Basketball Audiobooks | Sports & Recreation

The Jump: My Secret Journey from the Streets to the Boardroom

One of the most successful Black businessmen in the country, who has led Nike’s Jordan Brand from a $200M sneaker company to a $4B global apparel juggernaut, tells the remarkable story of his rise from gangland violence to the pinnacles of international business. Jump tells Larry Miller’s journey from the violent streets of West Philly in the 1960s to the highest echelons of American sports and industry. Miller wound up in jail more than once, especially as a teenager. But he immersed himself in the educational opportunities, eventually took advantage of a Pennsylvania state education-release program offered to incarcerated people, and was able to graduate with honors from Temple University. When revealing his gangland past caused him to lose his first major job opportunity, Miller vowed to keep it a secret. He climbed the corporate ladder with a number of companies such as Kraft Foods, Campbell’s Soup, and Jantzen, until Nike hired him to run its domestic apparel operations. Around the time of Michael Jordan’s basketball retirement, Nike Chairman Phil Knight made Larry Miller president of the newly formed Jordan Brand. In 2007 Paul Allen convinced Miller to jump to the NBA to become president of the Portland Trailblazers, one of the first African-Americans to lead a professional sports team, before returning to Jordan Brand in 2012. All along, Miller lived two lives: the secret of his violent past haunted him, invading his days with migraines and his sleep with nightmares of getting hauled back to jail. More than a rags-to-riches story, Jump is also a passionate appeal for criminal justice reform and expanded educational opportunities for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people across the United States. Drawing on his powerful personal story, as well as his vast and well-connected network, Miller plans to use Jump as a launching point to help expand such opportunities and to provide an aspirational journey for those who need hope.

Laila Lacy, Larry Miller (Author), Jd Jackson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Hoops Whisperer

Basketball's most unlikely-and most sought-after-training guru offers an inside look at his career, his methods, and the all-star players whose games he's helped transform. Where do the best basketball players in the world turn when they want to improve their game? Whom does a future NBA Hall of Famer thank at his press conference when he's named Rookie of the Year? Who is it that Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal, and Men's Journal all call the "Hoops Whisperer" because of his ability to engage, inspire, and challenge the players he trains? The answer to all of these questions is Idan Ravin. Ravin never played or coached in college or the pros, yet a virtual NBA All-Star team relies on him to better their game and reach their full potential. A soft-spoken former lawyer, Ravin has become professional basketball's hottest trainer. In The Hoops Whisperer, Ravin shares the fascinating story of how he transformed a passion for the game into working with iconic basketball stars such as Chris Paul, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Stephen Curry, Blake Griffin, James Harden, Dwight Howard, and many more. He offers a rare unguarded glimpse inside the lives of these great athletes, drawn from his intimate connection with them that is the basis of his success. Showcasing his unorthodox drills and improvisational techniques in action, Ravin reveals how faith, effort, dedication, and passion can make a player into a superstar-and anyone into a success. Combined with his own inspiring journey, Ravin's insights make The Hoops Whisperer a must for anyone who loves the game.

Idan Ravin (Author), Sean Pratt (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Great Nowitzki: Basketball and the Meaning of Life

A journey into the mindset of a historic basketball superstar, and the importance of his landmark career. The seven-foot Dirk Nowitzki is one of the great players in basketball history. With a devastating fadeaway and unexpected agility, the Dallas Mavericks superstar helped to pioneer the modern three-shooting game and became a global ambassador for the sport. Award-winning novelist and sportswriter Thomas Pletzinger traveled with Nowitzki for more than seven years, seeking the secret of his success and longevity. In novelistic detail, Pletzinger tells the dramatic story of how a lanky kid from the German suburbs became a top-five all-time scorer and NBA champion. He profiles the revolutionary training methods developed by Holger Geschwindner, Dirk's enigmatic mentor and coach, whose philosophical insights on performance, creativity, and freedom shaped Dirk's game. A masterpiece of sports journalism and a work of personal obsession-akin to John McPhee's A Sense of Where You Are and David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game-The Great Nowitzki brims with a fan's passion and offers an intimate portrait of an iconic performer.

