Kurt Kemper's history on the rise of college basketball is a valuable addition to the University of Illinois Press's “Sport and Society” series. Kemper has thoroughly researched the archives of the various institutions that have governed intercollegiate sports. It is a complicated story of competing regions, schools, conferences, tournaments, and governing bodies. Kemper writes for an academic audience, and some of the minutiae of bureaucratic infighting might bog down the general reader. Nonetheless, he clearly delineates the important milestones in the evolution of the men's college basketball system, dominated today by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The villain in the story is the NCAA, whose power in college sports derived from the big football programs. “If football birthed the NCAA,” Kemper writes, “it was basketball that revealed its transition from adolescence” (37). The organization fought turf battles with the Amature Athletic Union (AAU), the YMCA, and the National Invitational...
