Last Shot by John Feinstein

Author:John Feinstein [Feinstein, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53695-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

The rest of the evening passed Stevie like a train flashing by on a high-speed railroad track. Once the games began, it was all a blur. He and Susan Carol had much better seats than he had dared hope. They were in the second row of what was called overflow media, which meant they were sitting in the second row in the stands, just behind the three rows of press seating. Most of the other overflow media were reporters and producers from the local TV stations in each of the four towns where the teams were from. But there were some media celebrities, too, including Chris Wallace from Fox News, who was sitting right next to Susan Carol.

Susan Carol asked what he was doing at the Final Four. “We’re doing the show from here tomorrow,” he said. “We have a panel that’s going to discuss what’s wrong with college athletics.”

“I hope your show is at least four hours long,” Stevie said, realizing he had become a true cynic in just a couple of days.

“You aren’t the first person to say something like that,” Wallace said.

“Who’s on the panel?” Susan Carol asked.

“It’s an interesting group,” Wallace said. “We have Tom Izzo, the coach at Michigan State, and Roy Williams, the coach at North Carolina, to talk from the coaches’ point of view. Then, to talk about it from the academic side, we have the outgoing president of Duke—”

“Dr. Sanford?” Susan Carol said.

“Yes, good man, I think,” Wallace said. “I like the fact that he said he wants to retire and go back to teaching because he’s tired of being a glorified fund-raiser. And our fourth panelist is the faculty representative at Minnesota State, who is some kind of ethics expert.”

They both went wide-eyed. “Whiting?” Susan Carol said. “Thomas Whiting?”

“Yes. Why? You know him?”

“No, not really. I just know he’s close to Chip Graber.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. We actually tried to get Koheen, the MSU president, too, but they said he had to go to a fund-raising brunch.”

“Guess Dr. Sanford is right,” Stevie said.

“Oh, he’s right,” Wallace said. “There’s no doubt he’s right.”

They sat back in their seats to watch the game. Stevie couldn’t believe how the place had filled up. He looked up at the seats in the upper deck and saw they were completely full. Somewhere up there was his dad. “The players must look like ants from up in the top deck,” he commented to Susan Carol, thinking how lucky they were.

Everything about the Final Four was big. The PA was loud, and the announcer seemed to take several days introducing the players. The TV time-outs seemed to last forever, no doubt because he couldn’t click to something else during the three minutes of commercials he knew CBS was showing.

The game itself was intense, right from the start. Each team had a great guard whom the coaches built their offense around: Graber for MSU, Tommy Watson for the Hawks. Early on, St. Joe’s got several long threes from senior Pat Carroll, a skinny guy.

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