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‘The Back Roads to March’ Review: The Boys of Winter
Forget the ESPN highlights reel. If you want to see spirited, hell-for-leather basketball, visit a regional college gym.
By Andrew R. Graybill / Wall Street Journal / Book Review
March 6, 2020
When I moved to Manhattan in the mid-1990s, I became an avid listener of “Mike and the Mad Dog,” an afternoon sports radio program on 660 WFAN. Although the focus most days was on New York’s jumble of professional teams, the show boasted a national profile. Thus, during my first spring as a devotee, I was mystified (if also charmed) by the airtime that the co-hosts—Mike Francesa and Chris Russo—allotted to discussing the tournaments put on by various obscure New York-area Division I basketball conferences, such as the Metro Atlantic or the Northeast. While there was an automatic bid to the NCAAs at stake for the leagues’ champions, winners like the Iona Gaels or the Monmouth Hawks were virtually assured a low seed and therefore a quick exit from “the Dance.” Still, even if early March is a fallow season for many sports fans, squeezed between the Super Bowl and Opening Day, Mike and Mad Dog understood that a certain portion of their listenership hungered for this coverage.
“The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season” is aimed at just such an audience. To be sure, author John Feinstein makes passing mention of perennial heavyweights like Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Duke (his alma mater; class of ’77), but he is far more interested in teams from schools such as the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which upset top-ranked Virginia in an opening-round game of the 2018 NCAA tournament, becoming the first-ever No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1. There are 353 squads that compete in NCAA men’s Division 1 basketball, most of them much closer in profile to UMBC than UVA. In his new book, Mr. Feinstein spends the 2018-9 season with some of these overlooked teams, introducing readers to players and coaches familiar only (if at all) to the most ardent hoops enthusiast.
There is no better guide to this world than Mr. Feinstein, who has been enchanted with the college game since 1965, when, as a boy growing up in New York, he attended his first tournament at the old Madison Square Garden. He has since become one of the nation’s most successful and revered sports reporters, writing for venues such as the Washington Post and offering in-game commentary on the CBS Sports Radio Network. He is most famous, of course, for the first of his three dozen previous books, “A Season on the Brink” (1986), which chronicled his time among the Indiana Hoosiers during the 1985-6 basketball campaign, focusing especially on IU’s legendary but irascible head coach, Bob Knight. That volume has taken its deserved place among the classics of sportswriting, often appearing on “best-of” lists with the likes of George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion” (1966) and John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game” (1969).
“The Back Roads to March” could as well be titled “A Season on I-95,” given all the time that Mr. Feinstein spends in his car shuttling between stops along the northeast corridor, between New England and the mid-Atlantic, as he drops in on countless games from November through March. (Mr. Feinstein’s gaze rarely crosses the Appalachians, which will no doubt distress fans of West Coast schools.) We learn that despite basketball’s being an indoor sport, the weather is no small factor in the game, especially for the coaches and players of these smaller programs, who can only dream of flying on chartered planes like the sport’s royalty. (When Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, unhappy with an uninspired practice session, threatened his team with a commercial flight, they got the message.) Take, for instance, the Black Knights of Army, who early in the season must get out and push their bus uphill after it dies in a snowstorm on the way to a tournament in Providence, where the exhausted team promptly loses all three of its matchups.
The theme that unites this dizzying dramatis personae is an unquenchable love of the game, even though most will never coach or play in a March Madness contest of much consequence. As Mr. Feinstein explains in the introduction: “In many ways, this book is about Bjorn Broman,” a four-year starter at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. Although his Eagles were soundly thumped in the quarterfinals of the 2019 Big South Conference Tournament, Mr. Broman was making hustle plays until the final horn. “I just didn’t want it to end,” he said afterward. “Basketball’s been such a big part of my life for so long, I wanted to play as long as I could and as hard as I could.”
