However, once I opened up the book and actually began to read through it I was quickly won over because of the passion Christopher Bibey has for the game despite all of the adversity he has faced in his playing career.

The biggest road block that Bibey faced during his playing career was being diagnosed with cancer during his freshman year of college. Most young men will throw up their hands in frustration and quit when life throws them an obstacle like this but instead Bibey used the life skills that basketball had been teaching him to beat cancer and he used this tough situation to build persistence, determination and devotion in his life. Bibey did a great job of informing readers about the countless road blocks that coaches and life threw at him during his playing career and how instead of getting bitter or quitting he used these events to toughen his resolve and make him a stronger player and a better person.

Throughout this book Bibey did a great job of showing how attributes like persistence, determination and devotion that are learned on the hardwood can transfer to other areas of your life like dealing with getting dumped by the hot girl you’ve been dating, not getting the promotion you want at work or any of the countless hurdles that life can throw your way.

Another reason why I was fan of this book was because Bibey did a great job of addressing the mental aspect of basketball. When I was at university one of my favourite course was Sport Psychology so I was stoked to see that Bibey addressed this topic in a chapter called “Mind and Body.” Far too often fans think that the best athletes make the NBA but they fail to realize that the mental aspect of the game is just as important. In this chapter Bibey did a great job of breaking down some ways that he overcame a lack of physical ability to have a success playing career because of his mental preparation prior to games, he explains the important role visualization had in his training and preparation for games and he did a great job of explaining to readers the struggles he faced getting his body to reawaken following his cancer treatments. I could relate to him being a player that overcame physical limitations so he became symbolic to me of a “basketball underdog” and as I read through his book I couldn’t help but root for him.

Something else I enjoyed while reading reading this book were the quotes from college coaches about what they look for in recruits and their perspective on how the game of basketball has changed their lives. Arizona Wildcats head coach Lute Olson provided the forward for the book and throughout the book there quotes from other college coaches like Bill Lilly from West Virginia Wesleyan, Ron Slaymaker from Emporia State University, Scott Lang from La Roche college and Paul Hogan from New Hampshire Tech. Bibey was able to collect some great insight into how basketball has changed these coaches lives, what they enjoy most about basketball and how they motivate their players.

Besides being a heart warming story because he was able to beat cancer and play NCAA basketball following his fight with cancer, this story is a must read for any teen that loves the game of basketball because it shows that road blocks can be a hidden blessing because they can help you grow as a player and a person if you approach adversity with the right perspective.

Some of the topics we cover during this interview include:

• What motivated him to write about all of the Game 7’s that have occurred in the history of the NBA?
• What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book?
• What has been the most rewarding part of writing this book?
• What were some of the struggles that you faced while trying to get this book published?
• There were two quotes by Rick Fox on Kobe Bryant that explained how Bryant rubbed some teammates the wrong way early in his career and I had Bill talk about these quotes and why he chose to include them in his book.
• In a chapter called “Duel At The Garden” he talked about Dominique Wilkins being one of the greatest players of his era yet not getting all the credit he deserved because he never won a championship so I asked Bill if he thought that Vince Carter is this generation’s version of Wilkins.
• As of the 2006 season 96 playoff series were decided by a game seven. So far in the NBA playoffs only the Utah-Houston opening round series has gone seven games so I had Bill talk about if he were to include this series in the next release of your book what he would write about.

Click here to listen to this Hoops Addict Podcast.

Some of the topics that we covered during our chat include:

• Why he choose to write a book about coaches
• What it was like to get some of his favourite writers to contribute to this book
• My favourite chapter in his book was the one that Frank Deford wrote on Al McGuire. Andrew gives listeners some insight into this chapter and why he included it even though he grew up as a Notre Dame fan
• One of the more interesting chapters was chapter written by Jane Leavy called “Coaching Bob” that deals with a woman being a “death coach” to a man. Andrew tells listeners a about this chapter and explains how this article found it’s way into the book about sports.

