| Details | | Publication Date: | 1999-01-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 302 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 20.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
In North Carolina, college basketball is not a matter of life or death; it's more important than that. The home of three recent NCAA championship teams, the Duke Blue Devils, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, and the North Carolina State Wolfpack, as well as Wake Forest's Demon Deacons, the state hosts some of the greatest basketball to be found anywhere -- and found it is, on ESPN and ABC on an almost nightly basis. To live in North Carolina is to align yourself with one school or another. Four Corners, packed with the hoops histories and highlights of these four schools, takes fans through the thrills and scandals of some 50 years and shows how these teams have influenced the game. With profiles of such legendary figures as Dean Smith, Michael Jordan, Mike Krzyzewski, Grant Hill, Bones McKinney, Jim Valvano, and all the great coaches and players who have made the Big Four rivalry the most inbred and intense in the basketball world, Four Corners is the first book to take a full, historical, cultural look at the ways and means of hardwood life on tobacco road.
Industry Reviews
People in North Carolina have long been convinced that nothing else in sports even approaches the excitement of college hoops in their state. In this methodical account of the storied basketball history of the Big Four schools listed in the subtitle, Menzer, a sportswriter for the Winston-Salem Journal, details more than 50 years of coaches, competitors and roundball culture. He looks at modern legends such as recently retired UNC coach Dean Smith, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Michael Jordan, whose high school principal encouraged him to attend the Air Force Academy instead of North Carolina so he would have a job after college. But tales of the schools' early histories provide the greatest rewards. Everett Case, the innovative N.C. State coach of the 1950s, was nicknamed the Old Gray Fox and was the first to make a spectacle of pregame introductions and to install an applause meter at his home court. His rival was the dapper UNC coach Frank McGuire, whose "underground railroad" of top recruits from his hometown of New York culminated in an undefeated national championship season in 1957. But as the programs grew, so did the pressure. Bones McKinney, a lanky Wake Forest coach who brought his team to the NCAA Final Four in 1962, gulped a case of Pepsi and, eventually, a handful of barbiturates daily just to try to endure the pressure. For all Menzer's exhaustive reporting, however, the book lacks the powerful writing needed to let the reader feel what is being described. Much like the stalling offense devised by Dean Smith from which the book takes its name, Four Corners is effective but less than thrilling. (Jan.)
White
North Carolina is a college basketball powerhouse home of the Duke Blue Devils, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, North Carolina State's Wolfpack, and Wake Forest's Demon Deacons. This is an account of how these programs evolved, starting with the turbulent changes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when college basketball became a big money sport attracting the attention of gamblers and the infant television industry. Sportswriter Menzer (The Carolina Panthers, Macmillan, 1996) uses extensive interviews to paint a colorful picture of the personalities of the coaches and players behind the history. A good choice for any library collecting team histories or where John Feinstein's A March to Madness: The View from the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference (LJ 1/98) has been in demand. Terry Jo Madden, Boise State Univ. Lib., ID
Fox
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