Winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Prize for Literary Sports Writing

The true story of the game that never should have happened–and of a nation within the brink of monumental change

In the fall of 1943, in the little-known NEW YORK College for Negroes, Mentor John McLendon was for the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of Wayne Naismith, the game’s inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become about THE TRICK Game: A Wartime Tale of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph the highest-scoring college team in America–a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty factors per game. However his players confronted danger every time they traveled backcountry highways.

Across town, at Duke College or university, the best basketball squad in campus wasn’t the Blue Devils, but an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Composed of previous college superstars from in the united states, the group dismantled everyone they encountered, like the Duke varsity. They were prepared to take on anyone–until an audacious invitation came, one which was years ahead of anything the South experienced ever noticed before. What occurred next wasn’t on anyone’s plan. Based on many years of analysis, The Secret Game is a story of courage and dedication, and of an unbelievable, long-buried minute in the nation’s sporting previous. The riveting, true account of an extraordinary season, it’s the tale of how a group of forgotten college golf ball players, aided by a pair of refugees from Nazi Germany and a group of daring pupil activists, not merely blazed a path for a new sort of America, but helped produce one of the most meaningful moments in basketball history.