Click here to listen to this Hoops Addict Podcast.

This Hoops Addict Podcast is a gem because I was able to get Adrian Wojnarowski on the show to talk about his national best seller “The Miracle of St Anthony.” Adrian writes for Yahoo Sports and his book “The Miracle of St. Anthony” is a national best seller.

For his book Adrian chronicled a year in the St Anthony basketball program and he is able to provide readers with some great insight into Coach Hurley’s program and all of the struggles that the coach and players faced that season. As a basketball coach I loved reading this book because it gave me some great insight into one of the best high school coaches of all-time. Coach Hurley has won 22 state championships, two USA TODAY national titles and has an amazing 847-97 at a school with no home gym and a student enrollment under 300.

During this interview Adrian chatted with me about how he was given permission to document the team, some of his favourite memories of documenting the team for a season and he talked about some of his favourite players on the team.

Click here to listen to the interview with Adrian Wojnarowski.

This winter I had the chance to read “Ball Don’t Lie” by Matt de la Pena and it instantly become one of my favourite books. The development of Sticky was so riveting that I found myself staying up past midnight reading it because I couldn’t put the book down and I found myself rooting him on despite all of his personality quirks. If you haven’t had a chance to read this book make sure you head out to your local bookstore this weekend and pick up a copy of this classic novel.

A couple months ago I was lucky enough to chat with Matt for 30 minutes about his book and the upcoming movie based on his novel. Because of the shift from 360ThePitch.com to MVN.com I’ve had to repost some of my older podcasts and I thought this would be a good time to repost one of my favourite interviews.

Some of the topics we covered were;

* What it’s like to have Grayson “The Professor” Boucher, Sharon Stone and hottie Taryn Manning sign up to be part of this movie
* He talked about playing against Steve Nash while he was on a hoops scholarship at Pacific
* We talked about what it was like to go from being a starving writer for four years to having his book picked up by a publishing company and the rights to his movie picked up all within six months
* He talked about what it’s like to have NBA stars like Antawn Jamison write to him about being fans of his book

Matt provided some great answers to my questions and this is one of my favourite interviews that I’ve conducted for my Hoops Addict Podcast series. Bare with me as I stumble through some of my questions because Matt does a great job of throwing back some answers at me that will entertain and enlighten basketball fans.

To listen to this Hoops Addict Podcast click here.

Some of the topics I had the chance to chat with Rus about include;

- His reasons for writing this book and why he decided to spend a year coaching in Ireland
- Some of the rough conditions he endured playing at The Sports Complex in Ireland
- What it was like having to have a home game moved to the other teams home court
- What it was like to go from coaching in a country where basketball is one of the lead stories to somewhere like Ireland where game recaps were barely mentioned in the sports section
- Rus had the chance to coach alongside Lou Henson and that coach disliked cursing because it showed a lack of emotional control. Rus talked about frustrating was it to hear Kieran Donaghy drop the F bomb so often
- Some of the highs and lows of having Antoine Gillespie join and then leave the team midway through the season
- What it was like to train Earl Watson and Jerry West’s son when he returned to America
- In “Paddy on the Hardwood” Rus wrote about a desire to become a writer but as I read through his book it’s clear that coaching is still in his blood. We talked about if he has any intention to return to coaching

If you haven’t had a chance to check out a Hoops Addict Podcast then this is the perfect time to check one out. Besides the great insights Rus provides listening to this Podcast will give you the prefect excuse to pop open a can of Guinness while he talks about his experiences coaching in Ireland.

Click here to listen to this Hoops Addict Podcast.

This week I was able to chat with Christopher Bibey about his book “Open Your Heart With Basketball” and how his life changed after he was diagnosed with cancer during his freshman season of college basketball.

During this chat we also talked about what motivated him to write about all the highs and lows that he experienced while playing basketball, how his struggles as a basketball player in high school helped him build the character and perseverance that he needed to beat cancer, he explained how he was able to get Arizona Wildcats head coach Lute Olson to write the forward for his book and he talked about what he misses the most about playing competitive basketball.

