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"Bill Simmons has the generous title of ESPN's all-encompassing \"Sports Guy,\" but his truest passion\u2014and his ultimate expertise\u2014falls in covering basketball. He's one of the game's premier scribes, a bona fide authority on all things pro roundball. Which is why it probably surprises no one that he's built a personal library comprised of \"basically every NBA book that's every been written.\" All this not only amounts to our enthusiastic endorsement of his new, massive tome, The Book of Basketball (out today!), but also why we asked Simmons to give us his top-five titles from his library:\n\nThe Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam\n\n My all-time favorite. It's about the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers, and it catches the league at an awesome time. It's Bird and Magic's rookie year. CBS is tape-delaying all the games. And everybody is using cocaine. It really seemed liked the sport was headed toward a bad place. And the access Halberstam gets is just unbelievable. He wouldn't be able to get access like that now. He traveled with the team the whole season\u2014he was eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with each guy. After the league became a huge business during the Jordan era, and players started making a ton of money, the league didn't need the writers anymore. It's just an amazing book. I've read it at least once a year, every year since it came out.\n\nUnfinished Business by Jack McCallum\n\n About the 1990-91 Boston Celtics. The last time Bird was really, really good; he ended up getting hurt that year. McCallum spent a lot of time on the road with the team, and the anecdotes are just great. It's old versus young in the league, and the NBA is starting to change. The book also reveals that Kevin McHale is one of the five funniest people who's ever lived. You'll read it and be infuriated that he didn't become the John Madden of basketball, instead of becoming one of the worst GMs ever.\n\nLoose Balls by Terry Pluto\n\n It's an oral history of the ABA. Which in itself is an awesome idea. I'd read an oral history about anything, but to have it be about the ABA\u2014that's especially in my wheelhouse. So many characters. Plus they're competing with the NBA and they're so stupid, some of the decisions they made. The ABA really created a lot of the problems in today's game: overpaying young guys, taking guys right out of high school, freshmen in college. But on the other hand they have this one guy\u2014arguably the best player in the mid-seventies\u2014Julius Irving. And he's the meal ticket of the league and the guy who kept it together by himself. There's not a lot of video of Dr. J, so he lives on through all these stories.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n A book about how the late-'80s Pistons were put together, following them through their first title season in 1988-89. It's basically about the GM and Isaiah Thomas and the mechanics of what went into that team. It's another type of book that couldn't be written anymore because you wouldn't get that kind of access. That was a particularly interesting team because there were a lot of forceful personalities, yet they didn't have one superstar, which is normally what you need to win the title. Here was a team that was built around a 6-ft. guard, which had never happened before. No one had ever won the title like that.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Came out in 1973. And it gave me a lot of material for my book. He's so full of himself and he twists everything around to fit his career, and he has stories about getting blown by stewardesses. It's just fantastic. I love everything about it. The cover's great. It's this blue cover of Wilt\u2014close up of him. It just cracks me up. If you've ever wondered why Wilt only won two titles when he was allegedly this unstoppable force, read the book and you'll understand."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/gq-book-club-bill-the-sports-guy-simmons>