December 28, 2008 I'm reading Loose Balls right now, the story of the ABA (the American Basketball Association) that was published by Terry Pluto in 1991. The subject is a compelling one, and not only for a fan of rogue sports leagues like myself. The ABA was wide open, brand new, and experimental, with a lot of obvious criminality and exploitation (of players) also taking place. It's a classic story of an upstart league taking on an established institution, the NBA. It also tells us a lot about the era in which all of this takes place, the early 1970s. Loose Balls tells the story of the free-flowing ABA Loose Balls was not so much 'written' by Terry Pluto as edited. The book is mostly a collection of interviews of dozens of individuals who were involved in the ABA—players, coaches, staff, announcers, refs, and the like. The interviews are then divided up and cross referenced according to topic. So, for example, following the topic of the ABA's tricolor basketball there are snippets of interviews taken with ABA commissioner George Mikan, ABA executive Mike Storen, former Indiana Pacer center Mel Daniels, where these individuals and others discuss the ball. At its best moments, this organization makes the book feel like a conversation about basketball, rather than simply a series of parallel interviews. At the same time, however, I find that this style gets a bit boring after a while. A lot of this just comes from my training as an historian, but I'd like to see the 'author' produce more of a narrative. Obviously, there is a narrative which emerges from the interviews, but the approach strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. One day, I'd love to have the chance to write on sports. Rogue leagues like the ABA and the USFL have always held my interest, and most of the books out there just don't work well as histories. If things don't work out with the job search, I guess it's something I can keep in mind.