Looking Back At 'A Season Inside'

When I was 13, I was a supreme nerd. Having bought in fully to the vision of my college prof parents, I had in my sights nothing less than utter and complete academic domination of Beaumont Junior High School. For a while, I was well on my way. I had taken four of the six end-of-the-year academic awards and I was one of only two students in the school who got a library pass for the half-hour to 45 minutes before the first class bell rang. This is why the septuagenarian librarian was the first person to sign my 7th grade yearbook. This fact is as true as it is sad.

My particular brand of nerddom was aerodynamics. By the 6th grade I had already scouted colleges and determined that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — the nation’s pre-eminent destination to study, um, aeronautics — would be my next step after that mere stepping stone that was high school.

But that was down the road. The first tangible step of the plan was to win the school science fair. After researching extensively, in the library of course, the properties of flight — drag coefficient, lift, etc. — I built from an old appliance box a working wind tunnel, complete with dry ice and box window fan. I cut a viewing port in the side of the box and attached an F-14 tomcat model using some of my dad’s fishing wire. And it all worked quite well, actually. So well, in fact, I won the school event, earning a trip to the countywide level. The judges universally applauded my use of items found around the house and the earnestness with which I had put the whole thing together. At the county science fair, I took second, wearing home with pride my red second-place ribbon. This meant a trip to state. Destiny was upon me.

But the onramp to NASA brilliance would prove to be paved with some humility. My homemade wind tunnel wasn’t quite the stuff of science fair legend, apparently, and I walked away from the big dance with a yellow participant ribbon and just enough taste of scientific glory/bitterness to keep me hungry. After seeing the caliber of setup that had been my undoing at the state fair, I was determined next time to not let limited resources be my demise. The next year, eschewing a fresh idea I built a new wind tunnel out of plywood, cut fiberglass, a new and more powerful fan and a fresh out of the box F-16 Fighting Falcon. I was confident it was state champion worthy, and quite possibly my ticket to untold fortunes.

But a funny thing happened. The new, slicker update held none of the quaint elegance the previous year’s model had. My design was better, but the execution came off as over-planned and precious. Instead of bringing me wide acclaim, I was left cramming the bulky, dumb project into the trunk of the car, just another loser among losers of the Beaumont Junior High Science Fair.

Well, suffice it to say my amateur ambition for aeronautic glory ended with a thud. Within two years I had abandoned the dream in toto, as much for Metallica and girl watching as for any failure to achieve science fair mythological status.

Last month I decided to break away from a steady diet of overlarge history books and read a sports book. Despite my obsessive interest in sports, I hadn’t read one since finishing Michael Lewis’ Moneyball probably five years ago. In part because of this column, I selected John Feinstein’s book about Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, A Season On the Brink, as my return engagement. But none of the three used bookstores I went to had A Season On the Brink, so I settled for the one one of them did have, his follow-up to that bestseller, A Season Inside.

I’d specifically avoided Feinstein for years due to what I considered his unnecessary personal hatred for the Kentucky program (more on that later). But A Season On the Brink is supposed to be a classic, and the subject matter of the sequel looked fine, so I swallowed my big blue pride and dug in.

Feinstein’s first book follows Knight and his antics through a single season at the peak of his Knight-ness, getting into the personal and professional alike. The book was an unmitigated success, riding the top of New York Times Bestseller List for 17 weeks. It made Feinstein — until then a well-regarded sportswriter for the Washington Post — a star, and spawned a whole genre of embedded reporter sports book. It appears A Season Inside was Feinstein’s attempt at his own plywood and fiberglass wind tunnel, designed to do with the whole 1987–88 season’s worth of characters what he’d done to such glorious acclaim with Bobby Knight a few years before.

But like my fancier wind tunnel, the results fell short. The book got decent enough reviews, but never came close to the sort of fawning praise Brink received, and reading it one walks away with a strong sense of the basketball moment, but also a sense that the scope was perhaps beyond one writer. Some characters do get a fuller treatment, but none get the real depth of coverage that Feinstein was able to get with Knight. This isn’t necessarily the writer’s fault. Sometimes the wind tunnel is just better in cardboard.

In the book, much attention is paid to Danny Manning, whose heroics in that season’s NCAA tournament are now part of the game’s lore. But others who get the most QT from Feinstein are those he deemed to have that season’s most engaging profiles.

Mostly forgotten now, Arizona guard Steve Kerr — later sidekick of Mister Jordan in Chicago — is essentially the book’s frame. Kerr’s personal history of strength through tragedy was compelling that year, but with hindsight he didn’t made much of a mark in college hoops history. It’s pretty clear why a frumpy white sportswriter would find Kerr more approachable. Kerr is white, articulate and quotable. That’s a holy triumvirate for old guard sportswriters.

Beyond those few, there are some great throwaway names, illuminating mostly for who went on to make a name for themselves and who did not. In the background, you hear about the on-court exploits of guys who would have effective pro careers like Will Purdue, Sean Elliott, Jud Buechler, and Mitch Richmond, guys like Charles Shackleford and Jerome Lane who were pro busts, and then the guys only a few of us even recall — your Barry Goheens, Rodney Monroes and Kevin Houstons. But, however unintentional, this sort of frozen moment in time is what actually makes A Season Inside more enjoyable for hoops nerds like me than its execution as a book. This was a more innocent time for college basketball. And it also reminds you just how fleeting college stardom can be, and how difficult creating a lasting impression on the game of basketball really is.