Click here to listen to this Hoops Addict Podcast.

I was fortunate to be sent a copy of Mark Kriegel’s book “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich” to review on HoopsAddict.com and after picking it up Sunday afternoon and I wasn’t able to put the book down until I had devoured all 323 pages of this epic biography. Since I’m in my mid-20’s I wasn’t able to witness the genius of Pistol Pete firsthand so this book provided me some great insight into what shaped and transformed Pete into the basketball player he was and the amazing transformation that occurred in his personal life shortly after he retired from the NBA.

While reading through this biography it became painfully clear that being a celebrity and playing in the NBA isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Often while I’m watching an NBA game on television I’ll sit back and daydream about what it would be like to play in the NBA and the fame and money that comes along with that. However, after reading through this biography on Pistol Pete it seems that I’m grossly misinformed. Kriegel did a brilliant job of showing how Pete had a rough time during his first few years in the NBA while breaking colour barriers and living with the hype that came with being a rookie while being paid one of the highest contracts in the league. While reading about all the pressures he faced in balancing between entertaining fans with flashy passes and making the right choices on the court to earn playing time from his coaches or dishing out enough dimes to keep his teammates happy it’s no wonder that Pete struggled to find peace with the game of basketball. Instead of being able to enjoy his time while playing in the NBA it seems like Pistol Pete was always dealing with “ghost” that were sucking the fun out of the game and forcing him into bouts of depression.

One of the themes that sticks out from reading this book is the immense pressure to perform and how it began at a young age for Pete. His father, Press, placed an incredible amount of pressure on him when he was a grade eight student playing on the varsity team of his local high school. This pressure only increased when he was a high school senior when the media blitz first took hold and then increased when he grudgingly agreed to play for LSU when his dad forced him to play for the program after he signed on to be their coach. Instead of being able to get away from the pressures his dad placed on him as a teenager Pete was now forced to work day-to-day with the man who was his toughest critic but would tell anyone who would listen that Pete would make a million dollars playing in the NBA.

While Press was Pete’s biggest fan he was also his sons biggest hurdle. Kriegel talked about countless times when Pete turned in an awe-inspiring game but would be ripped by his father on the ride home for a handful of small mistakes that he made during the game. While his father was trying to help him improve it was these interactions that would make Pete become a perfectionist and force him to be unable to enjoy success at the college or pro level. Kriegel explained how the pressure was crashing in on Pete when he wrote:

To be sure, he drank because he was a college kid who liked to get high on beer. But he also drank for his father; Press’s hopes and expectations formed a cruel yoke around his thin neck. He drank for his mother, too, as they shared a burden in their blood. He drank because no matter how many points her scored, it would never be enough. Amid all this record-setting triumph, all that apparent joy, there was an undertow of grief. To watch Pete hoist a beer was to see a college kid having a good time. But too look in his eyes was to see the sadness in his soul.

Something else that stuck out while reading this book was the fact that Pete was always searching for something that would serve as his redemption. For most of his teens basketball served as his redemption but once politics and money began to corrupt and taint the game he loved it forced him into a downward spiral he couldn’t dig himself out of. When he joined the NBA with the Atlanta Hawks he was faced with a new dilemma - teammates that disliked him and a coach that tried to break his spirit. Having never had to deal with obstacles on the hardwood this only escalated Pete’s desire to find something to give his life meaning. He openly claimed a belief in aliens to any reporter or teammate that would listen, he looked for peace at the bottom of a beer bottle and he tried countless “isms” to find peace with the world and his role in it. Just when it looked like his world was going to crumble in on him Pete woke up one night in a cold sweat to hear what he believed was the voice of God urging him to “be strong and lift thine own heart.” It was at that moment that Pete finally found peace with the world. The change that resulted in his turn and the subsequent changes in his personality and mannerisms after becoming a Christian awed everyone that surrounded him as friends and family would remark that the sadness in his eyes was removed, he was finally able to be a great father to his sons rand he seemed genuinely content with being alive for the first time since his youth.

