indiana state title, but beat Crispus Attucks in the semifinals along the way. McCallum wrote a full chapter on the legendary team from the tiny Indiana town.
Jack is friends with Angelo Pizzo, the screenwriter for “Hoosiers.”
Says McCallum: “Angelo emailed me and said, ‘I haven’t read your book yet. I’m hoping by the title it’s not a trashing of the movie.’ I told him, ‘No, it isn’t, but the only chapter I’m sure people will read is the one about Milan. You’d have to mess that up not to be interesting.’ ”
The reader is well-backgrounded on Robertson’s upbringing in Indianapolis and the state championship run as a senior. We learn that even then, Oscar was extremely confident in his abilities, but rather than drift into cockiness, he carried himself with a quiet elegance.
McCallum seemingly spent many hours going through newspaper files in library morgues and via the Internet to get as much perspective and context as possible. It is delivered in McCallum’s typical conversational tone, easy to read and enjoy.
There are numerous footnotes by which Jack uses his sardonic humor.
This about the “Hoosiers” film: “The movie almost had a different title. The studio hated Hoosiers because it was convinced it would limit international sales. What? They don’t know about torn-off ears in Paris? The higher-ups wanted ‘The Last Shot.’ But after the movie scored astronomically high at its first test screening, the head of Orion Pictures told (the screenwriters), ‘OK, you can have your damn title.’ In subsequent cocktail parties, the exec no doubt took credit for the name.”
Describing rival Muncie’s gym, McCallum writes that it was a setting for community events and “big-time acts like the Globetrotters, the Supremes and Abbott and Costello.” He adds: “You could barely fit all three Supremes in the Attucks gym, and you definitely couldn’t if you added Costello.”
Of one of Indiana’s early prep stars, Homer Stonebraker: “He once scored 80 points in a 108-8 victory, which we can safely classify as pouring it on.”
Jack displayed an eye for detail, as in noticing on a YouTube film of the 1956 championship game the players and coaches convening for a post-game team photo. He writes, “The camera catches the team walking off and settles for a moment on the face of Oscar, a vision of youth. He smiles widely, a smile that will come less and less frequently as the years go by, replaced by a wary countenance.”
McCallum goes off on tangents to provide background information on all the main characters and even some secondary ones. Did he have fun with all of this?
“I did,” he says. “In its review of the book, The Washington Post said, ‘McCallum had a lot of digressions there.’ I’m not a historian. I don’t have the bonafides to be a person who has written about black culture my entire career.
“In covering the NBA, there is always an undercurrent of race. That’s something you deal with. But I didn’t want to be a professor on a high horse. I did digressions into music and culture to say, ‘This is who I really am. This isn’t an academic track.’ ”
Did McCallum expect to write so much about Indiana’s African-American history and racism in the state?
“No,” he says. “People have liked the book, but a couple of reviews said (the emphasis on that) was too much. I became enamored of it. The first thing I saw in my reporting at Crispus Attucks were the pictures on the wall of the graduating classes through the years — almost entirely African-Americans from as far back as 1928.
“That stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Everybody knew they won two state championships. Their senior year, there was never a game when they were touched. In place of writing about games, I decided to do the history. Whether it’s too much (about race) or not, I will leave it to people’s discretion.”
McCallum talks about biased referees of the era and writes that “race-based officiating remained a problem at all levels of basketball for a long, long time, and who can say it’s been eradicated?” He skewers racists such as the long-time executive director of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, Arthur Trester, whom he calls a “tinhorn dictator” and adds, “There are no tinhorn dictators so tinhorn as the tinhorns who run amateur athletic associations.”
Did Jack receive any reaction from Oscar or his family about the book?
“None, but I didn’t expect any,” he says. “What I was most fearful of was that, after the book came out, the reaction from Oscar would be, ‘I didn’t know he was writing this. Why didn’t he call me?’ ”
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Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose
Keith O’Brien (2024)
Pantheon Books
Many books have been written about Pete Rose, most of them by Pete himself, including one also titled “Charlie Hustle” in 1975, when he was in the midst of a 24-year playing career.
I’m sure none, however, are as comprehensive, detailed and balanced as O’Brien’s new book on baseball’s hit king.
The author is a Cincinnati native, having grown up during the time when Rose was at the peak of his playing career with the Reds. To get the complete story, O’Brien went through thousands of pages of federal court documents and newly released FBI files. He writes that he conducted more than 150 hours of interviews with Pete’s friends, teammates and family members, two former MLB commissioners, four private investigators and special counsel John Dowd, the man who brought Rose to his knees with a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball for gambling in 1989.
