The story of how this book came together begins with a different project that shares the same name, ESPN Films’ Basketball: A Love Story, directed by Dan Klores. At the heart of both projects is a landmark feat of basketball reporting—165 in-depth interviews, conducted between 2014 and 2017 by Dan and a number of renowned sports journalists, with a collection of basketball luminaries that ranged from Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson to Cheryl Miller and Mike Krzyzewski to LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki. Together, these interviews resemble something like the Dead Sea Scrolls of basketball, containing 70 years of collected wisdom from the NBA, the women’s game, college hoops, and international competition, and bound together by the overarching theme of the love of the game.
In early 2016, while working to complete the film, Dan enlisted Jackie MacMullan and Rafe Bartholomew to produce a book using the same cache of interviews. After reading through thousands of pages of interview transcripts, Jackie and Rafe began the difficult process of deciding what to include in this volume. The transcripts contained enough poignant, powerful, and revealing anecdotes to fill a book three times the size of this final version, but given the amount of space permitted, the authors did their best to represent the major events, movements, and dynasties in basketball history, from the 1930s through the present. The book is presented in oral history style, allowing the voices of the athletes, coaches, executives, and journalists who helped build basketball into a global game to speak for themselves, and only interjecting with the authors’ prose to provide context. The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity, but the authors have made every effort to preserve the sources’ conversational and sometimes informal voices. Because the original interviews were not conducted with the intention of creating an oral history book, it would be improper to call Basketball: A Love Story an oral history in the strict sense of the form; likewise, it would be incorrect to describe this book as anything close to a definitive history of the sport—there is so, so much more.
We are thankful for the opportunity to work on this book, thankful to all of those who will read it, and, most of all, thankful to all the men and women interviewed, whose dreams and sacrifices have made basketball what it is today.
—Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew, and Dan Klores