The heart and soul of the book, however, is neither a player nor a coach, but rather the Palestra, a storied Philadelphia gym, little changed since its opening in 1927, known as the Cathedral of College Basketball and home to the Penn Quakers as well as the Philadelphia Big 5, an informal grouping of local schools who face off annually for bragging rights. Mr. Feinstein makes multiple visits during his reporting for the book.
For all its appeal, “The Back Roads to March” misfires here and there. Sports reporting, admittedly, is a genre prone to cliché, but Mr. Feinstein is far too good a writer to describe a UMBC player having a great game as “unconscious,” or Sister Jean, the nonagenarian team chaplain of the Loyola (Chicago) Ramblers, as “sharp as a tack.” More distracting are those moments when Mr. Feinstein makes himself the story, as when he describes his behind-the-scenes campaign to get Lefty Driesell—one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, and clearly an author favorite—elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. I would have preferred this episode stripped of its self-congratulatory wrapping; as Chris “Mad Dog” Russo often says about commentators who suffocate their listeners with too much information, “Let the game breathe!”
Additionally, Mr. Feinstein largely avoids criticism of any kind, save for repeated (and merited) swipes at the hypocrisy of the NCAA. Given the national conversation about the astronomical cost of a college education, one might expect Mr. Feinstein to offer even brief commentary on the vast sums spent by colleges and universities on Division I basketball, where—as of 2017—hoops coaches were the highest paid public employees in eight U.S. states. (In 31 others, that spot was locked down by a college football coach.) That UMBC, with nearly 14,000 students but an endowment of just over $100 million, would open a $85 million state-funded arena—and this months before the historic win over Virginia—goes unquestioned. Even for a relentlessly uplifting book like this one, surely there is room for a little more clear-eyed skepticism.
On the other hand, love letters rarely traffic in doubt or other unpleasantries, and “The Back Roads to March” is nothing if not a long, meandering, heartfelt missive to college basketball, best summed up for Mr. Feinstein in the words of a plaque that hangs inside the Palestra: “To win the game is great . . . To play the game is greater . . . But to love the game is the greatest of all.” Words to live by, whatever the contest.
—Mr. Graybill is a professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.
Forget the ESPN highlights reel. If you want to see spirited, hell-for-leather basketball, visit a regional college gym.
By Andrew R. Graybill / Wall Street Journal / Book Review
March 6, 2020
When I moved to Manhattan in the mid-1990s, I became an avid listener of “Mike and the Mad Dog,” an afternoon sports radio program on 660 WFAN. Although the focus most days was on New York’s jumble of professional teams, the show boasted a national profile. Thus, during my first spring as a devotee, I was mystified (if also charmed) by the airtime that the co-hosts—Mike Francesa and Chris Russo—allotted to discussing the tournaments put on by various obscure New York-area Division I basketball conferences, such as the Metro Atlantic or the Northeast. While there was an automatic bid to the NCAAs at stake for the leagues’ champions, winners like the Iona Gaels or the Monmouth Hawks were virtually assured a low seed and therefore a quick exit from “the Dance.” Still, even if early March is a fallow season for many sports fans, squeezed between the Super Bowl and Opening Day, Mike and Mad Dog understood that a certain portion of their listenership hungered for this coverage.
“The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season” is aimed at just such an audience. To be sure, author John Feinstein makes passing mention of perennial heavyweights like Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Duke (his alma mater; class of ’77), but he is far more interested in teams from schools such as the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which upset top-ranked Virginia in an opening-round game of the 2018 NCAA tournament, becoming the first-ever No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1. There are 353 squads that compete in NCAA men’s Division 1 basketball, most of them much closer in profile to UMBC than UVA. In his new book, Mr. Feinstein spends the 2018-9 season with some of these overlooked teams, introducing readers to players and coaches familiar only (if at all) to the most ardent hoops enthusiast.
