How People Reveal Themselves on the Basketball Court

A law professor hits the road telling people he’s writing a book about pickup basektball. Sure, Why Not.

The Rest of Our Lives | S&S | Summit Books (240 pages)

Tom Layward is a law professor. But in Ben Markovits’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Rest of Our Lives, the law is not where his heart is right now. Basketball is. And the court becomes a mirror for character, age, and ambition.

Our hero is on forced leave from his law school after consulting on a high-profile NBA workplace misconduct investigation and clashing with a new dean. His marriage is fraying after his wife’s affair. His daughter calls him an “angry white male.” And then there’s his health — he’s dealing with long Covid, or maybe something more serious.

A spontaneous cross-country road trip after dropping his daughter at college sounds like a pretty sane response.

Tom had played basketball in college, mostly sitting on the bench. He once considered being a writer before pivoting to law. Now he has the germ of an idea: a book about pickup basketball in America. He struggles to write a first line on hotel stationery. “People reveal themselves on the basketball court…” He rejects it. What that revelation is, and whether it helps, is another matter.

I loved this sneakily stunning book. It’s warm, observant, and so precisely written that you don’t realize how deeply it’s gotten under your skin until you’re done. The Booker committee called it “quietly exhilarating and moving” — they’re right. But they forgot to mention the basketball.

Markovits knows this world from the inside. After graduating from Oxford, he played professional basketball in Germany — which explains why the pickup game scenes feel so precise about the unspoken negotiations of effort and ego on the court.

The Old Dumb Idea

Throughout the novel, Tom tells people he is working on “a book about pickup basketball in America.” It’s “my old dumb idea for a book about pickup basketball, which was turning into something I could talk to people about, because it didn’t matter and it wasn’t going to happen anyway.”

Except it does matter. It gives structure to his road trip and becomes the way he connects with people when his professional life no longer allows it.

When Tom walks into a gym where basketball is being played, “my heart rate ticks up. Just the echoes of those bouncing balls… It’s not excitement exactly, more…” The sentence trails off, but the point is clear: this is where he feels most himself. Not in the courtroom or the classroom, but on the court.

Meeting with Brian Palmetto, an old college teammate who until recently worked for the Denver Nuggets, Tom asks: “Can you still dunk?”

“Fuck no,” Brian answers.

Is there a more succinct, perfect way to describe middle age? Brian still knows how the game works. He doesn’t move his feet, doesn’t jump six inches off the ground, but he has quick hands. “When he set a pick, he really set a pick.”

Tom reflects: “But you forget what it’s like to play with somebody who really knows what he’s doing. The world opens up.”

When You Talk to Crazy People

The legal thread that most directly intersects with basketball involves Todd Gimmell, a former Denver Nuggets player who wants to file a class-action lawsuit alleging systematic discrimination against white players.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Tom’s college friend Brian connects them. Brian is excited about the case: “This may be what you’ve been looking for. I mean, the prima facie evidence is overwhelming.”

Tom is skeptical. But in his lawyerly, methodical way, he does not dismiss the claim outright. Instead, he listens to the statistical argument. More than sixty percent of Division I college basketball players are white — that’s the main recruiting pool for the NBA. But less than twenty-five percent of NBA players are white, and many of those are European. The claim is that white players, as a class, earn significantly less than the league average.

Tom pushes back. “Maybe white guys just aren’t as good.”

Todd is ready. He has studies. He has comparators. He has explanations for why the numbers still matter. Tom clocks what is happening immediately: “When you talk to crazy people, they’re all expert in their particular branch of craziness.”

There are no real-world parallels — no history of white NBA players filing discrimination claims. The closest case I could find was a 2018 lawsuit by a former Atlanta Hawks employee alleging discrimination against white employees in the front office. That was an internal employment dispute, not a player case. The premise inverts the actual history, which has focused on claims by Black players and coaches. Tom understands basketball well enough to know statistics rarely tell the whole story, but he’s drawn to the intellectual exercise anyway.

If You Look Hard Enough, My Name Is On the Report

Tom’s other legal work involves consulting on an NBA investigation into Denver Nuggets owner Terry Kirkland, accused of creating a hostile workplace for women and minorities. The parallels to recent NBA scandals are obvious — most notably the Robert Sarver investigation. In 2021, an ESPN reported a pattern of workplace misconduct by the Suns owner. The NBA hired an independent law firm to investigate, which resulted in Sarver’s suspension and a $10 million fine in September 2022. Sarver ultimately sold the team in 2023.

In Markovits’s novel, the NBA hires the firm Draxell, Schmidt, Ogilvy and Walters to investigate Kirkland. The result: a one-year suspension and a $15 million fine. “The report came out and recommended a one-year suspension and a fine of fifteen million dollars. That’s what the league decided. But the PR so far has been fairly disastrous.” Tom notes, almost offhandedly, “If you look hard enough my name is on the report.” That becomes his professional undoing. The PR backlash, combined with tensions at his law school, leads to his forced “early sabbatical.”

Tom’s legal credentials are solid. He started out “clerking for Judge Mattieson at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. After that I spent two years at Draxell and Schmidt just to pay off my law school debts.” His expertise in corporate governance makes him valuable for high-profile investigations.

This is where the novel gets interesting from a legal ethics perspective. Tom explains: “This is not a good time for me, I mean, at the law school. We’ve got a new dean, Dinah Shaw. I voted against her.” He continues: “Last year I had an issue with a couple of students — I teach a class on hate crime, which always provokes strong reactions. For some reason they decided to take it up with the dean. She’s very… she tends to take the students’ side.”

Hard to know for sure, but it sounds like he’s not aligned with the moment.

Not the Facts You Lead With

Ithought that The Rest of Our Lives was a novel about taking stock at midlife on a road trip. The children mostly raised. The career set on its path. The marriage no longer what it was. The sense of having reached the far side of whatever mountain you thought you were climbing. What’s going to happen next, in the rest of our lives.

But Markovits’s title may (and I mean “may”) be read to convey something else. “The rest of our lives” may refer to the parts of your life that you don’t lead with when you meet a stranger at a cocktail party. Children. Profession. Partner. The rest of life could mean the other stuff. The material that is uncomplicatedly you.

Like basketball.

Markovits writes with warmth about the daily textures of family life. His characters are sympathetic but not perfect. I picked up Christmas in Austin immediately after and found the same attention to domestic life. I’d welcome another book with Tom’s family — I want to spend more time with these people. If that’s conventional, I’m fine with it.

Fine Print: Thanks to Summit Books and NetGalley for the ARC. A version of this post first appeared in www.judicialjunkie.com