I usually do not review coffee table books. They aren’t books really, but works of art – or at least that’s what they intend to be / attempt to be: works of art. You are not expected to read them, but to browse through them casually while your hostess puts the finishing touches on that very formal informal dinner or you feel you have made conversation for a respectable length of time with your prospective father-in-law. Coffee table books don’t belong in a library, but – well, on a coffee table. I don’t know anyone who ever pays the price for them that’s printed on the inside of the dust jacket. Of course, not. You pick them up on a remainder table with the little black swatch on the bottom edge. I always wonder how they make back the money that’s invested in those glossy, brilliantly colored photographs, those oversize pages and fancy bindings and fly-leaves, the careful design with art work bleeding off the pages, the permissions for all those copyrighted selections and photographs. Maybe those overpaid CEOs on Wall Street use them as Christmas or bar mitzvah gifts for their cousins in Iowa. Or maybe someone finances them so they can take the loss off their income tax. (Not that we Iowa cousins understand that.)

No, I don’t usually review them. And if I did, I might never be able to stop. For I’m a sucker for buying them on a remainder table or in a good, reasonable used bookstore. I have cords of them, stacked somewhere in the closet of my study. All right, I’ve browsed already! But who could pass it up – a $34.95 book for $8.98 plus tax at Barnes & Noble? One on a subject that you’re crazy about to begin with? That’s what I paid for The Basketball Book by Sports Illustrated (2007). Why, I could clip out any number of pages, frame them or put them in a fancy portfolio, and sell them to sports fans to display in their dens or offices. Here’s a coffee table book that deserves better than a coffee table.

Please understand. This book tells the story of my life. Oh, not the life others have seen me live, but the life I’ve imagined, the life I lived in daydreams beginning when I was, maybe, ten years old or so. First I was a Bob Cousy – back when Cousy was leading Holy Cross to unprecedented berths in the NCAA championship tournament, himself making All-American three years in a row; then when I was in high school and Cousy was creating the Boston Celtics, a team I came to love, creating the NBA as we know it now, indeed along with teammates and Coach Red Auerbach, creating professional basketball as the popular, profitable sport it is today. Like Cousy, I was a point guard – in my dreams. I mean what other choice would there have been for a kid who , as a high-school senior, was 5’8”, weighing 128 pounds? We knew – Cousy and I – that basketball was a game that required not only physical skill and agility, but also mental acumen and personal determination.

In my daydreams, I was Pistol Pete Maravich even before he was Pistol Pete , when his father was teaching the seven-year-old ball handling, head fakes, and long-range shooting. I envisioned that style and that success for myself, years before Pete made the headlines, averaging 44.2 points a game and making All-American all three years at LSU (this before the three-point shot, which would probably have raised his average to something like 57 points a game). Of course, even in my imagination, I could never have achieved Maravich’s fame, but his style – oh, his style was what I envied and admired.

But, in one’s mind’s eye, it’s possible to revert to youth even as one approaches middle age, settling into family life and a professional career. So there was Larry Bird for me to identify with. I became a power forward. Of course, I wanted to be Magic Johnson, too, and to this day my blood pressure rises to threatening levels when I think of those two heroes having to face off against one another. I watched with dismay as Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores lost in the NCAA finals to Johnson and the Michigan State Spartans, but then I managed to balance exhilaration and remorse as Larry and Magic led their Celtics and Lakers through thirteen exciting seasons. It’s never been the same since.

So that’s my story; those are my favorites: Cousy, Pistol Pete, Larry Bird, and Magic – not to mention Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Nate Archibald, Dr. J, Bill Bradley, Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippin, Shaquille O’Neal, Coach Phil Jackson, and – well, the list goes on and on. This book is their story, and it’s a page-turner. Of course, it’s a coffee table book, so the visuals jump out at you. And I mean that quite literally: they JUMP up and up and up and out at you. On page after page. Hold on!

Such a mammoth book requires multiple frontispieces. So take you pick:

Bob Cousy’s Chuck Taylor All Star [well-worn gym shoe], in his Celtics’ signature black

Eye-popping are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA stats: 38,387 points, six MWPs, multiple scratched corneas. [shown in a close-up in his special eye-glasses]

[a wrinkled, scratched, well-worn basketball of 1908] A good lacing was what the mighty Maroons of Chicago gave powerful Penn by sweeping a home and home.

