Reading the Final Four
After the weekend’s bloodletting I emerged groundhog-like from the pit of my office bracket contest just long enough to sniff 11th place in a 12-person pool. I do like to think I’m a little better at picking college basketball books than picking Final Four matchups.
A solid place to start is with John Feinstein’s Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four, which chronicles the 2005 NCAA tournament through a series of the author’s conversations with prominent coaches, players, and commentators. Feinstein observes a number of interesting characters along the way like former USC coach George Raveling, who once served as Martin Luther King’s bodyguard, and polarizingly passionate ESPN personality Dick Vitale.
In this excerpt from the introduction of Last Dance, Duke University’s legendary Coach Mike Krzyzewski describes his mixed feelings about attending the Final Four as an outside observer on the occasions when he has failed to lead his team there with a shot at winning the national championship.
Feinstein’s first book, A Season on the Brink, is one of the most riveting and revealing sports books ever written, profiling mercurial former Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight. The author enjoyed almost unlimited access to the Indiana program for a full season in the mid-1980s as Knight tried to lead a particularly frustrating team to at least a winning record, seemingly bringing himself to the brink of madness in the process.
I lived on Tobacco Road in the heart of ACC basketball country for a couple of years and witnessed up close the amazingly bitter rivalries. Probably my favorite of Feinstein’s books examines the personalities and schools of this basketball-mad region: A March to Madness: The View from the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Feinstein focuses on insanely driven coaches like Duke’s Krzyzewski and North Carolina’s Dean Smith, whose personal rivalry was almost as dramatic as that of the teams they led. The book also considers coaches like Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins and Clemson (now Texas) coach Rick Barnes, whose failures to cope with the crucible of pressure nearly broke them as human beings.
For an even more focused look at the white-hot loathing between Duke and North Carolina, Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever lays out one insider’s wildly biased, admittedly obsessive personal history from the Carolina Blue point of view. The former Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated writer eloquently explains the hatred these two institutions share for each other, and along the way he makes some fascinating observations about what it means to be a fan:
“The answers have a lot to do with class and culture in the South, particularly in my native state, where both universities are located. Issues of identity–whether you see yourself as a populist or an elitist, as a local or an outsider, as public-minded or individually striving–get played out through allegiances to North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams. And just as war, in Carl von Clausewitz’s oft-quoted formulation, is a continuation of politics by other means, so basketball, in this case, is an act of war disguised as sport. The living and dying through one’s allegiance to either Duke or Carolina is no less real for being enacted through play and fandom. One’s psychic well-being hangs in the balance.”
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