Customer Reviews

The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers in the Words of Those Who Lived It

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic and absolutely worthwhile read for any sports fan. I am primarily a hockey fan and being a transplanted Philadelphian living in Los Angeles for 20 years, I have a profound hatred for the Lakers yet I would GLADLY shell out the cover price for a book of this quaility with content of this much interest.

Many biographies and autobiographies have been produced by the Laker organization over the years. I enjoyed reading about Chamberlain (Philly's finest!), Jabbar, Magic, Jerry West, the Buss family and others indiviually. This book is a concise and comprehensive look at the whole bunch as well as many other significant figures whose contributions are not as well-chronicled.

The Lakers DVD set is considerably more expensive and insofar as telling the story of the franchise, I do not think it does the quality job Lazenby and company do here. This is really a marvelous compilation of accounts of a truly fascinating franchise that has dominated the NBA in four different eras and been highly competitive in most others.

This book should come as a gift with Laker season tickets and really is great for anyone interested in basketball or sports in general.

This is by far the best book on pro basketball in recent memory. If you're a fan of the NBA, not just the Lakers, you owe it to yourself to read this book. An absolutely fascinating oral history. Highly recommended.

For some reason, sports lends itself perfectly to oral biographies, especially basketball. The Terry Pluto book about the ABA, "Loose Balls" is one of the greatest sports books ever written.

This is a delightful book, an easy read and incredibly informative. All eras of the Lakers are covered, from startup through current. There are a lot of sources from every era, many of them contradicting each other, which is great.

Jerry West is quoted throughout and that is reason enough to buy the book. He is notoriously reticent and the author deserves a huge amount of praise for getting him to open up.

Even the soap opera between Bryant, Shaq and Phil Jackson is told in a way that is readable.

Great book!!!

A good book, although I started skipping through the last third of it - too bad there wasn't more info on the Minneapolis Lakers version and the early 70's West-Chamberlain-Goodrich Lakers - it would've been nice to read more about personalities on those Laker teams - there was already enuff media saturation with the Kobe-Shaq Lakers so i started to skip thru that section. Seems kind of sad that everyone didn't have the foresight (and media saturation) like we do now, to save every lil scrap and every piece of info, so we can have a better perspective on how things were then.

What a wonderful book on the inside story of the Lakers. Having been a huge Laker fan since the early '70's, I found this book to be very informative and easy reading. This book brought back all the heartache of all the loses to Celtics, to the first championship in the '72 season.The Lakers had a great team with Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain. The 33 wins in a row will most likely never be beat. As the book moves through the '80's, I could visualize each year and the outcomes. Magic Johnson, Kareem, James Worthy and company brought alot of excitement and winning during this time. The '90's were exciting in its own right if you are fans of Kobe and Shaq. I tend to favor the early years. I would recommend this book to Laker fans of yester-year and today. Well done.

Lazenby wrote one of the best basketball books I have ever read, called The Lakers and one of the best books on the Chicago Bulls dynasty called Blood on the Horns. In this book, he tells the history of the Lakers, but this time, it is told by those who lived it. It is similar in format to Terry Pluto's excellent books Tall Tales and Loose Balls.

The book is very large - over 400 pages which makes you think it is an exhaustive and thorough collection, but it really is not. I found the book to be less informative than The Lakers, with the only difference being that that The Lakers ends in 1993 and this book goes up to the 2004 season. I was wanting more information on Magic Johnson's final comeback and the behind the scenes information on the Dennis Rodman acquisition and dismissal, but this book left me wanting much more. Furthermore on seasons that the Lakers did not do well, they are passed over briefly, so rather than being an exhaustive history, it is closer to highlights of the franchise. In defense of Lazenby, if he wrote the book I wanted, it would probably be 2 volumes, but after the bar he set with his previous work, I expected at least as much detail. If you want more detail on Magic Johnson's short lived first comeback, read The Lakers.

Lazenby goes into great detail about the Phil Jackson-Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant 4 year soap opera. We heard from the press about how Bryant broke up the team so that he could hog the ball more. Lazenby tells the other side of the story, and details what a despicable person Phil Jackson can be and how his peers and even Jerry West loathe him. He tells more about O'Neal was out of shape an uninterested in defense and rebounding and was a poor team leader. He brings credibility to the argument by often quoting the venerable Tex Winter. However, I noticed that he only briefly touches on the shortcomings of Bryant. I think he would have been better served covering this and bringing balance to the story, much as he did in Blood on the Horns. I wonder if the lack of balanced reporting is a conflict of interest, due to the fact that he wrote a Bryant biography Mad Game: The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant.

Besides exposing the Jackson/O'Neal shortcomings, the strength of the book (compared to The Lakers) is that he goes into great detail about Jack Kent Cooke's reign over the franchise, exposed how tight Jerry Buss was with his money, and covered the power plays between Jackson, Buss, and West. Also, The Lakers bounces around between time eras from the present to the past, which is a bit maddening, whereas this book has more of an authentic feel to it, since it is written in chronological order.

If you haven't read The Lakers, this is definitely worth picking up. Some of the parts will be more Cliff's Notes version compared the other book, but this book covers the last 3 NBA championships, which tells a more complete story of the franchise. If you have read the other book, and come to expect a certain level of detail from Lazenby, you may find yourself a bit disappointed.

I was fascinated by this book even though it was not very well written. In fact, a majority of the book consists of short quotes from various personages involved in the long illustrious history of the Lakers. Lazenby plays the role of a gossip columnist here, commenting on the various rumors and innuendo bantered about so freely. Normally this type of stuff would not hold my interest for long, except that it involves one of my favorite subjects: The Lakers. There is a lot of franchise history to be garnered from this collection of interviews and much of it is extremely interesting to a rabid Lakers fan such as myself, but I'm not sure how relevant this all might be to the casual follower of the team or the league.

The problem with this particular format is that many of the quotes contradict each other and others amount to unsubstantiated slurs. I especially didn't appreciate the numerous comments of the form, "...I'm not going to name names but..." These typically go on to describe drug, womanizing and attitude issues of the team as a whole without specifying individuals, but in the process smearing large groups of players with the broad brush of controversial behavior. Still, if you can recognize the difference between verifiable and unverifiable information then there is a wealth of useful historical knowledge to be gathered here. The reader of this book also needs to realize that Lazenby has his own personal biases and preferences towards those involved and picks his quotes and comments accordingly.

Despite its many shortcomings this makes a very interesting narrative that is jam-packed with Lakers factoids from the team's inception to 2005. It certainly altered my perception of Kobe Bryant among others, as I came out of this experience having much more respect for both the basketball player and the man. I am still disgusted by the scandal in Eagle, regardless of what actually happened there, but I now realize that this is really an issue to be resolved between Kobe and his wife and that we shouldn't necessarily judge people by the worst public mistakes ever exposed in their life. Integrity is not measured by our worst behavior but rather by the human equation, which includes the adjustments made to correct personal mistakes and the accumulated actions of a lifetime.

I was vacillating between giving this book three or four stars but settled on a low four in the end, around the eightieth percentile. However, your mileage may well vary and if you're not a hardcore Lakers fan, nor a aficionado of tabloid journalism, then it may prove a disappointing read.

Great book. Complete Lakers' history with easy-to-read textual quotes of the Laker's owners, stars and rivals.

The author keeps the narrative going with many voices. He does a great job of keeping your interest. Lots of colorful characters. I tuned in during the Jerry West era and then back for the Shaq and Kobe era, so it is great to learn about the in betweens. I wish it came with a DVD package.

This book was even better then I thought it would be. I reccomend it for all Hard Core Lakers Fans.