December 5, 2023
I first met Gotham Chopra when I was just a kid in elementary school, and he was a parent picking up his Kindergartner. Sneaking out at dismissal, I’d reach up and tap him on the back of arm. And when he would turn, I would grease Gotham for information about the Lakers, because I heard he knew Kobe Bryant.
We became friends, then collaborators, bonded more than anything over our shared belief in both the power of sports and storytelling. Years later, when he called me to co-write this book with him, it felt like a project a decade in the making.
We wrote the first words of this book the morning after my college graduation. We turned in the first draft to our publishers at Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, just four weeks later. It was a whirlwind, and I’m so happy to have shared the book with so many of you all since.
After publication, Religion of Sports was named to Amazon’s Editors’ pick list for “Best Nonfiction” in December 2023. It also received a starred review from Booklist, and was named to the long list for the “Non-Obvious Book Awards,” as one of their 100-best books of the year.
