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Last night I noticed that The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, which my husband pre-ordered, was already in the archived section of my iPhone Kindle app. Since I had already finished my book club selection for the month and hadn’t decided what to read next, I opened up The Book of Basketball.

I’m married to a subscriber of the print edition of ESPN The Magazine, so I’ve read Bill Simmons columns in the past and found them amusing, if a little heavy on the pop culture references. So while I’ll read a sports article here and there, a book fully dedicated to sports would not make it to my nightstand. And this one is 700 pages, a fact that I fortunately did not realize when I started reading, due to the Kindle’s use of locations rather than pages. The Book of Basketball is surprisingly good though, at least so far. I’m still on Chapter One the Prologue (I need chapter indicators on the screen!), where he recounts attending Celtics games as a 5-year-old with his dad. (I had to laugh at his racial identity crisis — he used to want to be called Jabaal Abdul-Simmons — because our 5-year-old son has told me that he wants “a brown face like Kobe,” and doesn’t understand why we can’t just go buy him one for Christmas.)

I enjoy watching basketball, but I’m no NBA history buff, so interspersing Simmons’ personal history with that of the league makes it an interesting read without getting so overloaded with trivia that I shut down. Normally if I read a sports magazine or blog, I read the backstory-type articles and skim game recaps. But Simmons’ account of Game 5 of the 1976 Finals between the Celtics and the Suns, most of which he slept through because it started at 9pm EST and he was just a kid, actually kept me engrossed. Here’s an excerpt starting after the dramatic finish of the second overtime:

You know the rest: the officials ruled that one second remained, referee Richie Powers got attacked by a drunken fan, the Suns called an illegal time-out to get the ball at midcourt, Jo Jo drained the technical free throw, Gar Heard made the improbable turnaround to force a third OT (I remember thinking it was a 50-footer at the time), then the Celtics narrowly escaped because of the late-game heroics of Jo Jo and an unassuming bench player named Glenn McDonald.

I don’t recognize any of the names in this sentence (like Simmons, I was five years old that year but didn’t watch the game let alone have seats a few rows behind the visitors bench) but I still want to track down a video of the game, which is a first for me.

My other response to the first few pages of The Book of Basketball is to think of Simmons in terms of The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. Most American males would agree that Simmons has the best job in the world, and even Gladwell calls him a “lucky bastard.” Simmons started his career as a sports fan while still a pre-schooler. And he didn’t just watch the big games on TV while wandering through the living room with legos or Star Wars action figures in hand. Because the Celtics by 1978 had “devolved into one of the league’s most hapless teams,” ticket prices dropped and his dad was able to buy a second season ticket for young Bill, plus their seats got upgraded to the aisle near the tunnel used by the players to access the locker rooms.

So by the time Simmons reached adulthood, he undoubtedly would have logged the 10,000 hours of viewing, cheering, game analysis, season previews, and fantasy league management required per Gladwell’s thesis to become a true expert — in this case a sports fan to top all other sports fans. Furthermore, he was presented with opportunities (I’m assuming there will be more, since I haven’t even cracked Chapter One yet) like the affordable season tickets and the prime viewing spot that gave him a chance to interact with some players. Gladwell, by the way, wrote the foreword to The Book of Basketball where he makes the case for Simmons’ depth of basketball knowledge. Mere coincidence? Gladwell’s own stories of success would say not.