Word: valvano
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...Syracuse wants to avoid that possibility entirely. + "You never want to play Princeton -- never," he has said. After Princeton scared the bejabbers out of mighty Michigan State, losing earlier this season by two points, Jud Heathcote sang the same tune. "We don't want to play them anymore." Jim Valvano, the coach at North Carolina State, says playing a Carril team is like going to the dentist: very painful. Carril accepts the backhanded compliments as reluctant praise, although he says, "These guys must study one-liners at night...
GOLENBOCK'S allegations will raise some eyebrows, but it is his vivid characterizations that make the book work. There's Kevin Drummond, the serious, hard-working junior-college transfer who can't understand why Valvano picks on him instead of Charles Shackleford, the lazy, pot-smoking center...
MOST of all, there's Valvano, professor of "the Art of the Big Con 101." A liar, a cheat, a turncoat, a PR mastermind--this is not the funny loudmouth we saw on CBS looking for someone to hug after winning the NCAA championship...
...cynical one is hardly original: drop the facade, face the music and pay the players their market value. Rather than let Nike pay Valvano $150,000 to force his players to wear Nike equipment on the court (And planes--for "team unity," according to Valvano.), let the "amateurs" endorse their own products. This plan, of course, will never happen...
...body of the book, the story of a season of discontent, is where Golenbock excels. There are a few flaws, however: he does dwell unnecessarily on Valvano's coaching deficiencies, which are numerous but hardly immoral; and he also inserts a three-page chapter devoted solely to relaying rumors that Bias' died from smoking a crack-laced marijuana cigarette, not from snorting cocaine. Interesting, but irrelevant and unsubstantiated...