Kriegel did a masterful job of making Pete into someone that was human and not just a basketball player that people idolized. Between documenting how Pete dealt with a mother who committed suicide, countless injury issues and the stress of playing college ball for his father, Kriegel did a great job of providing me with priceless insight into what life was like for Pete Maravich.

If you are looking at the definitive look at a player who changed the way that basketball is played then you need to read Mark Kriegel’s book “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich.”

In “The Last Shot” author Darcy Frey describes Coney Island as a place of desolation and despair where the only source of hope comes when young men who are gifted at basketball because it provides them with a chance to escape the neighbourhood they grew up in. As Frey noted in his introduction, “even the dealers and hoodlums refrain from vandalizing The Garden, because in Coney Island the possibility of transcendence through basketball - in this case, an athletic scholarship to a four-year Division 1 college - is an article of faith.”

The idea of less fortunate teens earning scholarships is an ideal that I’ve long viewed as a reward for someone working hard on the court and in the classroom. However, after reading this book I came to the painful realization that this is just an ideal which has little basis in reality. According to Frey I’m one of the many basketball fans that have bought into the myth that young men with athletic talent can secure a scholarship at a Division 1 school. However, because of impoverished learning conditions far too many of these young men are not able to attend D1 schools because they can not obtain a score over 700 on their SAT’s.

Brent Staples explained this dilemma perfectly when he wrote in his New York Times review for “The Last Shot” that:

The myth of deliverance through basketball has always been nonsense. The sport has traditionally involved semiliterate athletes who performed mightily in gyms, failed in classrooms and were discarded when their scholarships ran out. But the competition for these athletes grew heated in the 1980’s, after the National Collegiate Athletic Association signed a billion-dollar contract for television rights to college basketball — and when winning coaches began to earn additional millions for themselves by fronting for the sneaker companies. When Congress and the press put up too much of a stink about poorly educated athletes who never graduated, the N.C.A.A. responded with Proposition 48, raising eligibility standards for those seeking to play big-time college ball in their freshman year. To be eligible for freshman play, an athlete needs a 2.0 average in a high school core curriculum — and a combined score of at least 700 on the Scholastic Assessment Tests (S.A.T.), about 200 points below the national average for college-bound seniors.

Those who fall short of 700 are grimly referred to as “Prop 48 casualties.” Scholarship offers are withdrawn. College coaches look upon these athletes as damaged goods. Illicit characters called street agents broker them to outlaw junior colleges, where they play without even the pretense of being students. The players kick around the outlaw circuit, dropping out of one school and into another, until they end up back at home — in the case of Coney Island, peddling cold sodas on the scorching summer sidewalks. Proposition 48 came into being in 1986. Since then, Mr. Frey tells us, 91 percent of its casualties have been black.

A perfect example of athletic scholarships being a mirage is found in “The Last Shot” when Frey documents the senior season of star guard Russell Thomas. Thomas was a 6′2″ guard that has the ability to explode for 50 points in a game while locking down an opposing team’s star player to under 10 points. As I read about Thomas spending countless hours honing his game in solitude and then spending extra time working on his marks at his kitchen table I assumed that a student with an 80% average would be a lock to obtain a basketball scholarship to a D1 school.

Frey mercilessly ripped apart this assumption in his book when he documented how Thomas was unable to escape Coney Island because of his low SAT scores.

As the senior season starter Thomas laid out his one goal for his senior season - to obtain a score higher than 700 on his SAT’s so that he could attend a four-year college and get a degree in nursing. Unlike most of his peers who hold onto lofty goals of playing in the NBA and making millions, all Thomas wanted was a chance to get a degree and secure a well paying job. To reach this goal Thomas carried around vocabulary cards, spent hours each night doing prep work for the SAT’s and even sought out the guidance of his teachers to be fully prepared for the SAT test.

