Bill Walton on David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game”
The Press Box
The Ringer
4.4 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2021
⏱️ 66 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and |
| 0:07.6 | Interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore black on the air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. |
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| 0:45.4 | Hello media consumers Brian Curtis of the ringer here. This is the press box podcast. My partner David Schumacher is on assignment today. |
| 1:01.5 | Now from time to time we do podcasts about what I call the great books meaning great nonfiction books. |
| 1:07.5 | We got John Crack hour on the podcast in January to talk about into the wild. And since we're in the middle of the NBA finals, |
| 1:14.3 | I wanted to revisit an NBA book. The NBA book you might say it's the breaks of the game by David Halberstam. |
| 1:22.2 | Now the breaks of the game is about the 1979 1980 Portland Trailblazers. A blazer's team that won the NBA title with their center Bill Walton three years before. |
| 1:31.4 | But when Halberstam found them, they had lost their mojo. But this is David Halberstam we're talking about. |
| 1:37.2 | He wanted to do something way more ambitious than your usual season with a team book. So he starts out with this big swaggering Halberstamian thesis about how the NBA is in decline. |
| 1:48.3 | And even more interesting is all the reporting he did writes a lot about race in the NBA. He's very good on the relationships between the players. |
| 1:56.5 | What he called the collision of humanity. But the most striking thing about the breaks of the game is the writing Halberstam's passages about the lives of Blazers players like Kermit Washington and Billy Roy. |
| 2:07.2 | Ray Bates are among the best sports profiles I've ever read. They show Halberstam's ability to get close to players and their families and then just write the hill out of the material. |
| 2:18.1 | So I wouldn't understand what being interviewed by David Halberstam was like. Halberstam died in a car accident in 2007. |
| 2:25.3 | So I brought in Bill Walton who was the center of that championship Portland Trailblazers team. |
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