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.”

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.   

Other sports, notably baseball and boxing, have inspired more books that are reliably considered classics.  Pro basketball might not have as impressive a pedigree as those 19th century games, but several books on the subject are well worth the attention of fans fighting their way through a lottery-bound season.

The great David Halberstam tackled the subject of sports in between brilliant books on politics, history, media, and American culture.  One of his most overlooked works is The Breaks of the Game, a genuine masterpiece that profiles the troubled NBA of the late 1970s and early 80s. 

Halberstam followed Bill Walton’s Portland Trail Blazers in the seasons following their 1977 championship as the team, and the whole league, almost imploded from controversies and injuries.  While Walton is one of the book’s fascinating characters, with the same infuriating personality on display 30 years later in his TV color commentaries, the heart of the book is the tragic figure of Kermit Washington.

In one of professional sports’ ugliest moments, Washington nearly killed opposing player Rudy Tomjanovich during a bench-clearing brawl with a wild but too-perfect punch.  The soft-spoken, thoughtful Washington was haunted by his almost unforgiveable act for years, and his internal scars are shown by Halberstam to be almost as awful as Tomjanovich’s physical ones.

Halberstam was a genius at telling revealing stories through the words of his interview subjects, and the tales of this gritty, pre-skybox, pre-Michael Jordan era give a fascinating background to the well-oiled corporate machine of today’s NBA.