海角大神

What we now call March Madness began as an eight-team tournament in 1939 in a rickety Illinois gymnasium. The University of Oregon won a championship that had an audience of 5,500 and lost $2,531 鈥� half the tickets were given away. By 1973, the first year the tournament was televised, 39 million viewers tuned in to watch UCLA pound Memphis State. Today, the tournament is a 68-team behemoth, with every match-up covered by four television networks. The NCAA collected a staggering $10.8 billion in its most recent broadcast deal; more than 95 percent of the NCAA鈥檚 revenue comes from March Madness contracts.

Barry Wilner and Ken Rappoport, longtime sportswriters, aim to tell how we got from there to here in The Big Dance: The Story of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. The authors draw from the wealth of sources cultivated over their courtside careers. Through excellent interviewing, they let the stars of tournaments past tell the story in the first-person. Among others, we hear from UCLA鈥檚 John Wooden, Tennessee鈥檚 Pat Summitt, UConn鈥檚 Geno Auriemma, Indiana鈥檚 Bobby Knight, and Cathy Rush, who had a 149-15 record coaching the Mighty Macs at Immaculata long before the NCAA got around to organizing a women鈥檚 championship in 1982.

The sportswriting background of Wilner and Rappoport is evident in the text鈥檚 short paragraphs, crisp sentences, and rhetorical questions, as well as their taste for quips. Game play is narrated in close-up detail, full of vibrant verbs and endearing anecdotes, as when we see the father of UCLA鈥檚 Lew Alcindor (later, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) celebrate his son鈥檚 1969 championship by leaving his bleacher seats to play first trombone with the school band. Wilner and Rappaport鈥檚 fan energy is the book鈥檚 driving force: they glow in the light of a game they love. Their eagerness to talk ball is contagious, and their detailing of game-by-game strategy is enlightening.

But "The Big Dance" takes a victor-centric approach, flat-lining the natural drama of the sport by beginning and ending each chapter 鈥� nay, each anecdote 鈥� with the winners. It reads like a hero鈥檚 march. And yet, nearly everyone who has ever participated in March Madness has lost. Disappointment, or the victory of making a brief appearance, is part of the texture of the tournament. These teams deserve more than a casual mention in a book purporting to be as broad as this one.

Even among winners, we are given narrow vantage. Naturally, there is a full chapter on John Wooden鈥檚 ten championships in 12 years at UCLA. But the chapters that follow loop us right back to UCLA in the Wooden years. The authors give us identical turns of phrase and anecdotes about Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton. A quote from Wooden is literally recycled: 鈥淎lcindor was the most valuable player I鈥檝e ever coached,鈥� Wooden tells us on both page 36 and 55. 鈥淏ill Walton is the second most valuable player, and you can put up a pretty good argument that he was as valuable as Alcindor.鈥�

Interesting. But the repetition is numbing. Whether it is word-for-word or anecdotal, the circularity of the book is indicative of how the authors bowed out of the opportunity to tell a story, rather than a series of curiosities.

Most compelling is when Wilner and Rappaport look at the changing of the game. They dedicate a chapter to the rise of television contracts, and another to the 1966 championship that was the first with a contending team starting five black players. The authors also look at the implications of students skipping college for the NBA, a story dating to Spencer Haywood鈥檚 1971 Supreme Court lawsuit, which found in favor of the Detroit player and overruled play-for-pay leagues鈥� ban on underclassmen going pro.

But such provocative stories are undercut by another reporter鈥檚 tic: talking about one thing at a time. Setting the 鈥渂ig picture鈥� chapters apart from the game-by-game narration limits the authors鈥� ability to explore consequences. Likewise, the courtside story is broken into parts. There is a chapter on North Carolina鈥檚 basketball dominance in the 1950s, for example, and another on 鈥渢he coaching giants鈥� which is in turn pieced into vignettes profiling, say, Kentucky鈥檚 Adolph Rupp and Indiana鈥檚 Knight. This gives the book the taste of an anthology: more compilation than comprehensive.

"The Big Dance" two-steps around the big picture and satisfies itself with winning anecdotes. The chapters feel like they could鈥檝e been placed in any order at all.

Altogether, reading this book is like listening to an affable drunk who lived an extraordinary life ramble at the neighborhood pub: at once, charming and frustrating.

Anna Clark is a freelance writer in Detroit.