The Final Four: The Pursuit of College Basketball Glory
INTRODUCTION March Madness The clock ticks down the seconds 5 4 The roar of the crowd is deafening A player drives toward the basket stops steps back 3 2 1 The shot goes up Camera flashes fill the arena The clock strikes 0 as the ball banks off the backboard and drops toward the rim Few sporting events can match the pure excitement of the Final Four After a tough regular season and weeks of battling through the National Collegiate Athletic Association NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship tournament four teams gather to try to stake their claims as the best in the land For more than three-quarters of a century the Final Four has given fans thrills chills and more than a share of heartbreak It’s college basketball’s biggest stage and only one team can survive Opposite page The Duke Blue Devils and the Wisconsin Badgers battle in the 2015 NCAA title game 5
One FROM THE BASEMENT TO THE BIG TIME A History of the College Basketball Championship There were no cameras no packed seats and no food vendors at Hamline University in St Paul Minnesota on February 9 1895 No fanfare of any kind No one could have known it at the time but in the basement of the university’s science building history was being made It wasn’t the splitting of the atom the discovery of genetics or the theory of relativity that made history that day in Science Hall It was a basketball game Basketball was a new sport invented by physical education teacher James Naismith less than four years earlier Hamline’s athletic director Ray Kaighn had played on Naismith’s first basketball team Kaighn brought the sport to Minnesota When he invited players from the nearby School of Agriculture part of the present-day University of Minnesota to campus for a friendly game the first intercollegiate basketball game was on Opposite page James Naismith center right invented basketball in 1891 7
