Fast Breaks, Finger Rolls, and Fisticuffs

Book excerpt: In 1979, Providence athletic director Dave Gavitt gifted the college basketball world a conference like no other. Much has been said about the unique brand of hoops played during the Big East's golden era, when football shared the entertainment throne and its specter had yet to hover over every other sport in America. However, very little of that dialogue has come from the mouths of the players, the men who made the magic. In Fast Breaks, Finger Rolls, and Fisticuffs: Memories of Big East Basketball, Mark Hostutler interviewed 50 alumni of the conference's first decade and a half to compile its oral history from the players' perspectives. Whatever the moment - Georgetown's national title in 1984, Villanova's the next year, Jerome Lane's glass-rupturing dunk, Syracuse's unlikely runs to the final in 1987 and 1996, or Boston College's shocking upset of defending-champion North Carolina in the 1994 NCAA Tournament - Hostutler spoke with someone who experienced it. Connecticut's Chris Smith, Seton Hall's Terry Dehere, Villanova's Doug West and Kerry Kittles, Felipe Lopez of St. John's, Boston College's Bill Curley, and Syracuse's Rony Seikaly, Lawrence Moten, and John Wallace are among the many who shared their stories of being on the inside. These men help fans relive the Big East's notorious battles of attrition, the violence of its post play, and the ball-handling exhibitions and perimeter-scoring displays that transcended some of the most physical, suffocating defenses in the country. Although the Big East has recently survived the football-dictated, tectonic shift of the NCAA's terrain with its original, basketball-centric ethos intact, what remains are just the fossils of the greatest alliance in college basketball history. This book turns back the clock, transporting readers to a time when the best players in America treated the college campus as their second home and not just a brief stop along their path to the NBA.