The Breaks of the Game was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981. Halberstam embedded himself with the Portland Trail Blazers for the 1979-80 season — the season after the team had lost its championship core to injuries, most devastatingly the career-ending foot problems of Bill Walton. What Halberstam found was not just a basketball team in decline but a laboratory for the forces transforming American professional sports: escalating salaries, free agency, racial tension, drug use, media pressure, and the increasing power of agents and television networks.
The book’s strength is Halberstam’s refusal to treat basketball as separate from the society that produces it. The racial dynamics — Black players, white coaches and owners, overwhelmingly white media — are addressed directly and without sentimentality. The economic transformation — players who were suddenly earning more than their coaches and general managers, with the leverage to demand trades and dictate playing time — is analyzed with the same institutional rigor Halberstam brought to Vietnam and the media.
The portraits of individual players — Bill Walton’s principled stubbornness, Maurice Lucas’s intimidating presence, Kermit Washington’s attempt to rebuild his career after the Rudy Tomjanovich punch — are among Halberstam’s finest character studies. Jack Ramsay, the coach, emerges as a tragic figure: a principled man trying to manage a situation in which principles are increasingly irrelevant.
Collecting The Breaks of the Game
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80
- Signed: $150–$400