Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball
By Thomas Beller
Duke University Press, 2022

“Basketball fans don’t read books,” a famous New York editor told me when rejecting my basketball novel Passing Off. I hope they read reviews because even NBA fanatics, along with casual fans, will find much to learn and appreciate about hoops in Thomas Beller’s Lost in the Game. A New York City native, Beller played college basketball and, at age 57, still plays pickup ball on playgrounds. For a time he covered NBA games for a wire service. Many of the essays collected here were printed in The New Yorker, and Beller has written books of both fiction and non-fiction. As befits someone who publishes with the high-theory Duke University Press, Beller is also a professor at Tulane.

I recite these facts to support my thesis that Beller is the ultimate “color man,” the term that used to describe broadcast analysts before “color” had a negative tinge and before women also sat beside play-by-play announcers. Usually a former player, the color person provides inside basketball: expert commentary on replays, advanced analytics stats, reports from inside locker rooms, anecdotes about the players. In Lost in the Game, Beller does all of this but goes beyond inside to insight, the novelist probing players’ psychologies, the professor placing individuals within cultural systems, the urban communities from which many NBA players emerge.

If you don’t believe the former pickup player and retired professor you are reading, you can find Beller’s best chapter--about Nikola Jokic, two-time NBA Most Valuable Player—in Slate: https://slate.com/culture/2022/11/nikola-jokic-denver-nuggets-history-profile-record.html

You don’t need to be a fan or have seen Jokic play to enjoy the nineteen-page piece because Beller’s attention to minute details of Jokic’s body and movements—his shockingly white skin and shambling gait—makes Jokic a full-fleshed character one might find in a novel. Not content with surfaces, Beller interviews a kinesiologist who tested Jokic’s reflexes and talks with a Serbian sociologist about the culture that formed the player. Perhaps Beller even uses his knowledge of Jokic’s family to invent a killer instinct for the usually unflappable center.

Jokic, we understand from earlier essays about Beller’s life in and out of basketball, is the author’s ideal double. A gangly and somewhat uncoordinated 6-5 white guy, Beller has spent much of his adult life trying to “redeem” (his word) his failures as a “big man” in organized ball. He’ll never be as tall as the 6-11 Jokic, who is most celebrated for his passing, so Beller decides to succeed in street ball by becoming a slick shooter like some of the famous point guards who came out of New York City. The transformation is decades in the making and not wholly successful. Beller is somewhat embarrassed by what he calls his “addiction”—to watching, playing, and thinking about hoops: being “lost in the game”—but his obsession makes him a great color man and a sympathetic representative of the hoop junkie who keeps on keeping on.

If there is a weakness in Lost in the Game, it is Beller’s sidestepping (Eurostepping in contemporary hoop parlance) around color, around race. I know something about this blacktop subject because for decades I was often the only white guy on the playground. Disrespected and bullied, Beller says he eventually asserted his presence by learning how to “trash talk”—talk back and Black — on the court. But in his book he usually keeps silent about the white elephant in the room—his relationships with the mostly Black guys he plays with and against. Not even the most self-revealing white color man (except for that shameless masochist David Shields in Black Planet) would confess that he sometimes wishes he were Black, but that fantasy may well be the innermost inside of Beller’s book. He enjoys being lost in the game--playing as a sanctuary from “real” life--but he is also lost—at a severe disadvantage--in a game that very few white guys such as Jokic play at the highest levels.

To interest casual fans and non-fans, I’ve concentrated on the ways Lost in the Game is like an autobiographical novel, a bildungsroman of belated, decades-long development. Serious fans of the NBA will find Lost in the Game is rich with reportage, some of which brings back players perhaps lost or dimmed in memory such as former Knicks Latrell Spreewell, Stephon Marbury*, and Zach Randolph, who epitomizes the clever low-leaper in “The Pleasures of the Old Man Game,” one of Beller’s best “historical” essays. Beller is equally good on micro-analyzing the distinctive moves of current dancing dribblers such as James Harden and Kyrie Irving. Their secret, Beller argues counterintuitively, is not in their movements but in their ability to stop while their defenders continue to move.

Beller’s best reportage, though, is backstage--from inside a 2003 tryout where the quality of participants is brutally assessed; from Beller’s wanderings into and out of locker rooms when he has his press pass; from his observations of green rooms and interview rooms at the annual NBA draft of newcomers in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Backstage and prestage: Beller arrives early at games so he can watch players practice before fans arrive, when, he says, “you can observe NBA players performing rituals of repetition that transcend the mechanical and begin to seem almost spiritual, ritualistic…It’s an opportunity to see the nuances of gesture and movement that are hard to glimpse in the middle of a game but that become pronounced with repetition.” Color persons now compliment players by saying that “the game has slowed down” for them. The analysts mean the player is not rushed, has internalized nuances and adapted to the pace of play. Beller slows down the game for the reader, breaking down split-section, continuous actions into precise and sometimes elegant discrete sentences.

In the essay about Jokic, Beller emphasizes “aesthetically pleasing plays.” Fans also want emotion, and Lost in the Game has that: Beller’s meeting with his now aged college coach who used to belittle him (and encourage him), Beller’s meditations on a father who died young, his lengthy description of empty playgrounds during the pandemic—and the risks of playing when the hoops were reattached to the backboards. Perhaps because Beller is still playing, he mostly avoids the curse of nostalgia while also bemoaning the diminishment of playground basketball as talent is professionalized at an early age, kids plucked off the cement and sent to camps at great expense, an investment that will pay off for only the very few who make it to the NBA. That is another “lost in the game.”

Now forget my comparison of Beller to a color man parceling out information about familiar figures and secret spaces. To imagine the experience of reading Lost in the Game, think of writer Beller as the baller, the ballers, the younger Beller and the current Beller. His play, his prose, is consistently skilled, in the moment and moving you on, interesting you in the action to come, the next essay, the whole game Beller is playing with words. “Nice, nice,” you keep saying to yourself as you register his stylish apercus. And then, as in an NBA game, comes an unforeseen highlight, an allusive phrase or a few sentences or even a whole essay that transcends ordinary sportswriting. Isn’t that—the surprise, the eruption of originality, such as a posterizing dunk by Zion Williamson--what you’ve been waiting for if you’re a fan who reads?

*Beller has occasional footnotes. Here’s mine: I once sat near Marbury at a bar in JFK. I asked him politely if he were Stephon Marbury. He said “no.” Ever since I’ve wondered if his identity was lost in the game.

Tom LeClair is the author of the “Passing” sequence, five novels about the basketball playmaker Michael Keever.