Think about it. Were Feinstein to give this college hoops season the Inside treatment, whose significance or insignificance would stand out 22 years later? Would it be Duke’s Kyle Singler, your Steve Kerr type, or would it instead some off the grid scorer like Adrian Oliver at San Jose State? Would it be future first-round draftee and All-American freshman Jared Sullinger or would it be undersized senior Oklahoma State forward Marshall Moses? It’s impossible to know, of course, but entertaining to speculate.

One of the more effective elements of Feinstein’s book, at least for me, is the time it devotes to college coaches. We don’t often hear from these guys except in regards to matchups and analysis, and this generally devolves all too quickly into bland coachspeak. A Season Inside gets rather candidly into the travails of college coaching. You see scrappers like embattled Tennessee coach Don Devoe, whose inability to produce a consistent winner at a school with delusions of hoops grandeur puts him on an eternally hot seat. Of course, today’s Volunteers boss is hardly less under siege. Bruce Pearl has all the look of a man who can see his fate playing out in front of him. And were it just his troubles with the NCAA that would be one thing. Losses at home to schools like College of Charleston are what’s actually nailing his bright orange coffin shut.

Feinstein also gets up close and personal with a rookie coach at George Mason, some guy named Rick Barnes. The young Barnes is a cipher for the drive it takes to succeed in the coaching profession. Crushingly hard on his players, Barnes parlays his one-year stint with the Colonials into the Providence job. Would Feinstein get similarly good stuff this time around from Iona’s Tim Cluess or Wagner’s Dan Hurley?

Certainly there are plenty of grizzled veteran coaches who could offer up this era’s version of Villanova’s Rollie Massimino and Ohio State’s Gary Williams, both profiled extensively in Inside. Heck, just get Williams to talk-sweat again. Different school, same guy.

But subjects aside, the writing is what ultimately dooms Inside. Most of the book is the worst kind of sports page hackdom: lots of clichés, an overuse of the word “patented” — a personal pet peeve — and too many over-tidy endings to stories that are effectively the reason I cancelled my SI subscription years ago. It’s not that Feinstein can’t write. The book reads smoothly and quickly enough. But returning to my science fair days for a moment, no one needs to see something everyone knows you can do. What’s remarkable, what’s great, what lasts is what just happens, especially in writing. Sportswriting on the whole labors under the weight of its own history. And it’s a shame, because one reason sports is such an integral part of our society is not just simple distraction and rah-rah, but because it’s metaphorical for life at large and because it’s unpredictable except when it’s gloriously, hauntingly predictable. And in covering this microcosmic phenomenon, reaching for tired phrases and neat endings is more than just unfortunate. It’s unnecessary.

Feinstein would go on to write a slew of other books, some major and some not, including Forever’s Team, about his beloved 1978–79 Duke Blue Devils. That team is the one that lost to Kentucky in the national title game, a game where Kentucky’s Jack “Goose” Givens poured in 41 points. Feinstein never recovered from that loss and has spent the better part of the time since slagging Kentucky whenever possible. I’m not going to deny Kentucky is eminently slaggable, having cheated its way to probation and then dominated its way back, creating a whole new generation of haters in the process. Comes with the territory. But you’d think Feinstein would have moved on at some point. Instead, he considers it some mark of pride that he’s considered persona non grata numero uno in the Bluegrass.

Whatever. It’s his right, I suppose. But it’s that same inability to transcend the simple, the obvious, the thing you most see that relegates A Season Inside to notable artifact. Just as it was Feinstein’s ability to get past the roadblock of the obvious and into Knight’s head that brought him journalistic stardom in the first place.

I’ll certainly read A Season On the Brink once I can locate a nice, cheap copy. I look forward to it, even. Even though Feinstein’s follow-up wasn’t quite everything I’d hoped, it was a good read. It’s always nice to be reminded what’s important about something you value. In this case, it’s using what’s around you to achieve something organically remarkable, not just setting out to out-wow everyone by going bigger. I learned it the hard way in the 8th grade. But it’s a lesson we need to hear more often. If nothing else, sportswriting would certainly be better off if it were.

THREE TO WATCH THIS WEEK:

• Georgetown at St. John’s: Steve Lavin’s return to college basketball has been solid thus far, with a pair of conference wins. He can get the buzz back with a win over the Hoyas. Monday at 7 pm, ESPN2.

• Memphis at Tennessee: A heated in-state rivalry game takes on larger importance as Vols coach Bruce Pearl fights to keep his team from tanking and taking his job with it. Young Memphis coach Josh Pastner could be the beneficiary of Pearl’s meltdown, suddenly becoming the biggest deal in state basketball circles. Wednesday at 9 pm, ESPN2.

• Iowa State at Nebraska: A pair of coaches headed in different directions meet when former Iowa State star Fred Hoiberg and his Cyclones bring a 12–2 record so far, though hardly against a gangbuster schedule, into Lincoln to face Doc Sadler and Nebraska. Sadler was once among the most promising young coaches in the game, but now he works to turn around what is a stagnating program. Saturday at 8 pm, ESPN Full Court.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.