Three stars but four beers. I'd like to say my favorite part of this book is Phil Jackson being out for the season with a bad back, but the writing on the playground players is very good, as are the chapters on the playoffs. You have to believe the Knicks were once an incredibly beautiful team to watch play (if you're younger than 45 and care about such things), but that shouldn't be any harder to believe than going to the library to plagiarize a term paper.

The City Game is a great hidden gem covering a piece of sports history that is starting to be lost to the mists of time. Written in 1970, contemporaneous with the Knicks winning their first NBA championship, the book cleverly alternates between recounting the Knicks magical season with the NYC playground basketball scene, which comprised its own subculture. The late author does a nice job of illustrating the differences between the NBA and street ball, but also showing how the two were intertwined and influenced one another. Importantly, the author does not glorify either scene., discussing the good, the bad and the ugly. The book is like a time capsule of 1970 NY sports.

Nothing to get excited about. Typical season recap sports story that tries to intersperse tales and profiles of city ball. Axhelm's grasp of city basketball is much less extensive than Telander's in 'Heaven is a Playground' and the structure of this book doesn't work.

Another SI Top 100 book where the makers of the list chose a former staff writer.

The story of the 1970 Knicks mixed with the stories of players from the parks in New York. Always a thin line between who makes it and who doesn’t. Also very interesting to read about basketball before the three point line.

I would love to read more about the park and playground basketball games that take place in New York. This was a great read for any basketball junkie.

One of the greatest basketball books of all time!

Basketball at its Best

A MUST read for any fan and f the NY Knicks, and a GREAT read for any fan of basketball!!!

Been awhile since I read this but memory tells me I enjoyed the stories of the playground legends (Earl "the Goat" Manigault, Herman "the Helicopter" Rawlings and several others) more than the back story of the Knicks championship season. A good read if you can find a copy...

Fantastically entertaining history of basketball in NYC.

The nicest thing about this was that it was loaned to me as a thoughtful thank you gift from a parent/teacher at my kids school as his 1st grader joined in some of our 3rd grade basketball Sunday practices.

I hope young Rhys ends up loving basketball as deeply and as long as Axthelm did. Not sure if the book's text merits a rating of "poetic" rating but in contrast to this era of SportsCenter quips and stabs at catch phrases, I understand.

Like a lot of sports reporting when I was young, this book is well written and avoids the obvious and catches players that are not caricatures of caricatures. These days, maybe effort along these lines goes into TV documentaries, which are easier (you film a guy) but more compelling (you actually see the guy playing, or talking from prison). Indeed if you dug this, I suspect you would also enjoy "Town Game" which contrasts Leon Powe and "Hook" Mitchelle just as Axthelm held up Willis Reed and his team versus "The Goat" and other playground legends from New York.

I thought the game recaps were well-done, not so in-depth as to squeeze the life out of them. Even though the Reed limping down the tunnel was before my time, I had seen it enough times that it was nice to hear some of the backing to it. Also the notion of the NBA in its infancy and where they would play and to whom, also worth checking out.

A good summer read if you can find it, or are lucky to have it loaned to you as I was. But in general, sports stories just don't appeal to me as much as they once did, not sure if it is a function of me, or the sports-entertainment world itself.

I liked this book - especially the juxtaposition between the Knicks and the street ballers - but it reads like an extended newspaper article at times as Axthelm relies far too much on extended quotations that can go on for paragraphs at a time.

Very interesting read on the New York basketball scene in 1970, a year the Knicks won the NBA championship. It felt like one book on the Knicks championship season and then a half book on the street basketball scene jammed together when I thought it could be integrated together a bit better. The overall writing is very good though and it had the best descriptions of game-action that I have read so far.

Axthelm was a columnist who covered sports in the Big Apple during the prime of the Knicks’ great teams in the late 60’s/early 70’s. This book is a documentary look at the team that captured the NBA championship at the end of the 1969-1970 season. Axthelm spends individual chapters describing the great players from that team – notably Bill Bradley, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, and Willis Reed – and how their unique personalities and skills perfectly complimented each other during that championship year. The latter half of the book goes through the ups and downs of the playoff series against the Bullets, Bucks, and Lakers, highlighting not only the Knicks’ players, but also the important players from the other teams (especially Lew Alcindor who was a rookie, and Chamberlain and West who were at the tail ends of their careers). In addition, Axthelm sets the cultural context for NYC basketball by describing the street basketball scene in Harlem, and the importance of basketball to African-Americans living in poverty in the NY boroughs. Alongside the chapters on individuals like Willis Reed, Axthelm spends chapters on talented neighborhood players who failed despite their talents because of social issues related to poverty and racism during that era. These two stories (Knicks basketball and neighborhood basketball) don’t always mesh perfectly, and there was a time or two I felt like Axthelm was telling two stories at once, but overall they work together to make this a documentary not only about the Knicks, but also about the larger game of basketball and its connection to urban areas and society at large. The language is a bit dated, as Axthelm often uses terms like “last year” or “next year” in reference to his writing this in 1970. But its place in time also lends a unique perspective since Axthelm predicts certain things like Bill Bradley’s political career and Lew Alcindor’s success years before either materialized. One minor criticism is that – like most non-fiction works – Axthelm tends to lionize players and teams, but when you’re covering legendary events like the Willis Reed appearance in Game 7 of the NBA championship, sometimes it’s appropriate to use superlatives. Overall, a very engaging and fascinating non-fiction read. This is a must-read for fans of the Knicks or of basketball, and a recommended read for everyone else.