The “Big Dance,” the nickname for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, has captured American attention since 1939. Our appetite for basketball has only increased over the past nine decades. Fill out your bracket with these books and find a winner.

The Last Great Game: Duke vs. Kentucky and the 2.1 Seconds that Changed Basketball by Gene Wojciechowski. ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski delves into Christian Laettner’s winning shot in the NCAA East Regional 1992 game between Duke and Kentucky. The book also explores the coaches and players from both teams and the tenacity that got them to college basketball’s greatest game.

 

Win By Two: A Kansas City Drug Dealer, A Private School Teacher, and the Game That Linked Them Together by Adam Donyes and Derrick Derrell. This unlikely redemption story begins in a crack house and a broken low-income home half a country apart, and unfolds in a state penitentiary, private school gym, foster home and a Kansas City downtown chapel. Basketball initiates the binding force between two drastically different people.

 

Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses and a Life in Perspectives by Pat Summitt. This memoir takes readers into the life of the all-time winningest NCAA basketball coach. Summitt began her coaching career at 21 and continued until after her early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age of 59. She played college ball, coached the University of Tennessee Lady Vols, won silver in the 1976 Olympics and coached the 1984 Olympic gold women’s team.

 

The Mamba Mentality: How I Play by Kobe Bryant. Written after his professional basketball retirement, Bryant “reveals his famously detailed approach and the steps he took to prepare mentally and physically to not just succeed at the game, but to excel,” states the book blurb. Paired with photographs from Lakers and NBA official photographer Andrew D. Bernstein, this book is a record of their 20-year relationship as player and photographer.

 

My Life on a Napkin: Pillow Mints, Playground Dreams and Coaching the Runnin’ Utes by Rick Majerus. This autobiography tells readers “how a chubby kid from Milwaukee found himself at the Final Four, upsetting office pools all over the country” and “how he roughed out his much-discussed plays on a restaurant napkin the night before the Kentucky game,” states the book overview from thriftbooks.com.

 

The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season by John Feinstein takes the reader to the “lesser-known Cinderella stories—the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA,” states the book blurb.

 

Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports by Guy Lawson. A crooked financial manager, Marty Blazer, cut a deal with the FBI and uncovered a monumental corruption scandal inside the NCAA Division I basketball program.

 

The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team by Matthew Goodman. The 1949-50 City College Beavers, most unlikely champions of the NCAA and NIT tournaments, stunned the basketball world. These African American and Jewish student athletes from a tuition-free, merit-based Harlem college “carried an era’s brightest hopes—racial harmony, social mobility and the triumph of the underdog,” states the book description. They made history again, when all five starters were arrested for conspiracy to shave points.

 

Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel is a multi-generational American family saga, centered around basketball. Fathers and sons struggle and triumph from a hellish childhood to the LSU hardwood. It is a book about obsession and legacy.

 

The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph by Scott Ellsworth won the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Ellsworth unfolds the history and story of the first integrated college basketball game in 1944 in Durham, North Carolina. The little-known North Carolina College for Negroes became the highest scoring college team in the nation, led by John McLendon.

 

To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe. “An obsessively personal history of the blood feud between North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams and what that rivalry says about class and culture in the south. This rivalry is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics and perhaps in all of sports,” states the book blurb.

 

March 1939: Before the Madness – The Story of the First NCAA Basketball Tournament Champions by Terry Frei describes the first NCAA Basketball tournament, ultimately between the University of Oregon and Ohio State. The book also dives into the rival National Invitation Tournament and the global historical events leading into WWII.

 

By Celeste McNeil; courtesy photos