Shea Serrano has a new basketball book out right now.

Let us say that again.

Shea Serrano has a new basketball book out right now.

If you’re not sprinting to your local bookseller or adding it to your cart online as we speak, are you even a real basketball fan?

First released on Oct. 27, Expensive Basketball, marks Serrano’s second basketball book ever, the successor to his terrific 2017 tome Basketball (And Other Things).

“I feel like if you’re going to write a book about something, you can only write it about something that you love, especially if it’s a non-fiction book, because you’re going to spend a couple of years researching this thing and just being in it,” Serrano said during a recent conversation with this reporter. “And so for me, the only things I really, really love, pop culture-wise, are basketball of course, rap, movies, and probably TV.”

“But those are the main things — basketball, rap, movies,” Serrano added. “I knew I wanted to write a basketball book, and then it just became, ‘Well, what is it going to be? How are you going to do this?'”

Serrano honed in on a return to basketball as a subject, for the first time in nearly a decade.

“I always talk to other people who care about this thing. So I would just hit up a buddy, or go to lunch with somebody, and we’d just be sitting there chatting. And I kept asking everybody the same question, which was, ‘Tell me about your favorite basketball memory, or one of your favorite basketball memories. It could be a game that you went to, or maybe you watched it on TV, or you were with your friends, or by yourself, or with your parents, whatever, the context doesn’t matter, but what’s a basketball thing that you love?’ And every single person answered the question the exact same sort of way. It was the same pattern every single time.”

Suddenly, that emotional response to experience special hoops moments became the focus of Expensive Basketball.

“When somebody’s telling you about a thing that they love, it’s always this feeling, this emotion first. ‘I was in the arena, the ball dropped in, everybody went crazy.’ It’s always something like that,” Serrano said. “And that to me was just super interesting, and I thought, ‘Oh, okay, I’m going to do a basketball book, and I want it to be that. Let’s figure out a way to write about the basketball stuff that made you feel something.'”

In the book, the lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan concedes that Indiana Pacers Hall of Fame shooting guard Reggie Miller emerged as first favorite player, even though Miller was in David Robinson’s draft class.

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“As a kid seeing Reggie play basketball, I’m in San Antonio, I’m here pre-David Robinson draft, I was watching the Spurs before then because I’m 44 years old. So I was here pre-David, and then we draft him, and it takes a little while [two years] for him to get here because he’s got the Navy stuff going on,” Serrano said. “He’s a military guy, this is a military city. There’s very much [a mentality where] you go to work and you do your job, you don’t ask for extra and you don’t make a fuss about it and then you go home.”

Robinson’s efficient, no-nonsense approach to the game, while incredibly effective, lacked the bold oomph of Miller’s approach.

“That was all of the basketball that I was watching because this was pre-internet, pre-League Pass. The only time you got to watch basketball was if the Spurs were playing somebody, or if maybe there was a national game of the week,” Serrano revealed. “Then on one of those national games of the week, the Indiana Pacers are playing. And so for the first time, in my memory anyway, I’m watching a non-Spurs team play in a game. There’s no David Robinson out there. I don’t even know who the other team was but the Indiana Pacers were one of them. And there was this guy out there, he was running around, shoving people and talking s—.”

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Miller infamously ranks among the great smack talkers of his day, along with two other elite scorers, Boston Celtics small forward Larry Bird and Chicago Bulls shooting guard Michael Jordan.

“This thing happens sometimes when you’re watching sports, where your eye just gets drawn to somebody,” Serrano offered. “And that happened with Reggie, and I thought, ‘This is the coolest person I’ve ever seen. He has a cool haircut.’ Jerseys were cool. He’s playing basketball in a cool way, he had kind of a weird shot that just looked cool to me. It was all of these things all at once.”

Serrano went on to suggest that Miller’s impact reshaped how he thought about basketball entirely. And that’s why Miller gets his own chapter in Expensive Basketball.

“These moments happen in your life as you’re growing up where your world opens up a little bit, like somebody introduces you to a new rapper and your head goes, ‘Oh s—, there’s other stuff out there,'” Serrano noted. “Reggie was the basketball version of that, where he shows up and you just go, ‘Oh s—, there’s another way to play basketball, there’s another type of player to watch.’ And immediately I was pulled toward him. I’m sure part of that is, I have this natural propensity to run my mouth as well.”

Miller’s brand of basketball yielded similar playoff success to his fellow ’87 draftee Robinson. Although he was never an MVP, he did lead his Pacers to the 2000 NBA Finals, while redefining the import of the 3-point shot. Robinson never made the Finals while he was still the best player on the Spurs — although once Tim Duncan (another Serrano favorite who gets his own chapter) arrived in San Antonio, Robinson won two titles.

“He’s always been an underdog in every situation: against the Knicks he’s supposed to lose, against the Bulls, he’s supposed to lose. Whoever. He was always fighting back against the ocean. I always feel like that about myself,” Serrano allowed. “So there’s something very inspiring about watching this guy overachieve, over-index, be sort of fearless in the face of adversity that you as a kid hope to aspire to. But that’s really what it was with Reggie.”

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