Basketball can be a game of feet. It can rely on whether your shot is on or off that day. For a person who no longer appreciates the game, The Sixth Man, co-written by Carvell Wallace with NBA champion Andre Iguodala, is a must read.
The gripping best-seller calls it “a game of pounding joints and crushing bones, ligaments ripped and healed, broken. It happens fast and without apology.”
Iguodala takes the reader through what could be termed as real-life situations. It is not a celebrity recounting of events, but a realistic, artful, back-down-memory-lane recollection. It immediately can bring a smile to your face and have you remember in a flashback when he references getting his butt whipped by his grandmother for something he shouldn’t have done.
His mention of getting his butt whipped at school was a hilarious flashback, too, probably for many Americans to identify with.
The Sixth Man was well-written and Iguodala gave a good recounting of pivotal moments in his life and his career that helped shaped him into who he is today.
“By waking up every day, playing basketball, doing what I loved doing since I was a kid, doing it at the highest level, and getting paid handsomely to do it, I was quite literally living a dream,” he writes.
Reading through the book left no dry areas. It’s a good page-turner that holds your interest through and though. It immediately grabs your attention and takes you to old times of racist ideologies when he mentioned how segregated the town he grew up in was.
His recount of the atrocity of 1908 in Springfield will chill you to your core. For a person who has never seen Illinois, the book gives you a great vision of what was going through Iguodala’s mind as he aged.
“When you come from a town like Springfield, you just don’t know how you compare to the entire world that is out there,” Iguodala writes.
The Sixth Man recounts how members of Iguodala’s family played significant roles in his development in a momentous fashion.
“I could make a future. Championships and trophies. Commercials and investments. Interviews and cars. Olympics and bank accounts… what I could see was as far away from Springfield, Illinois, as anything could ever be,” he writes.
The real life examples of how injury can make your life and take away the game you love are displayed. He highlights the people who made his career what it was and is, which isn’t a glorification of his life, but a tale of how his support network helped to mold and shape his life.
As for the season, “Whatever happened last season is over” sums up not only the games of last season, but the struggle within life. In essence, the memoir is telling readers that it’s always better for us to be a better version of who we are and who we were.