“There is no other coach—I say this in hindsight of having covered college basketball for the last 20 years—no other coach I know of who could have won a national championship with that team. He created a belief, an aura, an environment for that team to do things that even we did not know we were capable of doing without him.”
-- Terry Gannon
“There is no way that anybody could ever tell me that there wasn’t divine intervention involved. I think we were instruments. I think we transcended normal basketball.”
-- Thurl Bailey
“When March Went Mad” is a great story with a great title (which Seth Davis, unbelievably, stole for his own book) for a great (read: captive) audience. The story of the 1983 Wolfpack would not be believable if it weren’t true; even Disney would have laughed it out of town and derided it as a “Hoosiers” knockoff. But it happened. And author Tim Peeler painstakingly researches the team and the tale a quarter-century after it all happened to re-create it for another generation.
And surely, a captive audience is more willing to forgive the holes and errors that come along with a book like this, one that appears to have been somewhat rushed to print. So there were a ton of smaller mistakes, yet some of the problems are almost unforgiveable: in the pictures area, legendary Pack coach Kay Yow is referred to as “Coach Wow” in an unfortunate typo. One chapter actually ends in the middle of a sentence, something so amazing that it challenges belief.
Elsewhere, Peeler relies a bit too much on the lazy and the cliché, with seemingly every major player on the team being tabbed as the “heart” of the NC State team at one point or another. While the format of using each member of the team to tell the story from their own perspective is unique, it does lead to a lot of repetition, jumping timelines and slight awkwardness. Also, it would have been nice to include a photo of each player within the chapter that detailed them specifically; considering Peeler’s access to the Wolfpack record books and memorabilia, this seemingly would have been easy. The chronology becomes a bit hard to follow, with games discussed and summarized, then described in even greater detail. The team’s ongoing record is rarely discussed, leading to some miscalculations, certainly a strange approach for a season-long chronicle.
On the plus side, there were some great revelations that even the biggest Pack fan may not have known. For instance, I was pretty young when all this went down, but I didn’t know that it was a myth that State needed to win the ACC Tournament that year to get into the NCAAs; Peeler documents and proves that the Wolfpack’s record was solid enough to earn inclusion even after its first win in the tourney. Also, it’s revealed that even after winning the ACC Tournament in Greensboro, N.C., NC State is sent to Corvalis, Ore., while UNC got to play in Greensboro instead—even though the Wolfpack beat the Heels twice and won the league. Peeler notes that State officials were later told that, had State lost the ACC Tournament finale to Virginia, the Pack would have stayed in Greensboro for the opening rounds of the NCAA tourney.
There is also some room for commentary on the current state of college sports, with Dereck Whittenburg making a pointed statement that could be applied to a certain coach in Kentucky (and lots of other places):
“I think college basketball has lost its way with that; it’s ‘win at all costs’ and ‘forget about the kids who graduate. I think coaching is not about how many championships you win, it’s about how many lives you empower and how many people you put out there who can be productive in society.”
Of course and inevitably, any discussion of the ’83 Wolfpack centers around that great gravitational, magnetic force, Jim Valvano. Peeler doesn’t shy away from talking about V’s eventual downfall, his error of juggling too many balls in the air. Yet there were tremendous anecdotes shared about the passionate coach:
“If you think we have come all this way, won all these close games, and made it to the national championship game just to hold the ball in front of 50 million people, you are out of your fucking minds. We are going to shove it up their ass. This is what we have been fighting for!”
-- Jim Valvano
“Pam Valvano, Jim’s wife of 25 years, was used to finding 3x5 index cards listing simply stated life goals in her husband’s clothes. For years, those cards contained his dreams. One said, ‘Become Division I head coach,’ another said, ‘Get an NCAA bid,’ and another said, ‘Win the national championship.’ The last one she ever found simply read, ‘Find a cure for cancer.’ Valvano’s dreams were always bigger than the cards he used.”
“What I think is ironic is that Jimmy’s legacy isn’t basketball anymore. It’s not the ’83 championship anymore. It’s fighting cancer and the V Foundation. Jimmy had incredible foresight. He was always ahead of his time. His mind operated always in the future. That was one of his problems, too. He wasn’t in the present too much. He was rarely in the past. But he was always in the future.”
-- Bobby Cremins
“You know what Jimmy’d say about the V Foundation? He would say, ‘Jesus Christ, Nick, can’t you do a little better? What the hell is taking you so long? I got you started. I gave you the speech. And this is all you have done?’”
-- Nick Valvano
The book finds its stride at the end, as the Wolfpack players try to find a way to capture in words the feeling of winning it all, against all odds:
“I can pick out the two of us together dancing across the floor. Everything that I had worked for in my life came together in that moment: all those shots I had taken in the snow in Joliet, Illinois; all that time I spent working with my dad. To be able to share that with him on the floor—the guy who had taken me every step of the way—was just an incredible moment.
“They say getting married and having kids are wonderful things, and they are. But this was something so different. For a dad and his kid to share it, it was the greatest moment of my life …
“I have never encountered a person who didn’t know what that was. It has somehow become a sports version of the Kennedy assassination, the man walking on the moon, or 9/11. people remember where they were. They are always willing to convey what they were doing. Most of the stories start with, ‘I was in a bar …’”
-- Terry Gannon
“People talk to their sons and grandsons about it and tell them about one of the greatest finishes in NCAA history. People love that underdog story. It lives on. People are always asking me about it, and it never, ever, ever gets old.”
-- Thurl Bailey
In the end, the mistakes cast a relatively small shadow on the book as a whole, a kind of sad indicator of a small-scale job. Yet Peeler succeeds best by doing the easiest and most prudent thing: stand out of the way of a story that endures and let it tell itself.
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