I reviewed a book on the rise of March Madness by sportswriters Barry Wilner and Ken Rappaport over at The Christian Science Monitor. It's difficult to not make such an interesting story interesting, but while there's a lot of wonderful information collected here, I was ultimately disappointed at how the authors failed to envision this as a book, rather than a series of anecdotes.
Here is the review's opening:
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 – 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’s 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’s John Wooden, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, UConn’sGeno Auriemma, Indiana’s 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’s championship in 1982.
Relatedly: Go Blue.
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