O’Brien had the best of both worlds in delivering what is probably the ultimate Pete Rose book. Pete had never spoken to an author writing a biography about him unless he had editorial control of the project. O’Brien says he had 27 hours worth of interviews over four days with Rose before Pete decided he wanted nothing to do with the project.
The author takes us from the beginning with the tough, dominant presence of his father, “Big Pete,” a noted semipro athlete in Cincinnati. Pete was small and other boys called him “Pee Wee,” but like his dad he was a scrappy, hustling athlete. He signed with the Reds for $7,000 out of high school in 1960, starting in the low minor leagues but advancing to the big leagues in 1963, winning National League Rookie of the Year honors by hitting .273 with 170 hits in 157 games.
Rose would go on to a career in which he hit .303 and set the career MLB record with 4,256 hits. He was a 17-time All-Star, the 1973 MVP and played on six World Series teams, winning three. Rose was named to the heralded MLB All-Century Team in 2000, but has not made what he wants the most — baseball’s Hall of Fame.
O’Brien pulls no punches in revealing Rose’s character.
Pete married Karolyn in 1964 and had two children. They were divorced in 1980 after a paternity suit named him the father of a child born to his mistress. For a while when he was still married to Karolyn, he was cheating on his mistress with another woman.
Pete married his second wife, Carol, in 1984, and they had two children. While separated from Carol, he had an open relationship with a Playboy model. All the while, Pete was brazen and careless with his personal life. At games with the Reds and Phillies, Pete would have a wife and a girlfriend seated in the stands not far from each other. There was evidence that at one point in the ‘70s he had a sexual relationship for several years with an underage girl. Many years later, she sued and the issue was settled out of court.
Quoted was a former mistress, Terry Rubio: “Pete loves two things, wholeheartedly. Pete and baseball.”
Then there was the gambling. Pete had always had an interest in the horses, and later the greyhounds and jai alai. Then he got into sports betting, gambling with bookies on a variety of sports, including baseball. By 1984, “he had graduated from placing bets with friendly West Side bookies … to hanging around shady, small-time mobsters and established East Coast criminals.”
Rose had accomplices handle much of the betting for him, including Tommy Gioiosa, who moved in with him when he was teenager after Pete’s first divorce. Tommy would eventually serve a prison term for tax evasion and conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Gioiosa wouldn’t turn state’s evidence, but associates Paul Janszen and Ron Peters would. Rose, who became Cincinnati’s manager in 1983, was forced to resign in 1989 with rumors of his gambling swirling and an MLB investigation ensuing. For betting on baseball, including his own team, NL president Bart Giamatti permanently barred him from MLB in 1990. He has been denied reinstatement several times since then.
Rose served five months in prison in 1990 for filing false income tax reports. He was required to pay $366,000 in back taxes and interest and perform 1,000 hours of community service.
For 15 years, Pete denied he had bet on baseball. Then in his book “My Prison Without Bars,” he confessed, but contended that he never bet against his team. Still, Rose has never appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, and at 83, the time for it to happen during his lifetime is growing short.
It’s too bad. O’Brien puts his life into context. He was a good teammate, clutch player, an all-time competitor who welcomed young players, including several black teammates. He had a likable, engaging personality, but also a reckless irresponsibility that tainted his legacy and turned his life into a Greek tragedy.
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Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski
By Ian O’Connor
HarperCollins (2022)
Mikę Krzyżewski has written at least four books, mostly of the instructional variety with coaching strategies and leadership tips and motivational essays. And there have been at least a couple about college basketball’s winningest coach and his Duke Blue Devils.
I didn’t read any of them, but can’t imagine any were as compelling or more complete than Ian O’Connor’s unauthorized biography, published the year “Coach K” retired at age 75 after 42 years at the Blue Devil helm and 47 seasons as a Division I head coach.
Krzyzewski didn’t cooperate with the book, but also didn’t try to persuade friends and family from being interviewed by O’Connor, the veteran sports columnist for the New York Post whom I’ve known since the ‘90s (He once wrote a book on ex-Trail Blazer guard Sebastian Telfair).
The result was a balanced appraisal of Krzyzewski’s life and career, going inside to talk about his many kindnesses as well as character flaws. He roughed up his players mercilessly at times — though not as badly as his mentor, Bobby Knight — but loved them more. He treated team managers as fully invested members of the Duke program and introduced arena custodians to his players so they knew their first names.
