Just in time for the Final Four

Recommended reading:

If you like probing the seedy side of “amateur” basketball, check out Greg Cote’s Miami Herald piece on the at McDonald's All-American game, also known as an “overglorified culmination of a dubious, sleaze-tinged underbelly of All-American excess and greed.”

http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/story/977838.html

Then there’s William C. Rhoden’s column in The New York Times on what he calls the “extensive trafficking in players” that funnels high school phenoms — and often their coaches — to the next level.

Can you say meat market? Rhoden can.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/sports/ncaabasketball/30rhoden.html

There are two good columns on John Calipari’s move from Memphis to Kentucky.

ESPN’s Pat Forde writes about Calipari’s checkered past and how the Wildcats’ desperation to recapture past glory might backfire.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=4032093&sportCat=ncb

Speaking of desperation, Geoff Calkins has a terrific piece in the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal about a city so pathetically intent on winning college basketball games that citizens staked out Calipari’s house, practically begging him to stay with the Tigers.

Writes Calkins: “This kind of thing can’t possibly be all about basketball, can it?

“And it’s not, of course. It’s about our fragile sense of ourselves. When Calipari was on national television, Memphis was on national television. When Calipari was winning big, Memphis was winning big.

“So what if the city had a lousy mayor and an empty Pyramid and a soul-crushing problem with crime? It had a totally kick-butt basketball coach.

“And now the basketball coach was leaving. Going to Kentucky. Leaving Memphis with the mayor and The Pyramid and the crime.”

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/apr/01/we-learned-little-more-about-john-calipari/