‘The Backpack Baller: The Fantastical Basketball Voyage of Kevin Durant’ Kickstarter is Live Now


SLAM friend Brad Graham has penned The Backpack Baller: The Fantastical Basketball Voyage of Kevin Durant, a 250-page book about KD that you should definitely check out, but in order to do so, Brad needs your help: Beginning today, he’s launched a Kickstarter to help raise money to cover the planning, production, printing, shipping, design and editing costs of his book. BG is looking for 35K over the next 35 days (a number that might sound familiar)—and you can help him make it happen here. We’ll have an excerpt from the book on our site next week, and here are some more details on the book, courtesy of a press release: “The Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant is our most inscrutable basketball hero. Defying expectations in his game, work ethic, maturity, and temperament, Durant is a guard in a forward’s body; destined for the Hall but still hustling like a 12th man; a youngblood with an old soul; a really nice guy and a very bad man. The second best player on the planet, KD has earned four All-NBA First Team selections in six years of professional basketball. He’s Madison Avenue’s go-to guy, a heavyweight of the gaming world, a motion picture headliner and a superstar in the eyes of millions around the globe. And yet we seem to barely know him at all. That changes now. Over 250 pages of original interviews, revealing essays, and tasty graphics, author / designer Brad Graham delivers the micro- and macro-truth in The Backpack Baller: The Fantastical Basketball Voyage of Kevin Durant. An artful mash-up of long form journalism, graphic design exposition and stat geekery, the book is a labor of love for Graham – independent, self published, and crowd funded. In conjunction with an exclusive excerpt dropping in SLAM Magazine Issue 174, The Backpack Baller will go live on KickStarter from Wednesday November 27, 2013. Currently 80 percent complete and needing more of a Kick than a Start, the book will – with one more edit, one more polish, and 35 more days of rumination, renovation, and rearrangement – be ready to print, bind, and release, an instant inclusion on every #TeamKD collectors’ item wish lists.”