![]() ![]() ![]() But in time all the interesting things Halberstam learned about new-breed-millionaire owner Larry Weinberg, personnel manager Stu Inman ("Are you really telling me"-to Weinberg-"that you know more than us?"), coach Jack Ramsay ("the system came first"-and the blacks craved more freedom), about Blazer superstars and comers and might-have-beens, do add up-intellectually and emotionally. Halberstam has contrived a narrative as seamless and fluid and intermeshed as basketball itself-with the result, in the first half at least, that lines of development don't stand out (and much has to be reiterated). (In pro basketball, of some of the best and brightest black lives.) The book has a problem with sprawl-not only because the central chapter, "The Season," goes on for 300 pages. The game is professional basketball, as represented by the Portland Trail Blazers' 1979-80 season-a microcosm, in Halberstam's wide-angle rendering, of the commercialization of all that was once genuine in American life. ![]()
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