He ran his teams like an Army boot camp — he played at West Point and coached there his first five years as a head coach — and he could be a bully. One season, Coach K met with members of the sports staff of the Duke school newspaper, The Chronicle, because he didn’t like the individual grades one of its writers gave his players. While he was screaming at a writer — not the one who penned the story — the writer had wired himself to tape the conversation. Coach K went on a profane eight-minute rant that was recorded (The writer said later he thought the coach was going to slap him). The paper wrote explicitly about his tirade and it got picked up by professional papers and TV networks throughout the country, backfiring on the coach.
O’Connor emphasized the importance of Mike’s wife, Mickey, who was almost like a co-coach. She even acted as a buffer with the players when her husband was in a foul mood. One day she spoke to players without her husband around and said, “All right, guys, listen up. You’re going to have a rough one today. I need you to know that you’re going to get through it, and that he loves you. But you guys are going to have a rough one, so buckle up and be prepared.”
When Mike was stationed in South Korea for a military commitment shortly after college, family members were barred from visiting. Mickey and their infant daughter made an unauthorized trip from Virginia and secretly stayed in a supply room for nearly three months. They pulled it off.
The book talked about his rivalry with North Carolina’s Dean Smith, which turned out somewhat good in the end, and his relationship with Knight, which turned out badly. There was jealousy toward one of his former players when he was an assistant, Quin Snyder, now head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. Said one player: “I saw tension between them. K snapped at Quin more than any coach or player combined, and when he did it, it felt personal.”
At Duke, Coach K had a history of struggling with apologies. He couldn’t simply tell someone “I was wrong” without quickly adding “but you were wrong, too.” In a job that often demanded that he be critical of others, the coach was not particularly good at accepting criticism.
There is an interesting anecdote involving Oregon. When the Ducks beat Duke 82-68 in the 2016 Sweet Sixteen, Dillon Brooks launched a 3 that went down in the closing seconds. That irritated Krzyzewski enough that he sought Brooks out in the post-game handshake line and said, “You’re too good a player to do that.”
When asked about it afterward, Coach K lied and said he just congratulated him, but Brooks told the media what he had said. When TV replays surfaced and confirmed Brooks’ account, Coach K was forced to say he had “reacted incorrectly” to the reporter’s question about Brooks and offered a half-hearted apology.
But the coach’s triumphs far outweighed any weaknesses. His organizational structure, game knowledge and competitiveness were at such a high level, he could have written a book about it — which he did several times.
There is plenty of background provided and stories related from Krzyzewski’s extensive time coaching the U.S. national team. From 2008-16, his teams won three Olympic gold medals as well as a gold at the 2010 World Championships and 2014 World Cup.
That, along with a record 1,202 victories and five national collegiate championships, qualifies him as the greatest basketball coach in history. It would seem that O’Connor treats his subject with respect and fairness but not reverence, which helped make it a very good read.
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By Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon
Gallery Books
Sad. Inspiring. Troubling.
Those are the adjectives that first come to mind while reading Kara Goucher’s memoir.
Goucher is the distance runner who was a two-time Olympian and World Championships silver medalist, living and training in Portland from 2004-11 while being coached by Alberto Salazar with the Nike Oregon Project group. In 2021, Salazar was permanently banned by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee for doping offenses with his athletes and also violations involving emotional and sexual misconduct.
Goucher was at the center of that. For years, she writes in the book, she endured the abuse with little or no protest, protecting her Nike contract while clinging to the belief that Salazar had her best interest in mind. The coach stepped over the boundary enough times — including a couple of instances of sexual abuse — to help convince her to lead the way in exposing Salazar’s cheating and misconduct.
I interviewed Goucher a couple of times during her peak years as a runner. Her career story is a good one. Her father was killed by a drunk driver when she was four, and she had issues with her stepfather. Running was her saving grace. Goucher was an NCAA champion at Colorado but really came on after she moved to Portland and joined NOP, becoming world class in the 10,000 meters and marathon.
Kara wanted to stay clean, wants her sport to be clean, and has been a leading proponents of developing guard rails to prevent performance-enhancing drugs from taking over international track and field. Her book reflects the strength she found to battle two behemoths (Nike, which stood behind Salazar until the final USOPC ruling, and Salazar himself) and quelled the inner demons that tormented her for years.
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