John Feinstein has written so many books about college basketball that it's understandable that he might repeat a story or two. But is it too much to ask that he not repeat stories within a single book? Feinstein's latest, Last Dance, looks at last year's college-basketball championship weekend, considering the history of the NCAA tournament through the prism of all that goes into staging the Final Four. But as Feinstein wanders through practices and hotel lobbies, stopping to chat with the likes of Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski, he keeps spitting out new versions of the same points: The NCAA tournament is a bigger deal than it used to be, coaches are defined by their success in the tournament, and so on. Feinstein even tells us twice about how Billy Packer came up with the idea for CBS' "Selection Sunday" show, twice about how easy it is to get tickets to Monday's game, and twice about how often the tournament-selection committee meets.
After a while, even the rehashing of Feinstein's earlier books becomes ridiculous. Feinstein apparently brings up the Final Four career of Bobby Knight—who wasn't at last year's Final Four as a participant or a spectator—so he can reuse anecdotes from A Season On The Brink. It's like the literary equivalent of a TV clip show: Feinstein writes a little about Krzyzewski, then flashes back to scenes from A March To Madness and A Season Inside. Stop him if you've heard these before.
All of that said, Feinstein is one of the most readable writers around, and Last Dance breezes by, dropping a few interesting tidbits. Feinstein's rants about the selection-committee's secrecy and frequent failures have real bite, and his mini-histories of how the tournament evolved are concise and useful. There's even a noticeable wistfulness as Feinstein writes about the cyclical decline—often corruption-related—of perennial Final Four programs, and how the tournament has become so overblown that it isn't the basketball-lover's paradise it once was. Feinstein clearly knows first-hand how a once-reliable institution can expand beyond its capacity for competence.