Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball

by Thomas Beller

For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

Genres: Sports, Basketball, Essays, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

Published November 8, 2022

About the author

Thomas Beller is an American author and editor.

Reviews

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be hard for me to resist "Lost in the Game," a series of essays about basketball -- and many of them about pickup basketball. Yes, Thomas Beller played on the asphalt of New York and other big cities, while I spent decades in the air-conditioned gyms of the suburbs; and yes, he was 6-5 and a college player while I'm 5-8 and never even played in high school. But both of us spent far too much time on the courts, and far too much focus on playing well in games most didn't remember for more than 10 minutes after they were done.

But Beller, an English professor and author, encapsulates both the charm and challenge of the pickup game. There are those who try to bully, those who try to overawe and those who barely try at all, and both Beller and I have played against them all.

Granted, his literary allusions sometimes get the best of him, and the several essays about his time covering NBA players and teams aren't much more than good sports journalism but Beller's ability to get inside the allure of basketball, the attraction of ball and basket, is special.

Of course, "Lost in the Game" works better if you hungered to play until your 50s and beyond, but even those whose connection with basketball is less visceral will find much to enjoy in Beller's exploration of the pickup game and the NBA life -- references to Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" notwithstanding.

[Matthew Wennersten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lost In The Game was my book of the year for 2025, a sublime collection of essays, meditations on basketball that transcend sport. Beller's writing is crisp, funny, and universal - a book for which no knowledge of the game is required (as it is a superb introduction), but one that rewards a life of fandom through the illustrated journey of a life of craft. Scenes shine like freshly developed Polaroids, from stadium parking lots to deserted, decrepit courts, guided by a hard-bitten affection for things always a bit out of reach. Most of all, it is a book about fatherhood by a fatherless boy, haunted by and rebelling against a ghost, triumphantly scoring an improbable triple digits in an orgy of surpassing greatness.

[Midori · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 STARS, rounded up
the essay i most enjoyed (and the reason i read the book) was about enigmatic center nikola jokic.
other pieces were autographical musings, and a few were pelicans centric.
i didn't read the book in its entirety because i skipped the essays about players/teams whose style of play i don't like.

[Erika Verhagen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s exceptionally easy to see the attempt to summon the ghost of Roger Angell in many these essays. I found it altogether a better book when he sloughed off that skin writing about streetball (and about wanting to dunk (literally) on a recently de-fathered child at a charity basketball game).

[فاروق · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a collection of essays and articles the author had written over the past decade or so, so it wasn’t necessarily an intentional collection. A lot of good essays, a lot of just okay ones. But still, time with this book, with basketball, was time well spent.

[John Julius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book impressed me most with its chapters of honest and insightful memoir about playing pick-up ball and trying to measure up on the court. Full discussion of this book and Alexander Wolff's "Big Game, Small World" here: https://youtu.be/m4TpEggyXQA

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good essays, but a lot of repetition throughout

[Elizabeth Benedict · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not reading LOST IN THE GAME because I'm a basketball fan, but because I'm a Thomas Beller fan. I love his occasional columns in the NYT, as when his family had to evacuate in a hurricane in New Orleans, a sort of obit in the New Yorker for Jerry Stiller, because they lived in the same building, and these elegiac essays collected here about his beloved sport of basketball. His sentences are crisp, beautiful, and often heartbreaking.

One element that makes them so powerful is that they're often about longing. Longing for a missing person (his father), longing for a New York City that's gone, longing for pick up basketball games in NYC's playground courts, and for the incredible characters who populated them, including a guy named Homicide.

I'm halfway through the book, and already don't want it to end. I live near some of the basketball courts he writes about in Riverside park, and I'll never look at the same way now that I've read his book.