Tobacco Road

As you might have noticed due to my lack of reports, my trip to Thailand de-railed some of my reading for quite awhile. I continued to do my weekly Sports Illustrated reading very faithfully (I do a lot of that on the bus), and I've been plugging through The Complete Sherlock Holmes (I'm about 15% of the way through volume 2) on my lunch breaks, but I didn't do any non-fiction book reading for the last week before I left for Thailand, and for one reason or another, I didn't crack open the next book until about 2 weeks ago. However, I'm back in the groove now, and I just finished Tobacco Road, by Alwyn Featherston. The book chronicles the history of college basketball on Tobacco Road, the region of North Carolina from which Duke, North Carolina, NC State, and Wake Forest hail. I picked this book up due to my Duke fan-dom and my interest in ACC basketball as a whole.

I found this book to be a worthwhile read, but I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed. The book is subtitled: "the history of the most heated backyard rivalries in college sports", and so I was expecting a more intimate look into the actual rivalries, with more emphasis on the emotional sides of things, and maybe some more behind the scenes things, like student body incidents. However, while the book certainly highlights some of the more explosive rivalry type moments, it really is just a history of the 4 basketball programs, their ups, downs, and the competition between them. Since I'm not very up on my college basketball history beyond the era when I started becoming aware of sports (late 80s), I still learned a lot from the book, but I was mainly just informed when I was hoping for a little bit more insight and entertainment.

Anyhow, it's on to the next book, which is A Few Seconds of Panic, by Stefan Fatsis. The sub-title of the book is rather enlightening as to what it's about: "A 5 foot 8, 170 poungd, 43 year old sportswriter plays in the NFL". The author was allowed to participate in training camp with the Denver Broncos as a kicker a few years ago, and the book chronicles his experiences and insights. A recent Sports Illustrated had a column from Fatsis where he gave some summary thoughts and insights from his experiences, and based on that, I will be highly disappointed if I don't find this book to be both highly entertaining and rather insightful.