In Praise of Pickup Basketball

"We go to the playground in search of our fathers. We didn’t find them but we found a game and the game served as a daddy of sorts,” the novelist John Edgar Wideman wrote in his book Hoop Roots. This quote is a fitting epigraph for Thomas Beller’s Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball, a nonfiction collection of essays by a New York City kid who lost his father at the age of nine and found meaning and lessons on manhood through the sport. Lost in the Game includes several humorous, psychologically probing profiles of the NBA’s biggest luminaries—Kyrie Irving of the Dallas Mavericks, Anthony Davis of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans, to name but a few—but also of some of its obscure, near-forgotten players, like Bol Bol of the Orlando Magic and Kerry Kittles, a pre-Brooklyn New Jersey Net.