There is no better guide to this world than Mr. Feinstein, who has been enchanted with the college game since 1965, when, as a boy growing up in New York, he attended his first tournament at the old Madison Square Garden. He has since become one of the nation’s most successful and revered sports reporters, writing for venues such as the Washington Post and offering in-game commentary on the CBS Sports Radio Network. He is most famous, of course, for the first of his three dozen previous books, “A Season on the Brink” (1986), which chronicled his time among the Indiana Hoosiers during the 1985-6 basketball campaign, focusing especially on IU’s legendary but irascible head coach, Bob Knight. That volume has taken its deserved place among the classics of sportswriting, often appearing on “best-of” lists with the likes of George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion” (1966) and John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game” (1969).
“The Back Roads to March” could as well be titled “A Season on I-95,” given all the time that Mr. Feinstein spends in his car shuttling between stops along the northeast corridor, between New England and the mid-Atlantic, as he drops in on countless games from November through March. (Mr. Feinstein’s gaze rarely crosses the Appalachians, which will no doubt distress fans of West Coast schools.) We learn that despite basketball’s being an indoor sport, the weather is no small factor in the game, especially for the coaches and players of these smaller programs, who can only dream of flying on chartered planes like the sport’s royalty. (When Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, unhappy with an uninspired practice session, threatened his team with a commercial flight, they got the message.) Take, for instance, the Black Knights of Army, who early in the season must get out and push their bus uphill after it dies in a snowstorm on the way to a tournament in Providence, where the exhausted team promptly loses all three of its matchups.
The theme that unites this dizzying dramatis personae is an unquenchable love of the game, even though most will never coach or play in a March Madness contest of much consequence. As Mr. Feinstein explains in the introduction: “In many ways, this book is about Bjorn Broman,” a four-year starter at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. Although his Eagles were soundly thumped in the quarterfinals of the 2019 Big South Conference Tournament, Mr. Broman was making hustle plays until the final horn. “I just didn’t want it to end,” he said afterward. “Basketball’s been such a big part of my life for so long, I wanted to play as long as I could and as hard as I could.”
The heart and soul of the book, however, is neither a player nor a coach, but rather the Palestra, a storied Philadelphia gym, little changed since its opening in 1927, known as the Cathedral of College Basketball and home to the Penn Quakers as well as the Philadelphia Big 5, an informal grouping of local schools who face off annually for bragging rights. Mr. Feinstein makes multiple visits during his reporting for the book.
For all its appeal, “The Back Roads to March” misfires here and there. Sports reporting, admittedly, is a genre prone to cliché, but Mr. Feinstein is far too good a writer to describe a UMBC player having a great game as “unconscious,” or Sister Jean, the nonagenarian team chaplain of the Loyola (Chicago) Ramblers, as “sharp as a tack.” More distracting are those moments when Mr. Feinstein makes himself the story, as when he describes his behind-the-scenes campaign to get Lefty Driesell—one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, and clearly an author favorite—elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. I would have preferred this episode stripped of its self-congratulatory wrapping; as Chris “Mad Dog” Russo often says about commentators who suffocate their listeners with too much information, “Let the game breathe!”
Additionally, Mr. Feinstein largely avoids criticism of any kind, save for repeated (and merited) swipes at the hypocrisy of the NCAA. Given the national conversation about the astronomical cost of a college education, one might expect Mr. Feinstein to offer even brief commentary on the vast sums spent by colleges and universities on Division I basketball, where—as of 2017—hoops coaches were the highest paid public employees in eight U.S. states. (In 31 others, that spot was locked down by a college football coach.) That UMBC, with nearly 14,000 students but an endowment of just over $100 million, would open a $85 million state-funded arena—and this months before the historic win over Virginia—goes unquestioned. Even for a relentlessly uplifting book like this one, surely there is room for a little more clear-eyed skepticism.
On the other hand, love letters rarely traffic in doubt or other unpleasantries, and “The Back Roads to March” is nothing if not a long, meandering, heartfelt missive to college basketball, best summed up for Mr. Feinstein in the words of a plaque that hangs inside the Palestra: “To win the game is great . . . To play the game is greater . . . But to love the game is the greatest of all.” Words to live by, whatever the contest.
—Mr. Graybill is a professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.