[a spanking new Spalding from 1996, labeled “NBA Season Record 70th Victory”] The Bulls’ run was not done when they beat the Bucks for a 70th win. Two more W’s were to follow.

[a Hollywood-handsome, well-combed Wisconsin Ten from 1918, their short shorts held up with broad buckled leather belts, their flies laced like their shoes, their hands folded prayerfully, all the same, and their knees all padded to the max:] In his first year at Madison, Guy Lowman led the Badgers to a 14-3 record and their seventh Big Ten championship.

2007 | The driving ambition of LeBron James was momentarily diverted by the D of Tim Duncan during the NBA finals. [one of those jump shots, viewed from above the rim]

[James Naismith (of course!) with his soccer ball and peach basket] Dr. Naismith’s first goal was produced by happenstance, but it proved peach-perfect for his invention and gave the fledgling sport its name.

1962 | The cheering stopped for Ohio State when Cincinnati beat the Buckeyes 71-59 for the NCAA title. [a double-page spread of a packed arena, with Ohio cheerleaders doing the leaping in this one]

Kevin Garnett / Minnesota Timberwolves | Forward [Title page, with a scowling, yowling Garnett leaping off the page, his long legs spread-eagled border to border]

And, once again, the list goes on and on: Super Snapper Reggie Jackson; Arkansas’s Kareem Reid playing hide-and-seek with the ball; a disappointed Kentucky team (b&w) with Coach Adolph Rupp after losing in an upset to unheralded Texas Western, “the first title-winning all-black starting five” (not shown!); a young Larry Bird with two super-cute cheerleaders from Indiana State; a photocopy of Dr. Naismith’s original thirteen rules, on two-pages, typewritten, double-spaced, yellowed with age.

That’s what I mean by a big book, the sort that basketball requires, deserves, enhances. I can’t even count the frontispieces, and the full-page, full-color photos just keep a-comin’, with lots of two-page spreads, and even one four-page foldout, called “Inch by Inch: The Alltime, All-Size All-Stars,” going from 7’7” Manute Bol all the way down to 5’3” Muggsy Bogues, including 7’5” Yao Ming, 6’7” Julius Irving, 6’1” Bob Cousy, 5’8” Ann Meyers, 5’7” Spud Webb, 5’4” Suzi McConnell, and every inch in between.

But, of course, you know my favorite photo. It’s a two-page spread:

Two Pistons get all fouled up trying to do the near impossible: put the brakes on Boston’s ball-bearing Bob Cousy

Cousy is dribbling, in his white Celtic uniform trimmed with green, and his familiar black gym shoes, his lower body at a perfect ninety-degree angle with the floor (and his left foot), but hinged at the waist to form a vee, his right arm controlling the ball and his balance, his eyes slanted at the hole he’s created by tricking two Pistons (in red, white, and blue) into bumbling into one another. One knows what’s next: another layup or assist or quick pump for two.

But I told you, didn’t I, that this is more than a coffee table book; so it’s more than magnificent photographs, too. Already, in these captions, you hear the poet behind the prose, playing with language like a Harlem Globetrotter playing with basketballs: Naismith’s baskets were “peach-perfect”; a victory with the old laced-up ball was “a good lacing”; and bouncing alliteration lets us see someone “put the brakes on Boston’s ball-bearing Bob Cousy.”

Some books are for reading; some are for careful study or analysis; some, for quick skimming or scanning; and some, for leisurely browsing. This one is for leisurely browsing. It is divided, more or less, into decades, with all-star NCAA and NBA teams for each decade; players’ nicknames; leaders in scoring, rebounds, and the like; “Wish You Were There”; important transactions; innovations; “By the numbers” (curious stats from these years); “Elsewhere in Sports”; and a feature called “What’s Happening,” providing historical contexts as represented by the covers of news magazines like Time, Life, People. Vogue, Scientific American, National Lampoon, etcetera, etcetera. Each decade has a frontispiece: one of the stars of the era dressed to the hilt in fashions of the times; e.g., George Mikan with the necktie, kerchief, and rimless glasses of a BMOC in the pre-1950s, Bill Bradley in the beret, scarf, corduroy, and arched eyebrow of Princeton in the 1970s, street-tough Allen Iverson with the beads, open collar, and tattoos of the 1990s, and naturally the hip LeBron James in the low-slung jeans and floppy white t-shirt of the 2000s.

