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5 basketball books for NBA fans

Here are excerpts from five recent books about professional basketball and its players, ranging from a mega-biography of Michael Jordan to a behind-the-scenes look at the Magic Johnson-era "Showtime" Los Angeles Lakers.

4. "Dr. J: The Autobiography"

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Julius Erving with Karl Taro Greenfeld
HarperCollins
431 pages

"They talk about how I transformed the horizontal game and made it into a vertical game. But that was bound to happen at some point. While I am studying for my [college] degree [while playing in the NBA], I read about Martin Luther and the demands he nailed to the church door in Germany. One of the points the author made is that eventually someone was going to start the Reformation; it just happened to be Martin Luther. The tides of history were moving that way. Does that diminish Martin Luther's achievements?

"I'm not comparing myself to the great German monk.

"But basketball was moving in a certain direction. The playground game was coming indoors. Connie Hawkins and Elgin Baylor were transforming the sport, taking it airborne. What I was doing was simply refining the new version of the game we were all playing. It was going to happen eventually. I am just the player who nailed it."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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