HOT CORNER

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “At the Buzzer”

Author: Bryan Burwell

Narrator: Bill Walton

Publisher: Doubleday

Price: $50

This slick, 216-page coffee table book, which contains legendary tales from the NBA and plenty of amazing photos, comes with two CDs narrated by Walton. The CDs also contain memorable calls from such legendary announcers as Chick Hearn and Johnny Most.

The book’s foreword is by Kevin Garnett, the afterword by Karl Malone.

If there is a fault with the book, it seems that it is randomly put together, even though there is a fancy table of contents that makes everything appear more organized than it is. There are four pages devoted to old hairdos, which includes Walton with his scraggly red hair and scruffy beard. There are plenty of good stories, you just have to search for them. One comes from the late Marty Glickman, the longtime New York Knick announcer. His story is about travel in the old days, specifically getting from Rochester, N.Y., to Fort Wayne, Ind. A train dropped off the players in a prairie at 5 a.m. and they had to walk a half-mile to the Green Parrot Cafe. “After we found it, we’d toss a few pebbles into a second-story window,” Glickman says. “This would wake up a woman who would call four or five of her friends to drive us some 40 miles to Fort Wayne.”

Phoenix Sun season-ticket holder Alice Cooper tells the story of how he thought about tripping John Paxson before he made the game-winning, three-point shot to secure the Chicago Bulls’ third title in 1993. “Paxson was literally two feet away from me,” Cooper says.