Preface: In 2010, the management at ESPN The Magazine put out a call for submissions of sports-themed short fiction. Dave Eggers, whose memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had been a Pulitzer finalist, was going to serve as the guest editor of an all-fiction issue. I submitted a piece that featured a real-life former pro basketball player named John Brisker and a trove of FBI files focused on Brisker that I had acquired through a Freedom of Information filing. I had been researching a non-fiction piece about Brisker's disappearance in Africa in the early 80s and interviewed members of Brisker's family and teammates going back to his high-school days in Detroit, his time at the University of Toledo and his runs in the ABA and NBA. I re-worked my research into an imagined piece of short fiction. Eggers and the ESPN editors made "John Brisker's Greatest Game" the only piece by a sportswriter to make the cut. So I made my fiction debut in a publication with an audited circulation of more than two-million.