Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball by Kurt Edward Kemper (review)

There is not one game summary, player analysis, or statistical comparison ubiquitously associated with sports in Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball by Kurt Edward Kemper. Instead, this book is about the administrative "civil wars" from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s that defined the future of college basketball and, in effect, college athletics. Kemper details the unsuccessful fight by small colleges to keep basketball from becoming highly commercialized in the hands of the larger universities, as had happened with football.

Since its inception, collegiate football cast a "long shadow" over collegiate athletics in general, according to Kemper. By the early 1900s, football was big business due to sizeable ticket revenue, coaches' salaries, and widespread media coverage. "Because of the game's commercialization and its intense popular importance, football also witnessed preferential admissions for talented players, under-the-table inducements from alumni, and questionable academic practices" (pp. 12-13). Before March Madness depicts a quixotic, yet noble, effort to stop college basketball from following a similar path.

The book articulates the struggle through seven chapters. The first depicts a unified college effort to keep control of basketball away from Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) governance. This initial unification crumbled when college tournaments began, which is articulated in the second chapter. The third chapter shows how the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), which evolved from a college basketball tournament, represented promise for the small college revolt. Race and its role in the development of both the NAIA and NCAA as well as the small college-large university disagreements are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. The final chapter discusses the NCAA targeting the NAIA to maintain its dominance as the governing collegiate athletic body.

Kemper begins by noting a united collegiate front first emerged in opposing the AAU in defining the developing rules of basketball as well as organizing the first tournaments. Colleges argued many AAU basketball teams were semiprofessional, such as the squads organized by corporations whose players were paid employees. In addition, the AAU became the gateway to the U.S. Olympics for most sports, including basketball, when it was added in 1936, which threatened to usurp college membership under its governance. Thus, the AAU saw itself as the overlord of all amateur sports, including college basketball.

To fight back, college officials formed their own rules committee and coaching association and, in a move to build membership, the nascent NCAA passed a "home-rule principle" in 1907 that its regulations would not be binding on an individual college. Thus, universities could enjoy association benefits while maintaining independence, which became significant in the coming "civil war." The "home-rule" policy reduced the NCAA into nothing more than a debating society (Gurney, 2017; Smith, 2011). Kemper noted: "This allowed the barons of college athletics to operate largely without oversight, to disdain those who would presume to restrain them, and to view college athletics as their fiefdom" (p. 14).

In the second chapter, Kemper explains how the battle to control tournaments ultimately ended the unity among the colleges. He wrote: "…the rise of college basketball and the creation of its major postseason tournaments in the 1930s was a story of paranoid jealousies, intense turf wars, and overactions that were both created by and representative of the civil war with the AAU…" (p. 36). All colleges and universities, regardless of size or resources, were considered equal competitors.

The highly commercialized National Invitational Tournament (NIT) run out of Madison Square Garden in New York City capitalized on sport tourism and media promotion of larger programs and paid teams to participate. The NIT was an independent college tournament, under no official collegiate organization. The National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) Tournament, began in 1937...