When March Went Mad
In honor of March Madness my one-man selection committee began creating a 64-entry, single-elimination tournament bracket to break down my Final Four Favorite Books of All Time.
Luckily for all involved, I was quickly distracted by Seth Davis’s new book, When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. The Sports Illustrated writer’s book describes the paths that brought Magic Johnson and Larry Bird together as opponents in the 1979 NCAA championship game. Davis shows how this marquee event catapulted both players to international stardom, transformed the NCAA basketball tournament into an annual national obsession, and jump-started the resurgence of the NBA through the next decade.
In this New York Times interview , the author discusses some of the interesting background material he learned about the two iconic hoops superstars. One of the book’s most intruiging subplots involves Bird’s coach at Indiana State, Bill Hodges, who convinced Larry Legend to give college basketball another try after washing out at Indiana and finding work as a garbageman.
This lengthy excerpt from SportsIllustrated.com describes Bird’s troubled family background and more of Hodges’s recruting efforts to lure the “Hick from French Lick” to Indiana State.
In this interview, the author discusses some of the racial undertones of the Magic vs. Bird rivalry and its role in breaking down stereotypes on and off the basketball court.
Over at Salon.com, King Kaufman points out a trend in sports book publishing that focuses on “a single game and claim(s) that the rush of history pivoted upon it.” Kaufman notes that recent studies of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees playoff, the 1960 World Series’ Game 7, and the 1958 NFL Championship Game tend to over-reach and over-simplify decades of complex events in order to magnify the importance of a single game.
Even so, Davis’s book is an entertaining narrative that captures the fleeting moment before two midwestern college kids became global icons and dragged their sport into the modern media age with them.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment