[.ca] The Last Amateurs: Playing For Glory and Honor in ... (ISBN 0316278424)

From Amazon.com:
If there's any doubt about John Feinstein being one of sport's true believers, The Last Amateurs readily dispels it. After years of smartly dissecting our games at their highest levels in bestsellers like The Majors, A Good Walk Spoiled, and A Season on the Brink, he returns to dissecting our games at their purest level, ground he first staked out quite stirringly in A Civil War, his chronicle of Army-Navy football. In The Last Amateurs, he mines the 1999-2000 season of Patriot League basketball. Given the high-stakes, high-profile, and often dirty world of college hoops these days, Feinstein comes up with a remarkably refreshing place to visit, a sporting environment short on scandals, prima donnas, and sneaker contracts, but long on a pure passion for the game that complements achievement in the classroom. In the league's seven schools--Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette, Colgate, Holy Cross, Army, and Navy--academics come first, the hardwood second. These are campuses populated by students who happen to be athletes, not athletes stopping off on the way to lucrative careers in professional sports. Indeed, these are young athletes who have their post-college focus on the rest of their lives, not the NBA. Sports, for them, builds character, not bank accounts. Still, the Patriot League is a Division I conference, with its champion earning an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. It takes the games seriously--often, as Feinstein reveals, heartbreakingly so--even if it doesn't necessarily play to ACC, SEC, Big 10, and Pac-10 standards. Feinstein's interviewing, skillful as ever, brings the players, coaches, and administrators of the colleges in this league to full form, making The Last Amateurs a rarity among sports books--a smart volume about smart people with their heads and priorities pointed in the right direction. Like the conference itself, it's in a league of its own. --Jeff Silverman

The Last Book I'll Ever Read by Feinstein:
Review of The Last Amateurs. This was not the kind of gripping narrative Feinstein had once written like "Season on the Brink" and "A Good Walk Spoiled" He was trying too hard to write another novel as good as those were. The Last Amateurs, or should I call it a notebook of facts, was utterly, "a mess" as another reviewer stated. It was as if Feinstein just read the sports section each day and wrote down the summaries of each game. In addition, there is a lot of bias in the book created by Feinstein and his opinions. Everybody has bias views on things. What bothers me, though, is that I don't think Feinstein does anything to hide his bias. It is most obvious towards the books ending when he proclaims, "The Patriot League schools all do things the right way in a college basketball world gone very wrong." Readers should be able to decide how they feel about the Patriot League and college basketball without Feinstein shoving his opinions down their throats. Instead of writing about the Patriot League he wrote about his feelings and then intermingled them with facts. Sure, it's a very interesting story about the guys who play for the love of the game. But, there was no focus, the story wasn't really there because you can't talk about the entire league and still expect to have a plot. Feinstein really shows this lack of plot/ story when he talks about the players and coaches. There are some great little stories he tells, but he doesn't expand on them. For example, the interesting stories among the league's personalities end before they even start, which is truly a shame. Feinstein never seems to say more than something like this, "Stefan Ciosici was a top player trying to regain form after devastating injury, Chris Spitler was an over-achiever who than wins over the coach to become a team leader, and Ralph Willard was a coach trying to rebuild his career by getting his team a bid in the NCAA Championship." It would have been a much better book if he had stuck with one team all season talking about the trials and tribulations of being a Division 1 team in the Patriot League and how important getting their bid to the NCAA was. A lot of things could have been changed, but instead, Feinstein just moves all around the league without any flow and seems to forget that we are trying to read a story not listen to a lecture. What is the Patriot League? I still ask myself because it seems like this book went on forever. I don't remember what happened in the first 15 chapters and I don't really care because they were just like the last chapters. As I read the last chapters of, "The Last Amateurs" I didn't sense that the book Feinstein wrote, did what it set out to do. I thought it was supposed to tell a unique story about unique people in a league like non other in college athletics and realize that they were truly rare and important. However, after hearing about all their problems, how bad they were, and how so few people even watched them, it only really made me care less about them. I give this book: 2 STARS Nick V.

