David Halberstam

David Halberstam brought the methods of a reporter and social historian to politics, war, media, and professional sport. The Breaks of the Game follows the Portland Trail Blazers through the 1979-80 NBA season, using the team's changing fortunes to explore players, coaches, ownership, race, labor, and the league's growing commercial power. Originally published in 1981, the book remains one of Halberstam's best-known studies of sport. He had already earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam and later wrote basketball and baseball books alongside works such as The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be. His portrait of the Trail Blazers treats a single season as a window onto a changing institution.