A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

*A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball. John Feinstein. Villard, $18.95.

If you haven't read John Feinstein, you're missing a lot of fun. He's one of those writers who loves something so much, and talks about it so vividly, that you can't help but find yourself caught up in the excitement. This kind of infectious enthusiasm has made him rich in acclaim as the country's best college basketball writer. It's made him rich, too. A Season on the Brink, his story of Indiana University coach Bob Knight, rode the Times bestseller list for 25 weeks.

This time Feinstein takes on a broader subject-an entire season of college basketball.* By weaving together profiles and you-are-there accounts of games into a diary, he tries to capture what he calls the unique "culture" of the game. During the 1987-1988 season, Feinstein went native. He hung out in motels and locker rooms with officials like Rusty Herring, whose license plate reads "Luv2 ref." He went court-side with lesser players and with stars like Steve Kerr of the University of Arizona whose father, the president of American University in Beirut, had been assassinated; the 22-year-old then had to endure chants of "PLO, PLO" when his team took on rival Arizona State. He studied how Danny Manning's metamorphosis from great player to great leader took the Kansas Jayhawks to victory in the national championship.

But while Feinstein lauds what's lovable about college basketball, he barely mentions what ails it-the abysmal SAT scores; the abysmal graduation rates; the drugs; or the insidious effect that big money has on 18-year-old kids and dollar-starved colleges. It's not that Feinstein is blind to the seamy side of college ball. He covered it for 11 years at The Washington Post and is currently a special contributor to Sports Illustrated. But here he's chosen instead to celebrate the sport rather than give it the warts-and-all treatment.

Even if it is a one-sided view, other journalists, including those beyond the sports desk, can still find a lot to learn from Feinstein's dogged reporting, lively style, and, perhaps above all, his acute sense of organizational culture. These qualities are what mark top-notch sportswriting like his-a genre too quickly dismissed by other writers. The condescension toward sportswriters as a gang of good-timin" would-be jocks found typical expression recently in an editorial in The New Republic. Criticizing the sportswriters' coverage of the protest of NCAA rules by Coach John Thompson of Georgetown, the magazine opined that recent columns served as "a reminder of why society generally confines sports writers to the sports page." This back-to-your-locker-rooms-boys view is ironic not least because the qualities that sportswriting embodies-vivid prose, deft narration, point-of-view-are precisely those that good political writers, from The New Republic to the newsweeklies, have increasingly displayed. And others could stand to display it more: even greats like David Broder could learn a trick or two from Feinstein. The opposite is true as well-Feinstein and his sports-desk colleagues could learn from political...