Hank, the nimble; Hank, the quick; Hank, the human corkscrew; Hank, as fast as light; Hank, the rubber-boned man, wrote Roy Cummings after seeing a 19-year-old Hank Luisetti perform for the first time in 1936.

Cummings sat alone in a deserted gym trying to describe to his readers what he had just witnessed on the basketball court. Luisetti, who learned the game to a background chorus of fog horns and gulls on San Francisco Bay, would later that year introduce New York’s basketball legions to the jump shot. Now Philip Pallette has created a riveting account of the basketball life of this eminently shy and decent young man who transformed Stanford basketball from a group of fun-loving dabblers into national champions. The Game Changer is a book that rediscovers the long-forgotten adulation basketball fans felt for Luisetti by tracing his journey from boyhood on to becoming basketball’s first matinee idol and the man who changed basketball forever.