The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds
Pete Axthelm alternates chapters on the 1969-70 New York Knicks, then chasing their first NBA title, with chapters on the playground stars of Harlem, including Earl Manigault, Herman Knowings, and Joe Hammond. He argues that basketball is uniquely a city game because it lives in gyms, schoolyards, and cages within blocks of each other, and that Madison Square Garden and Rucker Park share more DNA than most fans realize. The Manigault chapter, in particular, has become one of the most influential pieces of basketball writing ever produced. Axthelm's prose is short, sharp, and elegiac, and the book has aged into a period portrait of a New York that no longer exists. It is short enough to read in a weekend and long enough to reshape how you see the sport.
What you might want to know about The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A slim classic that pairs the 1969-70 Knicks with the Harlem playground legends of the same era.
Simmons has cited The City Game as a foundational basketball book on his podcast and in The Book of Basketball, calling the Earl Manigault chapter one of the best things ever written about the sport.
Yes. The reporting captures a specific New York moment, but Axthelm's ideas about basketball, cities, and lost promise still shape how writers cover the game.
The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds was written by Pete Axthelm, published in 1970 by University of Nebraska Press.
The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
The City Game: Basketball from the Garden to the Playgrounds is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
