A March to Madness : A View From the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference

It's the book in which America's favorite sportswriter returns to the arena of his most successful bestseller, A Season on the Brink. It's the book that takes us inside the intensely competitive Atlantic Coast Conference & paints a portrait of how college baskettball is coached & played at the highest level. It's the book that takes us onto the courts, into the locker rooms, & inside the high-pressure world of the talented coaches who have helped make the ACC's nine colleges - Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Virginia, Maryland, Wake Forest, & Florida State - world-renowned for their championship basketball teams. The author's afterword to this edition will recap the ACC's current season & preview the 1998-99 rivalries. In A March to Madness, John Feinstein follows all nine ACC teams through the unforgettable 1996-97 season and illuminates the almost inconceivable pressures on coaches and players in the conference. It was a year in which Dean Smith broke Adolph Rupp's all-time record for coaching victories, superstar Tim Duncan and coach Dave Odom attempted to lead Wake Forest to its first Final Four in thirty-five years, Mike Krzyzewski tried to fall in love with coaching again, and Carolina fought its way into another Final Four after a dismal start. Behind those stories, A March to Madness brings to light the hidden world of college basketball -- the bitter rivalries between coaches, the toll of competition on marriages and careers, the difficulties coaches have in dealing with NBA-bound players, and much more. - Jacket flap. IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL, when you say the words "Monday Night," they mean only one thing: the national championship game.