Thomas Pletzinger (Author), Charles Constant (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Gold Standard: Building a World-Class Team

Says Coach K: "In all forms of leadership, whether you are a coach, a CEO, or a parent, there are four words that, when said, can bring out the best in your team, your employees, and your family...I BELIEVE IN YOU. These four words can mean the difference between a fear of failure and the courage to try." In his previous audiobooks, Coach K has guided readers to success the way he has guided his teams at Duke University - - with the power of his inspirational words and phenomenal leadership skills. But that was with college kids.....Now, Coach K has stepped up to take on an entirely new challenge - by volunteering to coach the US Olympic Basketball team. Comprised of some of the biggest NBA stars, Coach K had to work with huge egos and personal rivalries in order to create an American team that could win against the best competition in the world and restore Team USA to the gold standard of basketball. This is more than a celebratory audiobook - it's Coach K's first-hand account of how he dealt with such stars as Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Carmelo Anthony and all the rest to buy into his "total team" play. Half an audiobook on basketball, half an audiobook on management techniques, THE GOLD STANDARD captures Coach K's personal style and approach to getting different (and sometimes difficult) people to work hard and succeed in reaching a common goal.

Jamie K. Spatola, Mike Kryzewski, Mike Krzyzewski (Author), Jamie K. Spatola (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Education of Kendrick Perkins: A Memoir

'Kendrick Perkins is the bold and educational voice we need today. Every single word he speaks will challenge, enlighten and encourage you to become a better version of yourself and see a better version of the world. Perkins' riveting stories about the NBA, his upbringing and social justice will make this ... impossible to put down.' —Emmanuel Acho, New York Times bestselling author of Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Kendrick “Perk” Perkins is known for his blunt, opinionated, “carry the hell on” commentary on ESPN’s most popular shows. As a fourteen-year NBA player and starting center for the 2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics, Perk earned a reputation as an enforcer, a fierce defender, and a great teammate. Now, In The Education of Kendrick Perkins, he opens a different side of himself: a powerful and intimate memoir that goes beyond basketball to discuss the reality of being Black in America. Abandoned by his father, then orphaned after the murder of his mother, Perk was raised by his grandparents in a small Texas town. He left their home at age eighteen, drafted out of high school by the legendary Celtics. For a country boy, Boston was a completely new world, and the NBA a league of legends: Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Kevin Garnett, James Harden, Shaquille O’Neal, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Kevin Durant, and more. Perk had to learn how to play with and against these stars, while adjusting to life on the road as a professional athlete. But his education went beyond basketball. In this audiobook, Perk reveals his awakening consciousness of larger issues that affected him, his fellow players, and Black Americans: -How many NBA players grow up in broken families and difficult circumstances -The history of slavery and how that trauma affects generations of Black life -The truths told by writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and others -The false myths about the Black family and fatherhood -Why George Floyd’s murder forced a reckoning about race in America Honest, fearless, dramatic, filled with stories about life on and off the court, The Education of Kendrick Perkins is a unique memoir that shows how he and we all can “carry the hell on.” A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

Kendrick Perkins (Author), Jd Jackson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching

