We Recommend: You not read John Feinstein’s Last Dance

June 6th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

As it is with the games themselves, I find it incredibly difficult to dislike a sports book. Give me action, give me arc, give me a modicum of intelligent analysis, make sure the book is about sports, and bam! You’ve got a book I will enjoy.

About six months ago, I told you I had started reading John Feinstein’s Last Dance, Feinstein’s attempt at moving through the facade of the NCAA Tournament and parsing bits that fans watching their TV’s can’t see. Six months later, I still can’t bring myself to finish the final eighth of this book, which is alternately very awful and kind of awful … but usually just really awful.

Key flaws are numerous. Feinstein’s tendency to deal in platitudes like “Making the Final Four is special for everyone” is incredibly annoying; his decision to jump from profile to profile in the matter of a few pages causes a serious case of writer’s whiplash (who are we talking about now? Tom Brennan still?); and his tendency to generalize to his audience, assuming all of his reades have no experience whatsoever with the tournament, feels as condescending as it is clunky. John: we are modern sports fans. We know everything there is to know about Dickie V, we know all about the format of the tournament, and we want more.

It’s a shame, too, because few people have had the opportunity to cover as many of these things as Feinstein has. I’ll give you an example. A year ago, I got to cover the National Title Game in Indianapolis thanks to a writing contest, and had the privilege of sitting at a press hospitality buffet table with Michael Wilbon, Andy Katz, Stewart Mandel, Pat Forde, and a host of other revolving sports media heavyweights. They shared stories about Bobby Knight, talked about their first tournament, recalled meeting Michael Jordan in college, and they did so without censor or concern. This is the type of book Feinstein seemed to want to write — Press Buffet Table Confessions, perhaps? — but instead, wrote a compilation of a career’s worth of notes, with little regard for space or continuation or structure.

Season On the Brink remains a seminal work, but it does so thanks just as much to its singular narrative focus as any of Bob Knight’s famous antics. Instead of prodigiously rushing each book to press, and spending so much of his time being wrong about Duke Lacrosse, Feinstein would be wise to revise what made him a ubiqituous brand in the first place.