Big Game, Small World Wolff

T E N W TIETH ANNIVERSARY E D I TIONRevised & Expanded 20

A BASKETBALL ADVENTURE

October 424 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1880-3 $24.95tr/£18.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1615-1 $114.95/£92.00 Rights: North America

Photo by Clara Wolff

Alexander Wolff is a journalist, editor, and author. Formerly a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated, he is the author and coauthor of several books, including The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama, Raw Recruits, and Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home.

Big Game, Small World

A Basketball Adventure ALEXANDER WOLFF

Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Revised and Expanded

“Everyone who reads this book—from kids shooting jumpers in their driveways to die-hard fans to NBA superstars—will learn something new and surprising about the game they love.”—COACH MIKE KRZYZEWSKI

“Part travel memoir, part sports narrative, Alexander Wolff’s Big Game, Small World is a beautiful rendering of a love affair with basketball and a magnificent take on why sport matters. Sports fans and writers alike will herald this new edition of this classic book.”—AMY BASS, author of One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together

During the late 1990s, eminent basketball journalist Alexander Wolff traveled the globe to determine how a game invented by a Canadian clergyman became an international phenomenon. Big Game, Small World presents Wolff’s dispatches from sixteen countries spread across five continents and multiple US states, in which he asks: What can the game tell us about the world? And what can the world tell us about the game? Whether traveling to Bhutan to challenge the King to a pickup game, exploring the women’s game in Brazil, or covering the Afrobasket tournament in Luanda, Angola, during a civil war, Wolff shows how basketball has the power to define an individual, a culture, and even a country.

This updated twentieth anniversary edition features a new preface in which Wolff outlines the contemporary rise of athleteactivists while discussing the increasing nba dominance of marquee international players like Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo. A loving celebration of basketball, Big Game, Small World is one of the most insightful books ever written about the game.