The most successful coach in college basketball history, and among the most beloved, offers his comprehensive program for building and maintaining winning teams in sports, business, and life. For almost forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of North Carolina basketball team with unsurpassed success, both in victories won and in shaping the lives of the players he led. Well known are the Michael Jordans, Kenny Smiths, and George Karls, but overall more than 96 percent of Dean Smith's players earned their undergraduate degrees, and more than 33 percent earned graduate or professional degrees. Now, in The Carolina Way, Coach Smith fully explains his entire coaching philosophy and shows readers how to apply it to the leadership and team-building challenges in their own lives. In his wry, sensible, wise way, Coach Smith takes us through every aspect of his program, illustrating his insights with vivid stories. Accompanying each major point is a "Player Perspective" from a former North Carolina basketball star and an in-depth "Business Perspective" developing some of the wider applications of Smith's precepts from Gerald D. Bell, a world-renowned leadership consultant and a professor at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Each year Coach Smith gave his team the same three goals: - PLAY HARD: Insist on consistent effort. The final result is often outside your control. Create a system that demands effort, rewards it, and punishes its absence. - PLAY SMART: Execute properly. Understand and consistently execute the fundamentals. Reward their execution and punish their absence. - PLAY TOGETHER: Play unselfishly. Don't focus on individual statistics. Recruit unselfish players, reward unselfish play, and punish selfish play and showboating. Coach Smith taught all his teams that if they kept their focus on these three goals, winning would take care of itself. And more times than any other coach in history, he was right.

Dean Smith (Author), Dean Smith, Gerald D. Bell, John Kilgo (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA

Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created the salary cap in 1983, the first in all of sports, against the backdrop of a looming players’ strike on one side and threatened economic collapse on the other. Joshua Mendelsohn illustrates how the salary cap was more than just professional basketball’s economic foundation—it was a grand bargain, a compromise meant to end the chaos that had gripped the sport since the early 1960s. The NBA had spent decades in a vulnerable position financially and legally, unique in professional sports. It entered the 1980s badly battered, something no one knew better than a few legendary NBA figures: Larry Fleisher, general counsel and negotiator for the National Basketball Players Association; Larry O’Brien, the commissioner; and David Stern, who led negotiations for the NBA and would be named the commissioner a few months after the salary cap deal was reached. The Cap explores in detail not only the high-stakes negotiations in the early 1980s but all the twists and turns through the decades that led the parties to reach a salary cap compromise. It is a compelling story that involves notable players, colorful owners, visionary league and union officials, and a sport trying to solidify a bright future despite a turbulent past and present. This is a story missing from the landscape of basketball history.

Joshua Mendelsohn (Author), Stephen Bowlby (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Breaks of the Game

More than 6 years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country's most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his ground-breaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and has become the standard by which all journalists measure themselves. The New York Times bestseller, now with a new introduction! The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions. The tactile authenticity of Halberstam's knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed. It's about the influence of big media, the fans and the hype they subsist on, the clash of ethics, the terrible physical demands of modern sports (from drugs to body size), the unreal salaries, the conflicts of race and class, and the consequences of sport converted into mass entertainment and athletes transformed into superstars--all presented in a way that puts the reader in the room and on the court, and The Breaks of the Game in a league of its own.

David Halberstam (Author), Brian Troxell, Nicholas Tecosky (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball

As the crack epidemic swept across inner-city America in the early 1980s, the streets of Baltimore were crime ridden. For poor kids from the housing projects, the future looked bleak. But basketball could provide the quickest ticket out, an opportunity to earn a college scholarship and perhaps even play in the NBA. Dunbar High School had one of the most successful basketball programs, not only in Baltimore but in the entire country, and in the early 1980s, the Dunbar Poets were arguably the best high school team of all time. Four starting players-Muggsy Bogues, Reggie Williams, David Wingate, and Reggie Lewis-would eventually play in the NBA, an unheard-of success rate. In The Boys of Dunbar, Alejandro Danois takes us through the 1981-1982 season with the Poets as the team conquered all its opponents. But more than that, he takes us into the lives of these kids, and especially of Coach Bob Wade, a former NFL player from the same neighborhood who knew that the basketball court, and the lessons his players would learn there, held the key to the future.

