This is a tough book to read, each page is difficult to digest, and every single story is hard to read.

When I read Red and me, I found some hard stories about the racism, the challenges the players were having to dedicate their lives to this sport, etc, etc. Hard labor explains how this happens across the whole country without exception.

Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed The Billion-Dollar NBA

The whole book goes around the Oscar Robertson’s lawsuit against the NBA that finally made possible the free agency for the NBA players.

The first days of the free agency were not good days, and the players involved in this mechanism were always in trouble.

The suit took 6 years (1970 – 1976) and it blocked the ABA – NBA merge. So you can imagine how Oscar and the other 13 players pushing the NBA as an adversary, so they treated accordingly; not easy days for these players that were spending their savings on attorneys.

The book also covers so many inside stories about the game,

and this is something that makes the book warming about the stories, the personalities of the players, and how the things happened during those days.