Basketball Was Never Really About Basketball
What this book is actually about, and why we didn't write a sports book
We did not set out to write a sports book.
The first sign of the obsession wasn’t a basketball. It was a Wiggles song called “Bouncing Balls” — Ravi running around the house with every ball he could find, moving rhythmically, absorbed entirely in the sound and motion of things bouncing. Volleyballs. Plushie balls. Anything that moved when you hit it.
Basketball arrived later, through a television screen. The Harlem Globetrotters. The spectacle of them — the tricks, the crowd, the percussive choreography. He watched a video of the Globetrotters performing with Stomp and reenacted it. Repeatedly. With a required audience.
The obsession was always about rhythm, sound, and spectacle. Basketball was the container.
This distinction matters for how you read the book.
Basketball & Pizza is not a book about learning to dribble. It’s not a book about making the team or practicing until you get it right. There is a moment — one moment — where Little Spark misses a shot, and the book says: that’s okay. Try again. And then we move on. Because that is not what this book is about either.
The book is about what it looks like when a child is inside their obsession. The rituals. The vocabulary they absorb and make their own. The way they recruit everyone around them into the world they’re building. The insistence on things being done in the right order.
Little Spark doesn’t just love basketball. He has a system. The plushies — Gigi the giraffe, Peter Rabbit, Matcha the green bunny — are the crowd. They have to be arranged. The confetti bucket trick has to be done correctly. Pizza night has a specific sequence that cannot be altered.
This is not quirk. This is a child’s inner life made visible.
His favorite Globetrotter is Ace — a female player, number 1, who performs a low rapid dribble with a distinctive head movement. Ravi imitated the move by putting the ball on the ground and shaking his head while moving it between his hands. He couldn’t dribble fast enough to do it correctly, so he made it his own.
This detail is in the book. It’s also real.
He chose number 1 for his jersey because Ace wears number 1. He told his father: “I’m number one. You’re number zero.”
That’s in the book too.
The title came from a correction. Avi said “pizza and basketball.” Little Spark — the real child behind the character — said no. Basketball and pizza. The order matters. Some things just have a right sequence and a child who knows his obsession knows which one comes first.
The title of this book belongs to him.
By the end of Basketball & Pizza, the crowd has gone wild three times — first the plushies, then the family, then a dream of something larger. The book closes with two parents leaning over a sleeping child, the basketball court quiet, the night done. It is an ordinary sacred image. The kind that doesn’t announce itself.
That’s the whole book, right there.
Basketball & Pizza: A Story About Big Dreams, Family, and the Best Nights Ever is available now at littlehollowbooks.com.
