The Last Amateurs: Playing for Glory and Honor in Division 1 Basketball Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Last Amateurs: Playing for Glory and Honor in Division 1 Basketball Book

If there's any doubt about John Feinstein being one of sport's true believers, The Last Amateurs readily dispels it. After years of smartly dissecting our games at their highest levels in bestsellers like The Majors, A Good Walk Spoiled, and A Season on the Brink, he returns to dissecting our games at their purest level, ground he first staked out quite stirringly in A Civil War, his chronicle of Army-Navy football. In The Last Amateurs, he mines the 1999-2000 season of Patriot League basketball. Given the high-stakes, high-profile, and often dirty world of college hoops these days, Feinstein comes up with a remarkably refreshing place to visit, a sporting environment short on scandals, prima donnas, and sneaker contracts, but long on a pure passion for the game that complements achievement in the classroom. In the league's seven schools--Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette, Colgate, Holy Cross, Army, and Navy--academics come first, the hardwood second. These are campuses populated by students who happen to be athletes, not athletes stopping off on the way to lucrative careers in professional sports. Indeed, these are young athletes who have their post-college focus on the rest of their lives, not the NBA. Sports, for them, builds character, not bank accounts. Still, the Patriot League is a Division I conference, with its champion earning an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. It takes the games seriously--often, as Feinstein reveals, heartbreakingly so--even if it doesn't necessarily play to ACC, SEC, Big 10, and Pac-10 standards. Feinstein's interviewing, skillful as ever, brings the players, coaches, and administrators of the colleges in this league to full form, making The Last Amateurs a rarity among sports books--a smart volume about smart people with their heads and priorities pointed in the right direction. Like the conference itself, it's in a league of its own. --Jeff SilvermanRead More

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  • Product Description

    The Patriot League is one of the NCAAs smallest Division I conferences, a group of schools in the Northeast that includes Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh, Bucknell, Army, and Navy. No one on these teams leaves college early to join the NBA. None of these coaches gets national recognition or endorsement contracts. The young men on these teams are playing for the love of basketball and of their schools. But every year, the top team from the Patriot League gets into the NCAA Tournament, and though they always lose in the first round, how much they lose by can make a huge difference in the coachs and players lives. This is a look at sport at its purest, written with the intensity, drama, and insight into character that have made bestsellers of John Feinsteins books. Feinstein spent the 1999 season with the players on the Patriot League teams. As always, his reporting and stories are as current as possible. Feinstein is a commentator on NPR/Morning Edition and writes columns for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine and Golf. There are more than 1.3 million copies of John Feinsteins books in print.

  • 0316277010
  • 9780316277013
  • John Feinstein
  • 5 April 2001
  • Little, Brown & Company
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 424
  • First Edition
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