Professional Basketball, Basketball Players & Coaches - Biography, Basketball - Coaching & Instruction

Full Court Pressure

Name: Full Court Pressure
Author: Curt Sampson
ISBN: 9780385476324

by Curt Sampson

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Overview

In the brave new world of the NBA, players are marketed like cartoon characters and image is all: pro basketball has become the most hyped product on the planet. Amid the relentless selling of the NBA, it's become increasingly hard to get close to the game, and more importantly, to the human beings who live and breathe hoops: the coaches and players. That's what Full Court Pressure - a detailed, hilarious, poignant look at the Seattle Sonics - accomplishes. Curt Sampson spent the 1993-94 season with the Sonics on and off the court. He casts a jaded and very funny eye at the NBA promotion machine, and he gives the true fan all the X's and O's they want.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The Seattle basketball team joined the NBA in the expansion of 1967; it won a division championship in 1979 but otherwise had a string of mediocre seasons, scarcely living up to its name of Supersonics. The ``Super'' was dropped by 1992, when George Karl became coach. A former pro player, he had coached in Cleveland for three tempestuous years, then briefly for the Golden State Warriors; then he alternated between the Albany team of the Continental Basketball Association (the NBA's minor league) and Real Madrid in Spain. A hard-driving, outspoken man, he took over the Sonics with high hopes and by 1993-94 was ready to move. Sampson (The Eternal Summer) covers that year, when Seattle compiled the best record in the regular season only to encounter a seismic shock in the playoffs. The result is a fast-moving read. Author tour. (May)

Dennis Dodge

George Karl, the brilliant, complex, dangerously volatile coach of the NBA's Seattle Sonics, combined a marvelously talented cast of players with a frenetic, in-your-face style of play to compile the league's best regular season record (6319) in 199394, only to see his team ignominiously bounced from the play-offs by lowly Denver in one of basketball's most mystifying upsets. Sampson, who seems to have spent a fair amount of time with the team and much more with Karl, chronicles the roller-coaster season in detail. Hoops junkies may wish for more courtside anecdotes and less biography, yet the copious background material on Karl and his players finally lends depth to an insightful look inside the rarefied world of professional basketball.