There are very few authors whose releases I count down the days for. Chuck Klostermann is one of them. Shea Serrano is undeniably the other.
I’ve been familiar with Serrano’s work for a while now, his trilogy on basketball, hip-hop and movies entertainingly thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud, must-reads for diehards of those three topics. (Read them now.) He also created the highly underrated show Primo, which is still, I believe, viewable on Amazon. (Also, watch it now.) Shea Serrano’s most recent book is once again right up my alley, and if you’re reading this website with any regularity, it should be right up your alley too.
His latest endeavor, Expensive Basketball, is a love letter to the sport, dedicated to those special athletes who mastered it and how these people made his life, and ours, immeasurably better. (Key word: immeasurably, at least numerically.)
Serrano describes what he means by Expensive Basketball in its opening chapter. It’s “an affirmation of how sometimes you watch a person do a thing on a basketball court and it feels the same way it feels when you lie in the grass at night and stare up at the moon for long enough that you start to think about how incredible it is that you really, truly, honestly, actually exist.”
Serrano is a basketball fan of the highest order. He is also a poet, an analyst and a free thinker. As you’ll find out when you read Expensive Basketball, because you should, he breaks down players’ contributions to the game with such delight, that you can almost picture them, many now retired, reading the chapter he wrote about them while sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, chuckling, maybe even blushing, at his complimentary words, as they reminisce about their career and perhaps, in the process, admire Serrano’s work as much as he admires theirs.
Serrano loves basketball for both its quantifiable and unquantifiable nature. “Everything in basketball is measured. Everything in basketball is counted, and quantified, and computed. And yet, no matter how expansive the list of various pinpoint-specific, statistical categories gets, some basketball things remain uncountable. More poetry than calculation; more art than numerical value.” Serrano uses the shooting techniques of Ray Allen and Joakim Noah to prove his point that, even if you knew nothing about the sport, by watching those two release a basketball, you’d know without a doubt that one is more aesthetically pleasing than the other. Not that Joakim’s wasn’t effective. It just wasn’t in any way Ray-like. Few were.
Every succeeding chapter is an ode to basketball and those who played it at its highest level. And if you know anything about Shea, a man who grew up in Texas rooting for the Spurs, it will come as no surprise that his book starts with an unapologetic love letter to Tim Duncan, who he calls “beautiful, gargantuan and quiet.” Again, if you like basketball described in the most heartfelt way possible, Shea Serrano’s work is for you.
“Tim Duncan operated on the basketball court the way that erosion operates in nature – consistently and uncompromisingly and with a baked-in, nearly imperceptible destructive terror. He simply leaned on you and leaned on you and leaned on you, and then you broke, and then he won, and then he went home.”
Serrano’s is a welcome blend of sports and pop culture, for what is sports if not pop culture? Expensive Basketball is a cross-generational, multimedia explosion, within which he compares Tim Duncan to the Terminator, Sue Bird to Samuel L. Jackson’s choice of weaponry in Jackie Brown and Reggie Miller to Cool Hand Luke.
And just wait, WAIT, until you get to the chapter on Steph Curry. No spoilers. Just pure poetry, as there should be, when describing the greatest, deadliest, rangiest jump shooter any of us have seen or will see again.
There’s his chapter on the cultural impact of 1993 Charlotte Hornets and his thoroughly accurate description of Shaquille O’Neal. “Trying to stop him from crushing over you in the post by putting a forearm in his back was like trying to stop a tidal wave from hitting the beach by throwing a handful of sand at it.” He’ll later tell the tale of how, desperately wanting to hate Shaq (for how he’d treated his Spurs and every other team in the league), he’d end up falling in love with him minutes after meeting him.
If you’re a true basketball nerd, you’ll down Expensive Basketball as you would an ice-cold Gatorade after a pick-up game on a hot summer day, one that you had, of course, won by hitting the game-winning jumper.
Expensive Basketball isn’t just an ode to players, but to moments, the highlights we celebrate and the lowlights (or as Serrano calls them “Ghost Stories”) that define us as fans. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. “They’re proof of a sports life lived; proof of a moment earned; proof that something was waged, and risked, and lost. And your memory of them afterward is proof that, despite the agony and the emotion and the pain, nothing was truly taken. To the contrary: Something was given.”
It’s better to have loved and lost, Serrano would undoubtedly argue in a Shakespearean sonnet, seven-game series, for without gut-wrenching losses, what good is victory?
Serrano’s chapters are filled with relatable metaphors, embossed in pop culture yet still full of meaning, allowing you to expand your mind before delving into the comparisons he’s drawn. In doing so and even when silly, and Serrano can get silly, with every passing paragraph, you get the impression that nobody loves the NBA more than Serrano does. Except, of course, for you because you’re glued to his every word.
Hanif Abdurraqib once wrote a book entitled Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest. It won multiple awards and became a New York Times bestseller. Within its 216 pages, with every verse, Abdurraqib professes his love for A Tribe Called Quest, a love I happen to share. Serrano’s Expensive Basketball is equally as intimate and imaginative. Basketball (and probably Tribe) is to Shea as Tribe (and, also basketball, see There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension) are to Hanif.
Just like the athletic savants Shea Serrano describes in his own entertaining manner, you can’t necessarily quantify how enjoyable Expensive Basketball is. You just know by reading it that it is time well spent and well worth the price of admission.
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