The back roads to March : the unsung, unheralded, and unknown heroes of a college basketball season /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Thirty years ago after changing the sports book landscape with his mega-hit, A Season on the Brink , #1 New York Times bestselling author John Feinstein returns to his first love--college basketball--with a fascinating and compelling journey through a landscape of unsung, unpublicized and often unknown heroes of Division-1 college hoops.

John Feinstein has already taken readers into the inner circles of top college basketball programs in The Legends Club . This time, Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball's lesser-known Cinderella stories--the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA.
Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament, but of making it past their first or second round games. Every once in a while, one of these coaches or players is plucked from obscurity to continue on to lead a major team or to play professionally, cementing their status in these fiercely passionate fan bases as a legend. These are the gifted players who aren't handled with kid gloves--they're hardworking, gritty teammates who practice and party with everyone else.
With his trademark humor and invaluable connections, John Feinstein reveals the big time programs you've never heard of, the bracket busters you didn't expect to cheer for, and the coaches who inspire them to take their teams to the next level.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Why the Back Roads (p. 1)
• 1 A New Beginning ... and the Beginning of the End (p. 13)
• 2 And the Cadets Came Marching In (p. 25)
• 3 Breakfast and Basketball (p. 39)
• 4 From 0-135 to 1-135 ... and Beyond (p. 47)
• 5 The Rearview Mirror (p. 63)
• 6 Safety School (p. 67)
• 7 The Rock and a Very Hard Place (p. 77)
• 8 Last Fran Standing (p. 90)
• 9 I Own a College-Iona Is Iona (p. 98)
• 10 Living on the Edge (p. 103)
• 11 Day-and Night-in the Cathedral (p. 111)
• 12 Rock-and-Roll Heaven (p. 128)
• 13 Christmas Gifts and Christmas Coal (p. 132)
• 14 Second-Year Law Student (p. 139)
• 15 Philly Kid (p. 152)
• 16 Gray Days (p. 157)
• 17 Let's Play Two! (p. 162)
• 18 More Than a Game (p. 175)
• 19 Yes, Christine, There Is a Farmville (p. 184)
• 20 From Kirby to the Palestra-Another Day in Hoops Heaven (p. 195)
• 21 The Old Coach and Division 3 (p. 203)
• 22 Where History Was-and Is-Made (p. 212)
• 23 The Countdown Begins (p. 224)
• 24 Dog Days and Very Cold Nights (p. 234)
• 25 From High School to Hollywood ... or Buffalo (p. 248)
• 26 The Hall of Famer They Missed (p. 263)
• 27 Starting from Square Zero (p. 269)
• 28 One Crucible for All (p. 278)
• 29 Tales of JJ and the Lefthander (p. 290)
• 30 In the Land of the Camels (p. 305)
• 31 The Madness Comes Quickly (p. 319)
• 32 Thanks for the Memories (p. 331)
• 33 The Road to Dayton ... Leads Through Norfolk (p. 342)
• 34 And Then There Were Sixty-Eight: Selection Sunday (p. 348)
• 35 Back to the Beginning (p. 356)
• 36 Midnight for Cinderella ... and for Me (p. 366)
• Epilogue (p. 377)
• Acknowledgments (p. 391)
• Index (p. 397)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