Alejandro Danois (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland's Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA

June 19, 2016: the greatest moment in Cleveland sports history, when the Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA Finals and broke the Cleveland Curse. It was the triumph fans had been waiting fifty-two years for, and it wasn't easy to get there-but thanks to LeBron James, an audacious plan to build a winning team, a couple of maverick GMs, and an incredible community of fans, it happened; and 2016 saw the birth of a new Cavaliers dynasty. But how did they get there? It was a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to triumph, one that Jason Lloyd, a longtime Northeast Ohio resident turned reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, got to see firsthand. He was witness to the Blueprint, as he calls it, which the Cavs put together to win their star player back from Miami and build a team that could win the ultimate championship. It incorporated several losing seasons, some highrisk draft picks, and an entirely new understanding of how to build a championship team. The best part of the plan is that it worked, culminating in the most exciting Finals series in NBA history. And, most important, the end of the Cleveland Curse. Jason Lloyd, a true insider, tells the story of how the NBA really works, and how everyone-from the front office to the stars on the court to the new generation of coaches-worked together to create an unforgettable winning team. The Blueprint is an unputdownable, must-have book for every LeBron, Cavs, and NBA fan.

Jason Lloyd (Author), James Patrick Cronin (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Black Fives

A groundbreaking history of Black basketball African Americans were making moves in basketball generations before the rise of the NBA. Their pioneering efforts helped popularize the sport in big cities and small towns alike and shaped the game we know and love today. From the invention of the game in 1891 to the racial integration of all-White professional leagues in the 1950s, dozens of teams—then often called “fives”—of African American players were founded and flourished. This was a time of visionary players, managers, and impresarios who blazed a trail, battled discrimination and marginalization, and created rich, meaningful events that strengthened their communities in the face of Jim Crow oppression. But this era, known as the Black Fives Era, has been forgotten, overlooked, unacknowledged, and squashed. It is barely known today. For more than two decades, Claude Johnson has made it his mission to change that. A fiercely committed advocate, Johnson has researched, preserved, exhibited, taught, and honored this important African American experience, unearthing what might have remained buried in an unmarked grave. The Black Fives is the result of his work, a landmark narrative history that braids together the stories of these pioneers and rewrites our understanding of the true history of the game.

Claude Johnson (Author), Claude Johnson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Big Three: Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, and the Rebirth of the Boston Celtics

New York Times bestselling sportswriter Michael Holley tells the inside story of how Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett joined together to form the most dominant team in basketball and lead the Boston Celtics to their first championship in more than two decades. The first of 'The Big Three' was Paul Pierce. As Boston Celtics fans watched the team retire Pierce's jersey in a ceremony on February 11, 2018, they remembered again the incredible performances Pierce put on in the city for fifteen years, helping the Celtics escape the bottom of their conference to become champions and perennial championship contenders. But Pierce's time in the city wasn't always so smooth. In 2000, he was stabbed in a downtown nightclub eleven times in a seemingly random attack. Six years later, remaining the sole star on a struggling team, he asked to be traded and briefly became a lightning rod among fans. Then, in 2007, the Boston Celtics General Manager made two monumental trades, bringing Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to Boston. A press conference on July 31, 2007 was a sight to behold: Pierce, KG, and Ray Allen holding up Celtics jerseys for the flood of media. Coach Doc Rivers made sure the team bonded over the thought of winning a title and living by a Bantu term called Ubuntu, which translates as 'I am because we are.' Rivers wanted to make it clear that togetherness and brotherhood would help them maximize their talent and win. What came next -- the synthesis of the Celtics' 'Big Three' and their dominant championship run -- cemented their standing as one of great teams in NBA history, a rival to Kobe Bryant's Lakers and LeBron James's Cavaliers. This is the team that brought excitement back to the Garden, and therefore to one of the most storied franchises in all of sports. They met their historic rivals, the Lakers, in the 2008 NBA Finals, winning the series in Game 6, in a rout on their home court with a raucous, concert like atmosphere. Along the victory parade route, Paul Pierce smoked a cigar -- as a tribute to legendary former Celtics Coach Red Auerbach. In a city now defined by a wealth of championships, 'The Big Three' joined the club. Michael Holley, the premier chronicler of Boston sports, brings their story to life with countless untold stories and behind-the-scenes details in another bestselling tome for New England and sports fans across the country.

Michael Holley (Author), Jean-Francois Donaldson, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Basketball Audiobooks in Sports & Recreation