A March to Madness: The View from the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference - Hardcover

In terms of work ethic, John Feinstein is the sports equivalent of Stephen King: he's tireless, prolific, and multifaceted. With a past-performance line that includes A Season on the Brink, A Good Walk Spoiled, and A Civil War, he's regularly in the running for his genre's MVP. A March to Madness, which chronicles the 1996-97 Atlantic Coast Conference's ineluctable journey to March Madness, continues his string. Exhaustively reported, and penned with as much poignancy as panache, it's the story of the most competitive college basketball conference in the U.S., filtered through the eyes--and complex lives--of its head coaches. Coaching young in-your-faces is never easy; it's even harder in a pressure cooker such as the ACC, where expectations are enormous, winning is essential, and an NCAA tournament bid is requisite for survival. Feinstein had remarkable access to his high-profile, high-strung subjects, such as Dean Smith, Bobby Cremins, and Mike Krzyzewski, and the drama he records is every bit as fast-paced and stunning as a close Duke-North Carolina game with the final seconds ticking off the clock.

John Feinstein is an American sportswriter and commentator. He is a columnist for the Washington Post, an author, is a guest commentator on NPR, and does color commentary for United States Naval Academy football games. He is also a frequent contributor to The Tony Kornheiser Show. During a radio broadcast of the football game between the Naval Academy and Duke University on October 1, 2005, Feinstein blurted an obscenity over-the-air in response to what he perceived to be a bad call on the field. He immediately removed himself from the rest of the broadcast, except to return at the end to apologize on the air. Although he offered his resignation to the Naval Academy, they rejected it because of his contrition and have invited him to continue to participate in future broadcasts. Feinstein was a sports writer for the The Chronicle while enrolled at Duke University, where he graduated in 1977. One of Feinstein's nicknames is "Junior", despite not having the suffix in his name. The name was given by Tony Kornheiser because of the similarities in his temper to John McEnroe. Feinstein sometimes fills in as a guest host on The Jim Rome Show. Rome considers Feinstein to be one of the most intelligent people he's interviewed on the show, and occasionally teases him about an over-the-phone interview that was interrupted by Feinstein's daughter.