As soon as the buzzer sounded, I closed my computer. Ever helpful, the NCAA had put out its one millionth printed statement of Final Four weekend prior to the start of the game, warning all of us in the media that confetti would come pouring out of U.S. Bank Stadium's ceiling as soon as the national championship game ended.  Sure enough here it came, and I quickly closed the computer so as not to have to spend several minutes picking confetti from the keys. Not my first rodeo. It was 10:40 central time in Minneapolis--11:40 in the east--and, as was always the case on Monday night, time was precious.  For a moment, while waiting to be able to safely open the computer and resume writing, I flashed back nine years to another Monday night. There were thirty-one seconds left in the NCAA championship game between Duke and Butler, and the Bulldogs had the ball and had just called a time-out, trailing 60-59.  Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, who was that year's chairman of the NCAA basketball committee, was sitting to my left. As the buzzer sounded to end the time-out, Smith leaned over to me and said, "Okay, you're the ultimate defender of the little guy. But you're also a Duke graduate. What do you want to see happen here?"  I looked at my watch. It was 11:37 p.m. in Indianapolis. Prior to the game, my editor at the Washington Post had told me that if I wanted my column to make the home edition of the newspaper, he needed it in the office by midnight.  I had spent most of the last thirty minutes writing and rewriting as the game swung back and forth. The first ten paragraphs were unwritten, pending the outcome.  "Gene, it's 11:37 p.m.," I said. "I have to hit the send button by midnight or my column won't make most of the morning's papers. The only thing I don't want to see is f----overtime."  Smith laughed. I could not have been more serious. The late, great Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, had explained to me early in my career that "the first rule of sportswriting is simple: it's always okay to root for yourself."  On that crisp April evening in 2010, I wasn't rooting for Butler--the David of college basketball--a team that had pulled one upset after another to reach the final game and now had close to seventy thousand fans screaming for one last shocker to finish the Disney movie.  I wasn't rooting for Duke--my alma mater--coached by Mike Krzyzewski, someone I had known well, liked, and admired for more than thirty years. In the minds of most college basketball fans, Duke wasn't just Goliath; it was Darth Vader. The evil empire in shorts.  I wasn't rooting for either team. I was rooting, at that moment, for me. I knew I had a great story--regardless of the outcome. I just needed to have time to write it so that the Post 's readers would get a chance to read it.  Nine years later, I had felt much the same way as the Virginia-Texas Tech national championship game wound down. Like Duke-Butler, it was riveting, the teams taking turns appearing to gain control.  Virginia had led by ten late in the second half, but Texas Tech had rallied to take a 68-65 lead with under twenty seconds to play. Somehow, the Red Raiders, a superb defensive team, lost track of UVA's De'Andre Hunter, leaving him wide-open in the corner.  As soon as I saw Hunter catch the ball, I knew his three-point shot was going in and the game was going to overtime. Texas Tech lost in overtime; I lost in regulation.  But even as the clock ticked toward midnight on the East Coast and I waited impatiently for it to be safe to reopen my laptop, I was smiling while Virginia celebrated.  I was happy for Coach Tony Bennett, who had been brutally maligned a year earlier after the Cavaliers had become the first No. 1 seed in NCAA Tournament history to lose to a No. 16 seed. Prior to UVA's game in Charlotte against the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, No. 1 seeds had been 135-0 against No. 16 seeds.  Just before midnight on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, that record had become 135-1. UMBC-74, Virginia-54. That score hangs from a banner inside UMBC's Retriever Events Center and will be there for as long as they continue to play basketball.  That loss hung around Bennett's neck for more than a year. He answered every question, never snapped when it came up, and didn't bother to mention that Hunter, arguably his best player, had been injured that night and watched the game from the bench.  Bennett never fell back on the clichés of jock-world losers: "That's in the past, we've moved on"; "I only want to talk about the present"; or the catchall "That was a different team. I'm focused on this team."  In a twist, the coach who most wanted to put UMBC-74, Virginia-54, behind him was UMBC coach Ryan Odom. His slogan for his 2018-19 team was "no looking in the rearview mirror."  Odom's Retrievers were a different team: K. J. Maura and Jairus Lyles, the senior guards who had keyed the upset, were both gone. UMBC wasn't just a different team; it had a different place in the college basketball pantheon. No longer did basketball people wonder what the letters UMBC meant when spelled out.  Everyone knew what they meant: UMBC-74, Virginia-54. Or, if you preferred, 1-135.  "It's an amazing story, isn't it?" Bennett said to me about an hour after the nets came down in Minneapolis, referencing where his team had been that night in Charlotte and where it was now, walking away with the championship plaque.  Of course, the NCAA had carefully choreographed every moment of the postgame celebration. First the confetti; then the players and coaches being herded onto a platform where NCAA president Mark Emmert would grab the microphone for a few unneeded words; followed by basketball committee chairman Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford, presenting the plaque to Bennett.  Then the nets were cut down, not like in the old days when players hoisted one another and then the coaches up to the rim to get their cuts of the net, but on something called "the official ladder of the NCAA."  Finally came the playing of the impossibly hokey and corny "One Shining Moment," during which the players and coaches were required to stand on the podium looking teary-eyed and the media was required to clear the area around the podium.  Nothing interferes with "One Shining Moment." It is, after all, a tribute to the purity of the great moments that make up the NCAA Tournament. Forget the FBI corruption investigations, the coaches with multimillion-dollar salaries; this is all about the "student-athletes."  Virginia was a worthy and eminently likable champion. And, within three weeks of the playing of "One Shining Moment," four of their starters--all underclassmen--had declared for the NBA draft.  From "One Shining Moment" to "Show Me the Money."  I didn't blame any of them even a little bit.  As I watched the Virginia players cut down that final net, my mind raced sixty-one miles down the road from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Farmville, Virginia.  Yes, Farmville, Virginia, is a real place--although my wife was very skeptical about that fact on the night of January 24, 2019, when I had traveled there to watch Longwood University host High Point in a Big South Conference game.  "Classic coaching matchup," Longwood coach Griff Aldrich had said that afternoon. "Me, with twelve career coaching wins, taking on Tubby Smith with six hundred and six--and a national championship."  Griff smiled. "My players better be a lot better than his players, because I'm sure as heck not going to outcoach him."  