A memoir by Whitelaw Reid coming in 2026
How Basketball Helped Me Through Anxiety,
Depression, Divorce and Made Me a Better Dad
F
rom the age of 10 all I cared about was playing pick-up basketball games with friends, shooting Nerf hoops in my room and when I could attend the
next Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
But what they didn’t realize, what nobody in my life knew, was that an addiction to hoops was the least of my problems.
Actually, if it wasn’t for basketball – not to mention God, my Granny Gloria and some really good matzah ball soup – you wouldn't be reading this now.
I was so consumed by basketball that my mom and stepdad pulled me from the ritzy New York City private school that I was flunking out of and shipped me off to a boarding school in the tiny town of Washington, Connecticut that was filled with mostly spoiled brats like myself.
The feelings I was experiencing seemed reserved for patients in mental institutions like the one we had read about in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when I was a seventh-grader at Riverdale Country School. I had no idea they were common and treatable disorders that explained a lot of the pain I was facing on a day-to-day basis.
Whether I was playing tennis at our family’s summer compound in the Adirondacks with my grandfather and namesake Whitelaw Reid, the former publisher and editor of the New York Herald Tribune, hobnobbing with famous friends of my mom’s like Martha Stewart, hosting “Whitey’s World,” my sports television show at Vanderbilt University, or working on press row for a University of Virginia basketball NCAA Tournament game at the Garden, the troubling feelings were always lurking.
Then they exploded like a Knicks' playoff crowd. That was when, you might say, Whitey’s World changed forever.
Throughout middle and high school, during my career as a basketball reporter, and especially after
I became a father and was going through a divorce, I became crippled by anxiety, depression and rage that I hid from almost everybody. It affected all of my relationships – friends, girlfriends, family members, coworkers and even people I knew only briefly from basketball, such as New York Knicks assistant coach Rick Brunson, the father of Knicks All-Star guard Jalen Brunson.
