As a long-time, long-suffering fan of the N.Y. Knicks pro basketball team, I welcomed the news that the team had acquired young star Carmelo Anthony, one of the many great players to come out of the Baltimore area. (He played at Towson Catholic not too long ago.) But like many Knicks fans with long memories, I'm a little leery of superstar signings, because they often promise more than they yield.
I still recall the heroics of the 1969-70 championship team led by Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley, which was much, much greater than the sum of its parts.
So for the first road trip, I'd suggest the Anthony -- and the other players who are joining the Knicks in the big trade -- read a bit of basketball history. There's no better place to start than "A Sense of Where You Are," John McPhee's classic about Bradley's college days at Princeton. McPhee is one of my favorite writers, and has an amazing range, from basketball to geology to oranges to shad.
Here's an excerpt, from the Macmillan website: "After watching Bradley play several times, even when he was eighteen, it seemed to me that I had been watching all the possibilities of the game that I had ever imagined, and then some. His play was integral. There was nothing missing. He not only worked hard on defense, for example, he worked hard on defense when the other team was hopelessly beaten. He did all kinds of things he didn't have to do simply because those were the dimensions of the game."