Frey addressed the uphill battle that Thomas faced when he wrote:

Getting a 700 - the eligibility requirement for Division 1 ball - did not strike me at first as a rigorous standard. But the national average for college-bound seniors, it turns out, is only about 800. And after becoming better acquainted with the quality of Lincoln players’ schooling and the environment in which they live, I am less surprised that they may not know a synonym for panache or how to make the most of what they do know; they’ve never been told, for example, to avoid guessing and answer only the questions they are sure of - the kind of test-taking tip suburban kids learn on their first day in a $600 Stanley Kaplan review course. Russell, after all, is struggling to answer reading comprehension and algebra questions on the SATs when he had never, until recently, finished a book or learned the fundamentals of multiplication. And the repeated frustrations of this test - the first of it’s kind he has even taken in his life - are making him doubt the conviction that gave him such pleasure just a few months ago: namely, that he wasn’t dumb; he just had never been properly taught how to learn.

Thomas wrote the SAT test countless times during his senior season and unfortunately the closest he came was midway through his senior season when he scored a 690. Without a score higher than 700 all of the interest he had garnered from D1 coaches in the fall after strong play in summer leagues shrivelled up by Christmas.

After reading this book I was filled with the same disillusionment that Frey faced while writing about his experiences following the Lincoln team. I found myself wondering how a student can pull down an 80% average yet not have the ability to achieve a score higher than 700 on his SAT’s or how can a student put in countless hours preparing for a test yet not possess the tools to do well on that test. The only answer I could muster is that the education system let him down and as an elementary school teacher I was ashamed of my profession and the fact that we had failed to provide a child with the tools so that he could be successful.

Tracking the plight of Russell Thomas is just one of the numerous reasons to check out “The Last Shot.” There’s a ton of insight into what goes on at the Nike Invitational, you are given a glimpse into what life is like for a teen growing up in Coney Island and there are rivetting stories about shady recruiting techniques from college coaches like Jim Boeheim and Rick Barnes. If your looking for an informative and entertaining book I’d like to recommend that you pick up Darcy Frey’s “The Last Shot.”

While reading the epilogue for this book I became worried that this book would resemble a chat with my grandfather who begins most of his chats about sports by prefacing his thoughts and experiences by saying “back in the day…” and then proceeds to rip the current state of professional sports. Between ripping AAU ball, the changes in the appearance of high school gymnasiums to accommodate more fans and pining for players like Steve Alford or Scott Skiles instead of Shawn Kemp and Zach Randolph to represent Indiana, I had a bad feeling that I was now stuck reading a book that would be tough to read. Fortunately, these doubts quickly evaporated and after I finished reading the epilogue I had a hard time putting this book down.

One of the reasons I enjoyed reading this book so much is because of the immense amount of history of the sport that was included. As a Canadian I grew up in a “basketball impoverished” country where the media generally neglected the Toronto Raptors and basketball in general until the back pages of the Sports section. Because of this, I was rarely able to obtain anything of substance on basketball outside of Sports Illustrated or the odd book I could come across in a book store. While reading through this book I was able to pick up a large amount of history about the game of basketball through anecdotes about; the politics behind Sean May spurning Indiana for North Carolina, an explanation of why Market Square Arena was no longer a financially viable option for the Pacers to play in, how integration of high schools changed high school basketball, the creation of class basketball and Title IX and an in-depth examination of how these changes have effected high school sports.

Another intriguing aspect of this was the chapter on Indiana high school legend Damon Bailey. Bailey was the poster boy for Indiana basketball in the early ‘90’s and graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in December of 1993. Bailey became a cult figure during the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s in Indiana and Wertheim recounted stories about parents naming their children after him (Damon if it was a boy, Bailey if they had a girl), Bob Knight praising Bailey in the media when he was in grade eight, fans stealing clumps of grass from his parents yard and later in his high school career fans would ask him for weird things attached to him such as the paper cup he drank out of during games.

