A Season Inside

Did John Feinstein, the author who followed Indiana Coach Bobby Knight and his Hoosier basketball team all the way to national championship in A Season on the Brink, pull it off again?

Did he repeat the success of A Season on the Brink, which became the best-selling sports book hardcover ever?

Almost.

Feinstein's newest entry, A Season Inside, once again deals with the theme he knows so well: college basketball. Feinstein is a hoop addict, a writer who could spend the rest of his life locked up in UCLA's Pauley Pavillion watching Kansas' Danny Manning posting up against North Carolina's J.R. Reid, or Arizona's Steve Kerr swishing three-pointers from outside.

And in A Season Inside, Feinstein takes the reader on a journey through the 1987-88 college basketball season--the year of Manning and Larry Brown, Kerr and the Arizona squad, and Rollie Massimino's return to the NCAA Tournament.

Feinstein focuses his attention on several teams, ranging from Kansas to George Mason. He interviews famous coaches, such as N.C. State's Jim Valvano and Villanova's Lord Rollie, and not-so-famous coaches, like Tennessee's Don DeVoe and GMU's Rick Barnes.

He writes about Kerr, Manning and Duke's Billy King--three players whom fans will identify with the 1987-88 season--and follows their exploits on and off the court.

But he also writes about the forgotten players. While he may praise Kerr for his courage to have a spectacular season even after his father's tragic death in Lebanon, Feinstein devotes a good portion of the book to Walter Lambiotte, the former North Carolina State player who transfered to North-western and had to sit out a year.

The reader gets to know how coaches feel about their jobs and their players, and how players respond to the pressures of basketball.

Feinstein enhances the book's charm with his clever anecdotes about the game's many characters. His style rivals some of the country's best columnists.

But the book does have a few faults that Feinstein could have avoided.

First, when he limits his book to just a few teams in college basketball, he has problems when it comes to presenting other characters. Great, the reader knows about Steve Kerr, but when other great players like Notre Dame's David Rivers and Temple's Mark Macon are mentioned, Feinstein devotes only a paragraph or two to them.

Another fault of the book is its emphasis on the game story. Whereas Feinstein's interviews and anecdotes give the book its unique color and life, the game stories slow down the reader's pace. The reader is no longer reading a book, but a 464-page story on how Perdue managed to sneak one past Indiana.

When all roads lead to Kansas City and the Final Four in the book's final pages, the reader has already struggled through enough game stories and play-by-play to fill the sports pages of The Boston Globe. Fifty times.

If Feinstein had focused more on the color behind the court, instead of the action on it, he could have pulled it off.

Maybe he should have written more about Bobby Knight.