The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball by J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts (review)

There is no doubt that the yearly basketball championship tournament of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) leaves an indelible mark on every sports fanatic's calendar. J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts have crafted a wonderful volume on the origins of "March Madness," focusing specifically on the 1973–1974 tournament, as it was the first to feature thirty-two teams and the last to accept only one representative per conference. Relying on a combination of archival material, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and interviews, Walker and Roberts have painted a vibrant portrait of the 1973–1974 college basketball season.

The authors use a multinarrative approach to build to the national tournament, dedicating individual chapters to the plight of the dominant squad at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), led by the conservative coach John Wooden and the socially minded superstar Bill Walton; to the emergence of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) as a college basketball powerhouse, spearheaded by Norm Sloan at North Carolina State University (NC State); to midwestern basketball, highlighted by the exploits of the University of Notre Dame's media savvy head coach, Richard "Digger" Phelps, and Marquette University's rigid Al McGuire; and to the efforts of Tom Scott, the chairman of the NCAA's university division basketball committee, to open the tournament to multiple teams from the same conference. The text culminates in the NCAA tournament and devotes two chapters to the various regional contests, the historic semifinal, and NC State's ascension to basketball supremacy.

The narrative's details, involving the players, coaches, and contests leading up to and within the tournament, are nothing short of spectacular. The individual stories surrounding each of the participating basketball teams supply context and demonstrate the NCAA tournament's multilayered narrative. The frequent use of famed sportswriters, such as Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated and Arthur Daley of the New York Times, are welcome additions to the text that validate much of the basketball-related commentary. Perhaps the greatest strength of this volume comes from the examination of the drama-filled contests within the tournament, in particular, the semifinal matchup between Wooden's dominant UCLA Bruins and Sloan's NC State Wolfpack. Every individual contest supplies a seemingly unique narrative that focuses on action during games and postgame reactions, making the text an attractive option for both sports historians and average fans.

Walker and Roberts also mindfully interweave the athletic exploits of the participating teams with the social and political movements of the day. The authors pay considerable attention to Walton's political views on issues such as the Vietnam War and racism as well as his propensity for participating in student-led protests. Other fascinating elements within the text include the authors' discussions of the emergence of the ACC as the preeminent basketball conference in the South and the efforts of the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, to host the yet to be anointed Final Four—both of which demonstrated the South's need for cultural validation through athletics in the considerable wake of integration, echoing Kurt Edward Kemper's contention in his stellar volume, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (Urbana, 2009).

Despite the considerable strengths of The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball, the volume is not without its faults. The political and social perspectives highlighted in the first two chapters go unaddressed in the remainder of the text and only reemerge in the final chapter. The authors' sweeping treatment of these issues and others rarely discussed in the book, such as the economy and the energy crisis, seems dismissive. A greater nod to these issues in an athletic context would have been a welcome addition to the volume. Regardless, The Road to Madness is a masterfully written contribution to the growing...