Basketball Feelings

A brilliant blend of sports reporting, criticism, and personal narrative, exploring the emotional world of professional basketball and the people who play it, from sports journalist and slam dunk aficionado Katie Heindl.

In professional basketball, there is the player and the person. There is the sight of 6’11” Giannis Antetokounmpo barreling toward the basket with “the kind of combustible, destructive power of event-grade fireworks,” and there is the person in the locker room after the game.

“There’s a discomfort when athletes show a glimpse of the person their body is carrying around,” writes Katie Heindl, whether it is Antetokounmpo sharing his frustration with a triple-team after the game or the emotional burden of the NBA journeyman, traded from team to team. 

With a unique blend of player profiles and cultural criticism, Heindl charts how we relate to the racialized human bodies endowed with the physical gifts to play professional basketball and the very human people who power them—in all their striving and ambition and inevitable failure to perform in a sport and in an economic system that shines a brilliant and sometimes unkind light on their rise and fall.

Basketball Feelings is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.