One of the first things you see when you walk onto ESPN’s campus in Bristol, Connecticut, is the famous quote of Nelson Mandela about the power of sports.
“Sport has the power to change the world,” it reads. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
What it leaves off are the words of Mandela that followed: “It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.”
For those of us who have made a living telling sports stories, stories of and about sports, and documenting the careers and lives of some of the people who have given sports that power, rare are there moments like the one we happen to be in. Especially in the sport of basketball. Especially in America.
See, the game is having a moment. In words, in print, in literature. Seven books entered the ecosystem all at the same time. ‘‘Fly’’ by Mitchell S. Jackson; ‘‘Magic: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson’’ by Roland Lazenby; ‘‘Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan’’ by Johnny Smith; ‘‘A History of Basketball in Fifteen Sneakers’’ by Russ Bengtson; ‘‘Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High!’’ by Bobbito Garcia with Estefania Rivera Cortés; ‘‘Lucky Me’’ by Rich Paul with Jesse Washington; and ‘‘ICE: Why I Was Born To Score’’ by George Gervin with (lucky) me.
My luck came with a phone call two years ago. “Ice wants to know if you’d like to help tell his story?” Being 30 years deep into a writing career still doesn’t prepare you for a call like that. I’m sure Washington felt the same way when John Thompson called him to co-pen his autobiography, the masterful ‘‘I Came As a Shadow’’ or when Jackson got the call that he’d won the Pulitzer for his “Twelve Minutes and a Life” story on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Those calls internally validate and humble you in ways that are almost impossible to explain.
The journey I was able to take with Gervin on his life story is one that I can only wish sinks into others who read the pages that make up his life. How there’s not much difference in his life than the life Rich Paul talks about in being a lucky one. The warmth, the sensitivities. The story of young black kids for two totally different eras trapped in circumstances they were not supposed to survive but how — in totally different ways — this game of ball saved them. The rarity is that basketball stories on the whole don’t get told in this way: not all at once, not in this intrasport range of subject matter (from fashion to biographies to sneakers to business to memoirs), not in the higher-elevated form of storytelling as books.
This might be one of those occasions in sports that if someone wasn’t paying attention, it would have been missed. One of those “if this goes unacknowledged or not publicly recognized, the moment really doesn’t exist” moments. Even while the world is watching it happen. Sports is powerful but it’s very easy to be invisible in it. Especially on this side of it. But in this case, the blessing is not in the acknowledgement, it’s in the books themselves. In details of Lazenby’s 778 pages on Magic, in the research Smith put into writing the world’s 100th or so book on Jordan to still find stories untold and theories untapped. It’s Bengtson’s ingenuity of incorporating sneaker culture into the entire history of the game in a way that has never been done before, and Garcia’s and Cortés’ beautiful blend of illustration and words in telling the aspirational journey of every kid who touched a basketball. It’s of the other S. Jackson finding the most brilliant way of fusing the aesthetics of appearance with the significance of basketball and those who shape and define the game — and explaining to us why they mean so much to us. So neurotically, inherently, necessarily much.
The moment feels like being in a cultural basketball capsule. A space to begin the season where the history of the game is frozen in the form of words being presented for those who the game is their lives to stop for a second and just breathe another part of the game back into our lives. A namaste before we go back to our regularly scheduled daily programming of LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Luka Doncic and flipping channels on League Pass. And to be a part of a collective that happens to be doing that in this moment, well, it kinda makes Madiba’s words, especially for many of the young brothas out here who don’t pick up books too often, ring a little louder.
