Falling from Grace

Award-winning sportswriter and author of The Plain Dealer, Terry Pluto gives readers a frank and honest opinion of the National Basketball Association in the 1990s as it dealt with a low level of support following the extraordinary popularity it saw in the 80s.

Pulling back the curtain on the struggles of the NBA in the mid-1990s, sportswriter Terry Pluto shares first-hand insight on how the league maneuvered some of its hardest seasons yet.

Teams with superstar players that couldn’t make free throws, coaches getting blank checks from their all-star players when there were no fines for the season, and ill-chosen spokesmen of shoe companies are just a few of the hardships that struck the NBA.

Through interviews and discussions with coaches, owners, refs, players, broadcasters, and general managers, Falling from Grace reveals what was going wrong with professional basketball and what must be done to save it.

Terry Pluto is an award-winning sportswriter who writes primarily for The Plain Dealer. He was a sportswriter for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1985-2007. He has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and twice been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors as the nation's top sports columnist for medium-sized newspapers. He is an eight-time winner of the Ohio Sports Writer of the Year award and has received more than fifty state and local writing awards. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Curse of Rocky Colavito, Unguarded, and Loose Balls. He lives in Akron, Ohio.