Redundant and commercial:
Having read all of Feinstein's previous books (and most of his articles) I was an eager purchaser of this book. I was living in Germany at the time and my NCAA tournament addiction was suffering greatly, so I was hoping for another ACC or Bobby Knight sort of book. Needless to say, I was disappointed. John tries to create an image about this league that simply isn't there. Is it nice that the league has certain rules that create a more academic regimen? Sure. . .but only if they enforce it on ALL the teams in the conference. Is it good that there is a 100% graduation rate for most of the schools? Sure. . .but only because most of them will never play in the NBA. Heck, the one kid in the book that was a legitimate NBA prospect left after his sophomore season. Is it a nice story to see the small schools play the Dukes and UNC's of the world? Sure. . .but the truth is that the small schools want the money and the big schools want the 'W'. Let's not kid ourselves. College hoops is a business. I would love to see truly amateur athletics come to the fore again, but it won't happen. There is too much money to be made and Mr. Feistein knows it. Amateur athletics sells. . .why do you think he wrote the book?

Hoops Heaven:
John Feinstein is an american treasure. He is the sort of writer that you could sit down with at the bar and talk sports and life. Once again he manages to take the reader inside the world of the athlete in a way no one else can. Once you read this book you will care about the Patriot League and find yourself following their ups and downs next season. If you're tired of overpriced ,coddled, spoiled athletes READ THIS BOOK!!!

Good stories, poor organization:
John Feinstein took the time to get to know the coaches, players, and competition style of the Patriot League, and makes a valiant effort to present the PL experience. Having read the book, I feel like I know the "flavor" of the Patriot League, perhaps as well as I know the flavor of my own ACC (Maryland graduate and diehard basketball fan, class of 1987). Feinstein really communicates the feel of being in the PL: the love of the game, but all in balance with academics and the rest of life. These schools, these players, this league, are all of very high quality of character, and glorifying high character quality is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. However, for anything beyond the general feel and character of the league, Feinstein's occasionally brilliant, frequently overly-detailed writing gets lost in the horrible disorganization of the book. Feinstein says he follows a season in the PL, and that's certainly true. The trouble is that the league has seven schools, seven coaches (and multiple former coaches), seven athletic directors, seven school presidents, seventy-or-so players, and each school plays 20-odd games per season. Most of those mean little or nothing to the average reader who would pick up this book. While Feinstein, having lived the season, watched the games, and developed relationships with the people, can keep them all straight, I don't know Fran Fraschilla from Ralph Willard, and I don't remember which one coaches where, and I couldn't tell the difference between Lafayette and Lehigh. Feinstein does absolutely nothing to make these clear to the reader. It seems to me that the obvious organization for telling the much needed story of the Patriot League would have been to write about each team, individually, over the course of their season. Then, after that, use the conference tournament as a means for tying the seven stories together. Instead, Feinstein wrote it as he lived it -- a game at Colgate means telling about them, then off to Holy Cross, over to Bucknell, down to Navy, back to Colgate -- oh they're playing Bucknell, gotta tell more about them... Meanwhile, readers are going crazy trying to figure out which team is which, which coach goes with which school, which player goes with which coach, etc. The result of the disorganization is utter confusion. It is telling that what I remember best from the book is a quote from Duke's Coach K (who was a former Army coach, but the quote is from his time at Duke). He spoke glowingly to his players about the high quality of the character of the players on the Navy team, and then emphasized the need to BEAT them, because they're NAVY and he was ARMY. Which is a great story, but why do I remember that better than any of the actual Patriot League stories? Because I was so lost in the whos, wheres, and whichs of Feinstein's disorganization. There are excellent anecdotes, funny stories, and character-telling quotes and actions described throughout the book, and for that, it's worth reading. But, I recommend one of two ways for reading: Either 1) read lightly, look for the good stories and ignore the flood of names, dates, and details; or 2) take notes as you read, and make a list of a) school, b) coach, c) other school administrators or former coaches, and d) players, just so you have a handy reference sheet to keep them all straight when Feinstein refers back to someone he wrote about 150 pages ago.

A Great Read:
I just finished this book about two days ago. It's refreshing to read about college athletics given the current atmosphere of laughable "student athletes" and early departures to the NBA by 19 year olds. I was particularly glad given the 2002 NCAA Tourney and Holy Cross' great game against Kansas in the first round. That scenario is nearly identical to the beginning chapter of the book when Feinstein makes his decision to write on the Patriot League after watching a first round game between Kansas and Colgate. I will be sure to watch the league championship game on ESPN this year!