Last Dance

Last Dance by John Feinstein
Behind the Scenes at the Final Four

Category: Sports Grade: B+

I said it earlier this summer and I'll say it again -- John Feinstein is the best sports writer out there today. His books, like this one, are consistently well written, interesting and, especially for the sports fan, show terrific insight in to the games he covers.

This one, as the subtitle implies, is about what I think is probably the best sports event of the year -- the NCAA basketball Final Four. Although its still terrific, this isn't one of Feinstein's best books, mainly because he abandons his normal modus operandi. Usually, he signs for in depth coverage of a specific team or group of teams for a long period of time - usually a full season. For example, in his most recent book, Next Man Up, he spent a full season with the Baltimore Ravens. For what I think is his best book, The Last Amateurs, he spent a complete year with the basketball teams of the Patriot League - one of the last group of teams that didn't offer athletic scholarship. This lets him get in deep for close looks at the players and coaches involved. There's a lot of talk about basketball and football games, but the game is mostly about characters that you actually get to know.

In Last Dance, Feinstein uses the Final Four as a framework to talk about some of the great figures of the game - coaches like Krzyzewski, Smith and Williams; some of the stellar players that competed in the Final Four - both stars and end-of-the-benchers. He also gives us vignettes about refs, reporters and even administrators. He doesn't even talk much about the actual Final Four games until over half way through the book. Unfortunately, Final Four week isn't enough glue to hold the stories together so want you get the book is essentially a series of loosely related essays. A bad side affect of this is that there are lot of stories that get repeated two, three and even four times in different parts of the book.

There's still good stuff here and any serious basketball fan should really enjoy the book. If you try and like it, definitely move on to some of Feinstein's better work.