Aldrich's players were good enough that night for a 55-51 victory, cutting the gap between Aldrich and Smith in wins from 594 to 593.  During the game, my wife, Christine, sent me a text. Christine is not exactly a jock. She got her undergraduate degree from Vassar in English literature. She then got a master's from Boston University in English and Irish poetry and worked for five years for Robert Pinsky when he was the U.S. poet laureate. She was later a literary agent and an editor at Random House. She could undoubtedly have written a poem--or perhaps a sonnet--about the matchup between Aldrich and Smith. But she had no idea who they were, where they coached, or why I might be watching their teams play on a cold night in January.  Her in-game text was short and to the point: "I forget where you are tonight," it said. "What time will you be home?"  "I'm in Farmville, Virginia," I wrote back. "Home about midnight."  The response came flying back almost as soon as I'd hit the send button: "You are having an affair," it said. "There is no such place as Farmville, Virginia."  Yes, Christine, there is a Farmville. And there is no question that Willett Hall, with 1,481 in attendance, was the place to be that night in Farmville.  The real question, then, was this: Why was I in a not-mythical place called Farmville that night?  The answer to the question really goes back to the night of the national championship game. My first Final Four was in 1978, in what was then called the St. Louis Checkerdome. The first game on semifinal Saturday, between Duke and Notre Dame, began at 12:30 central time. The second game--Kentucky and Arkansas--started just before 3 p.m. local time.  I was the night police reporter for the Washington Post, but had convinced sports editor George Solomon to let me fly out there since Duke was playing. I had graduated from Duke the previous May. In my four years as an undergraduate, Duke finished last, tied for last, last, and tied for last in the ACC. In those days, when we talked about making the Final Four it was a reference to the semifinals of the ACC Tournament. It never happened while I was in school; the Blue Devils lost their opening game in the conference tournament every March.  Which is why the notion of being in the real Final Four seemed impossible. My deal with George was--as I would learn in later years--classic George. I paid my own way to St. Louis, shared a hotel room with columnist Ken Denlinger, and wrote a sidebar each day.  All George had to do was come up with a credential for me--sort of. He had sent one of the paper's columnists, Dave Kindred, to cover the women's Final Four, since the Maryland women were playing there. I had Kindred's credential for Saturday's semifinals. For the championship game Monday night, I was on my own.  This was years before media credentials had photos on them or there were security checks to get into a basketball game. After Duke beat Notre Dame on Saturday, Duke sports information director Tom Mickle found Skeeter Francis, the ACC's media director.  "Need a credential for John for Monday," Mickle said.  Skeeter reached into his pocket of his blindingly loud jacket, pulled out a credential, and handed it to me. Simple as that. On Saturday, I sat in Kindred's courtside seat. On Monday night I sat in the seat assigned to the Notre Dame SID. He had gone home.  Those were the days.  They are, of course, long gone. The Final Four hasn't been played in a basketball arena since 1996. Now it's played in seventy-thousand-plus-seat football stadiums, with the court smack in the middle of the football field in order to maximize the number of seats that can be sold.  The benches are below floor level, as are the media seats, and most of the sight lines--even if you aren't sitting upstairs five miles from courtside--aren't very good.  But the Final Four sells out every year and has become one of those mega TV events that are part of the culture, like the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Masters. People just want to say they were there . Corporations pay big bucks to gain all the perks that come with being NCAA "corporate champions."  I still go because I'm fortunate enough that the Washington Post still wants me to go--at least nowadays, unlike 1978, the paper pays my way--and because I enjoy seeing friends I've made in both media and coaching through the years. The Final Four is an annual convention of the college basketball world as much as it is a basketball tournament.  But it is no longer the joyride for me that it was in those innocent years when Skeeter Francis could pull a credential out of his pocket and hand it to me.  The first game on Saturday no longer starts at 1:30 eastern time; it starts at 6:10. In 1978, there were six scheduled TV time-outs per game that lasted ninety seconds each. Now there are ten, each lasting three minutes. Halftime, once fifteen minutes, is now closer to twenty-two minutes. They put twenty minutes on the clock, but the clock doesn't start until one coach does one of those mind-numbing halftime TV interviews and exits the court.  That means games that once took about an hour and forty-five minutes to play take closer to two hours and fifteen minutes--or more.  On that first Final Four Saturday of my life in St. Louis in 1978, I finished my second game story not long after six o'clock local time and had plenty of time to go out and have dinner. So did most fans, who exited the building after Kentucky's win over Arkansas, soon after five o'clock.  In Minneapolis last year, 2019, the Texas Tech-Michigan State game ended at about 10:15 central time. I finished writing my column a few minutes before midnight. And two nights later, the confetti began falling at 10:40 p.m. in Minneapolis--11:40 on the East Coast.  I was just happy the game didn't go double overtime.  As I walked back to my hotel that night, I was thinking about why I had wanted to do this book so much. Excerpted from The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season by John Feinstein All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The No. 1 New York Times best-selling author of A Season on the Brink, Feinstein here revisits his beloved college basketball, focusing on the often unknown if still tough and gifted athletes of the Division-1 programs, which cannot claim the top high school athletes and won't likely be sending any stars to the NBA.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this fascinating history, sportswriter Feinstein (A Season on the Brink) takes a look at lesser-known college basketball teams. In order to explore the "real joys of college basketball," Feinstein eschews the big money and future NBA stars of celebrated universities to focus on the sheer love of the game that characterizes smaller schools, covering the 2018 basketball season from November to the March playoffs. He describes his travels in vivid detail, showing readers the smaller arenas and atmospheres where the schools play, as in his description of University of Maryland--Baltimore County's 90--85, double-overtime victory over Hartford in the America East tournament, a game "Very few people around the country would even notice" but that "for those who were there, it was a night to be remembered and savored for a long, long time." Most memorable, though, is Feinstein's eye and ear for the little-known coaches who aren't fending off NBA offers, such as Rick Byrd, who had coached at Tennessee's Belmont University for 33 years, but of whom Feinstein recalls, "I wanted to talk basketball, he wanted to talk golf." It's all net for Feinstein's passionate basketball history. (Mar.)

