In 1951, sport and greed combined to rock college basketball with scandal and shatter the lives of those involved. Big Mantells the fictional story of one player sent tumbling in the shakedown. For Mack Davis, a black All-American basketball star, the point-fixing scandals represent the end of a dream. Fallen from the big time, Mack must return to the lost schoolyards of his childhood Brooklyn neighborhood, where he is now stopped cold by the sport that once saved him. Gradually, however, Mack's real love for the game, combined with a series of unexpected pressures, goads him into an ironic comeback -- playing on an all-black team for a B'nai B'rith championship in a local Brooklyn synagogue with a cast of unlikely heroes and friends.
A tight, jabbing novel that moves with the speed and hard grace of basketball itself, BIG MAN puts Jay Neugeboren among "the surprisingly tiny company of fiction writers who have captured the essence of the athlete as a human being" (Kansas City Star).

"The best novel ever written about basketball." -- James Michener

“Fast, funny, touching . . . illuminates one of the great and terrible questions of life. ‘What happens when you can’t do the thing you love?’”

Time Magazine