One section of this chapter that stuck out was when Wertheim talked about Bailey being scouted by Indiana University as early as eighth grade:

In early 1986, when Bailey was an eight-grader, Knight the elder took in a Shawswick game. Not one given to hyperbole, Knight came away a believer in a precious fourteen-year-old kid. “Damon Bailey is better than any guard we have right now,” he famously told his assistants. “I don’t mean potentially better, I mean better today.”

On it’s face, it was uncharacteristic gushing but it was vintage Knight. Ever the puppeteer, his remarks were surely intended to motivate Indiana’s incumbent guard, Steve Alford, a terrific player who had been a member of the gold medal 1984 U.S. Olympic team but was in the throes of a slump at the time. Regardless, Knight’s sentients were picked up, not only by local cognoscenti but also b John Feinstein, in the process of writing a national bestseller. By then time Bailey was a freshman in high school and Feinstein’s “Season on the Brink” was in it’s gazillionth printing, the small-town basketball savant with the perfect, feathered hair had pierced the national consciousness.

Which brings up another great reason to read this book - a chapter full of Bob Knight anecdotes. What would a book about Indiana basketball be without plenty of talk about legendary Indiana Hoosiers head coach Bob Knight? Love him or hate him, it’s clear that Knight is the coach that is associated with Indiana basketball. An entire chapter was dedicated to Knight and it was full of interesting tidbits on the Hoosiers basketball program and all of the upheaval the program went through when Knight was dismissed from the school.

Wertheim’s stance on Knight is summed up best early in this chapter when he wrote:

There is comfort in the routine, and it’s worth pointing out that so much ceremony was made possible by the consistent excellence of the IU teams. But with this consistency as a backdrop, it’s hard to exaggerate the dimension of changes that have recently rocked Hoosier Nation. The iconic Bob Knight, a fixture on the sidelines for twenty-nine years, was replaced with a man, who, put simply, is his polar-opposite. Black replaced white. New School supplanted Old School. Knowledge and experience gave way to youth and enthusiasm. Profanity yielded to piety. Though he was the rare Hoosier who neither knew nor cared about Indiana basketball, my father had a pretty good analogy for the transformation. As he once explained to a friend overseas: “It’s like you’ve been listening to classical music on the radio for all your life and decide to change stations after thirty years. Instead of easing into something, you go right into speed metal. That’s what the switch from Bob Knight to Mike Davis was like.”

And with that race enters into the equation. Just like Adam in the Garden of Eden realizing that he was naked after eating the forbidden apple, Wertheim opened my eyes to the pivotal role that race unfortunately plays within the culture of basketball in Indiana. Living in Toronto, I’m fortunate to live in a city that takes tremendous pride in being viewed as a “cultural mosaic” and a place where people of countless religious, cultural and ethnic origins all live together in harmony. Now that I’m a coach I don’t take into account a players race when making a team of deciding playing time. Maybe it’s because I’m New School but I could care less what a player looks like and as a coach all I care about is putting players on the court that will work hard and will try to incorporate the concepts we’ve gone over in practices into game situations. While reading through this chapter on Bob Knight and his dismissal from Indiana I was saddened by the ripples that were caused by the University’s decision to hire an African American to replace Knight and I found it disheartening to learn that what happens in Toronto is a stark contrast to what occurs in Indiana.

This was one of those rare books where the author is able to blend history, humour, informative anecdotes with his passion for the game to create a classic hoops novel that was hard to put down. Despite a busy week with work responsibilities, coaching responsibilities and stuff planned with friends I was still able to read this book in less than a week because I found myself creating time in my schedule to sneak in another chapter.

If your looking for a book that will inform, entertain and challenge the way you to think about the game of basketball make sure you read Jon Wertheim’s book “Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop.”