Booklist Review

One of the premier events in American sports is the NCAA basketball tournament, which culminates every March with the media event known as the Final Four. But there is much more to college basketball than the premier teams, and Feinstein presents the universe of smaller schools with players who have no illusions of a professional career, coached by men who love the game. This is a book about the players and coaches from those teams, some of whom occasionally, against all odds, make the Final Four. That happened in 2018 when Loyola of Chicago, a small Catholic school cheered on by its unofficial spokesperson, a 98-year-old nun, made a magical run to the Final Four. Feinstein follows Loyola's remarkable year, along with the triumphs of other small schools, but he also shows what happens the next season. Fans expect more magic, but when it's supplanted by mediocrity, the pressure on players and coaches can be crushing. Feinstein interviews many who have been through similar situations. Given the perspective provided by the passage of time, the participants still remember the magic. Feinstein cites a small plaque at the Palestra, the legendary Philadelphia arena, that states: "To win the game is great. To play the game is greater. But to love the game is the greatest of all." Perfect. A wonderful book by a wonderful sports journalist.

Kirkus Book Review

A rousing account of the 2018-2019 college basketball season, a time of surprises and rising stars.Longtime Washington Post sportswriter Feinstein, author of such sports classics as A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled, comes by his indefatigable love of basketball honestly: In the late 1960s, his father took him to NIT championship games at Madison Square Garden, seated a few yards from the boards. "There were no Spike Lee seats in those days," he writes, gamely, "so this was about as good as it got." The author is a sympathetic observer, fan, reporter, and scholar all at once, and he delivers reams of information about how the game has evolved in the decades since his childhood. Today, he notes, there are more than 350 teams in Division 1 college basketball, with the first game of the season involving more action than any one person could ever hope to comprehend, all on the path to "March madness." The best parts of this book focus on the people who are involved in shaping the young players, such as the fellow who "gave up an $800,000-a-year job as a lawyer and CEO to become an assistant basketball coach for $32,000 a yearand couldn't be happier." Among Feinstein's other subjectsnotwithstanding such giants as Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, and Jim Calhounare coaches from historically black institutions, schools that are well represented throughout the season at every level of play; an episode involving a game between Howard and Harvard reveals coaching worthy of a championship NBA team. The narrative closes steadily in on victory by a school that had never enjoyed a national championship (Virginia) and the defeat of Feinstein's alma mater: "I watched the Duke kidsand they were kidsheads down, tears of shock in their eyes, after the final buzzer on the last day of March and felt badly for them. But, being honest, not that badly."Feinstein writes with warmth and enthusiasm of a beloved sport in a book that will grab any fan. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

John Feinstein was born in New York City on July 28, 1956. He graduated from Duke University. He is a sportswriter, author, and sports commentator. He was on the staff at the Washington Post and wrote for Sports Illustrated. He is the author of several books including A Season on the Brink, Where Nobody Knows Your Name, A Good Walk Spoiled, and The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and the Story of an Epic College Basketball Rivalry.

(Bowker Author Biography)