The foreword to the book as a whole is an historical essay, giving all the details of Dr. Naismith’s invention to keep boisterous YMCA students – missionaries to be – under (in “the Phys. Ed. class from Hell at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass.” in December, 1891). The title assigned to the foreword by Alexander Wolff is “GOOD GAWD! how ever did we get here from there?” Wolff has another historical essay, “The Golden Rules,” specifically on Naismith’s development and preservation of his original thirteen rules. The formal introduction, by Jack McCallum, catalogs “seminal moments in hoops history” (how’s that for alliteration, assonance, and consonance all in one precise phrase?). He lists one moment for each of the 24 seconds on the shot clock – an innovation in the sport dating from 1954, coincidentally the same year Sports Illustrated began publishing. McCallum concludes his list at :00 with the “one-year-wonders,” those kids who play basketball in college for only one year, now that they can be drafted at nineteen. These three prefatory essays (having just one would not do!) lead us into the prose texts at the heart of the book. (One major deficiency: no poetry, not even John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player”)

But scattered all through the book, among the photos and decades are little one-page essays, excerpted from Sports Illustrated articles, with an accompanying full-page photo. They are a little bit frustrating in that they almost always make me want to read the whole article, but they do make fascinating browsing. The subjects are ones you would expect: the Boston Celtics, Kareem, Carolina’s winning coach Dean Smith, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Dr. J, Pistol Pete, Larry, Magic, Michael Jordan, Shaquille, UCLA in the Sixties under John Wooden, Bob Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers of 1976, and the last one, devoted to the first “big man” who changed the game, the geeky George Mikan. And some you might find a little bit surprising: the Duke-Carolina rivalry, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Duke-Kentucky “greatest college game ever played,” in which the lead changed hands five times in the last 31.5 seconds, Diana Taurasi of the UConn women’s champions, ghetto playgrounds, and a moving eulogy for Jimmy Valvano after his death from cancer.

I can’t resist one long quote to illustrate the prose you might expect in these essays. It’s about Pete Maravich, of course, from 1968: “The LSU offense is Pete Maravich with the ball.” Here’s a description of the Pistol in action (it’s me in my wildest dreams):

Here he comes now . . . . The first defensive man slows him at the top of the zone, but Maravich goes right and is immediately swarmed over and double-teamed. He jumps, gliding forward through the air, and either hits the open man in the corner or puts the ball up to the basket himself. The next minute he dribbles by the first man, but he is hit by three defenders at the foul line and throws a hook pass to his blind side or slams the ball behind his back, a bounce pass to the corner again. He comes up once more and takes the shot himself, sliding through the zone and hooking from the corner on the run, or driving under and, with his back to the basket, flipping the ball in with a lefthanded, underhand double-jump shot.

After a time-out, Maravich looks his man in the eye and fires a push shot from 40 feet or gives him the head fake for the push shot and then is quickly on the move with a crossover dribble under his leg, around the man, to the left and up for his jump shot. If he misses, he is following, leaping, crashing over bigger and stronger players to tap the ball into the basket.

Dream on, man, dream on!

But it’s the photos that take the day in this book; action shots put you on the spot; close-ups let you read character (Pistol Pete’s dreamy-eyed, smooth-faced portrait shows why he’s called “America’s Sweetheart, Every Mother’s Son, the Teeny Boppers’ Top Cat”), some old b&w snapshots, wide-lens panoramas of crowded arenas, dazzling special effects. And for the connoisseur of souvenirs, there are pages of historic artifacts, a museum in print: sneakers, the old short shorts vs. today’s long, baggy ones, championship rings, game tickets, basketballs themselves, trading cards, Hollywood videotapes, an old-time knee pad, Jerry Lucas’s retired #11 jersey from Ohio State, held neatly in place by buttoning under the crotch. . . .

So how does one close out The Basketball Book that opened with Bob Cousy’s well-worn black high-topper shoe? Of course. What else? A big double-page spread of Shaquille O’Neal’s bright red, “Dunkman” sneaker, size 22, the largest in NBA history, its surface gleaming like glossy plastic, its logo a slam dunk, its lines elegant and futuristic. Did I say bright red? Shiny bright red?

“Good Gawd! How ever did we get here from there?”