Miami Hoops

Miami is full of free and ridiculously cheap stuff—one just needs to know where to look. Leave it to “The Cheap Bastard” to uncover all the ins and outs and exclusive bargains to be had, and to set forth the real deal with wit and humor.

Looking for a game? Here's your guided tour of the country's best pickup basketball courts, from the blacktops of Brooklyn to the asphalt of Anchorage to the gyms of Jackson, Mississippi. It's all inside: where the pros play, the most scenic runs in the land, and a ranking of the top five courts. ø Chris Ballard and three other former college players piled into a used Chevy van and traveled thirty-one thousand miles in seven months, playing at over a thousand courts in 166 cities in forty-eight states. This is the story of their roundball road trip and a guide to the places, people, and communities they encountered. ø More than a travel guide, Hoops Nation is "a celebration of the game of basketball as it is played in America." It includes guides to streetball fashion, the lingo of the courts, the etiquette of the pickup world, the tricks of old-guy basketball, and tips for the dunking impaired. Also included are profiles of playground legends and dispatches from the legions of basketball lifers who populate the country's courts. ø This book can tell you where they?re running today, all over America. Who?s got next?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the #1 bestselling author of The Dynasty and Tiger Woods—the “definitive…fantastic” (Sports Illustrated) biography of basketball superstar LeBron James, based on three years of exhaustive research and more than 250 interviews. LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he’s in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined—the truth is vastly more interesting than that. What makes LeBron’s story so compelling is how he won his destiny despite overwhelmingly long odds, in a drama worthy of a Dickens novel. As a child, he was a scared and lonely little boy living a nomadic existence in Akron, Ohio. His mother, who had LeBron when she was sixteen, would sometimes leave him on his own. Destitute and fatherless, he missed close to one hundred days of school in the fourth grade. Desperate, his mother placed him with a family that gave him stability and put a basketball in his hands. “An absorbing chronicle of talent, character, pluck, and luck” (Wall Street Journal) LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict, the most celebrated sports biographer of our time, paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star who, surrounded by a tight-knit group of teenage friends and adult mentors, accelerated into a speeding comet during high school. Today LeBron produces Hollywood films and television shows, has a social media presence that includes more than one hundred million followers, engages in political activism, takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, and transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy. He went from a lost boy in Akron to a beloved hero who uses his fortune to educate underprivileged children and lift up needy families—and brought home Cleveland’s first NBA championship. But LeBron is more than just the origin story of a GOAT or a recap of his multi-championship, multi-MVP, gold medal–decorated career on the court. Benedict delves into LeBron’s relationship with fame and power: how he has cultivated it, harnessed it, suffered from it, and leveraged it. In these pages, we watch his evolution from a player who avoided politics and was widely criticized for not joining his teammates in protesting China’s role in the Darfur genocide to becoming an athlete who partnered with President Obama; campaigned for Hillary Clinton; became an advocate against gun violence, racism, and voter suppression; and openly clashed with President Trump, empowering other athletes to speak out against social injustice. To capture LeBron’s extraordinary life, Benedict conducted hundreds of interviews with the people who were involved with LeBron at different stages of his life. He also obtained thousands of pages of primary source documents and mined hundreds of hours of video footage. Destined to be the authoritative account of LeBron’s life, LeBron is a “masterful…propulsive” (Los Angeles Times) and unprecedented portrait of one of the world’s most captivating figures.

The Rough Guide to Miami is the definitive guide to the city, featuring:

Eyes the color of the Mediterranean Sea. Sexy stubble shading his jawline. Niko’s dating status? Available. The problem? He might be Lexi’s new co-worker…. One flying puck. That’s all it took to change Lexi Stewart’s life. When an errant puck heads towards Lexi, she collides with Niko Xenakis, the new Dallas Demons TV producer. He’s sexy as hell and with a quick mind—and Lexi is more than smitten with the newest hire of the local sports network. That collision leads to an opportunity Lexi has always dreamed of—a chance to work at Total Access Total Sports—but also makes Niko her out-of-bounds co-worker. Or is he? With sparks too strong to ignore, Lexi and Niko follow their hearts—in pursuing careers in sports television—and each other. But the road to love is never easy, complicated by the fact that they both carry emotional baggage. Can these two break out of the past to find love in the present. If you like strong, sexy, heroes with a good heart, heroines trying to find their way in the world, and hilarious and heartfelt romance, you’ll enjoy this sports romantic comedy.

Kylie Reed vowed she’d never pick up a man in a bar. It’s one of her personal rules, after all. So falling into a gorgeous ginger’s lap, tossing a glass of wine on him, and then hoping he asks for her number while in a bar would be a trifecta of wrong, right? Organized, rule-loving, and cautious to a fault, Kylie Reed is waiting for the perfect moment to live her dreams—when she has a house, when she meets her husband, when she has been at her visual display job at a chic boutique a little while longer. All of her dreams are saved for later—as that seems to be a safer place than taking a risk to actually live them. Yet Kylie finds all her rules bending when she falls into the lap of gorgeous Harrison Flynn, captain of the Dallas Demons hockey team. Harrison harbors his own fears for the future, ones he keeps close to the vest. He’s intrigued with the brown-eyed beauty who proceeds with caution, while she’s drawn to the sexy man who pushes boundaries and functions in chaos. The phrase opposites attract has never been truer as the chemistry between them is anything but polar from the second they meet… While the attraction is hot, is that enough to make a relationship work? Can they face their fears for a future they both want? Will this relationship end before puck drop? Or will they find home ice together? If you like swoony heroes, hilarious heroines, and a couple you can cheer for, you’ll want to escape into Home Ice. Can be read as a standalone and a happily ever after is guaranteed.