Last Shot

Last Shot is a best-selling book set in a context well-known to fans of college sports. At the end of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball season in March, the best teams play in a single-elimination tournament. If a team wins their lone game, they advance to the next round. If they lose, their season is over. Typically, the tournament produces surprising victories, so in the US, March is known as March Madness. As the name implies, the Final Four consists of the last four teams in the tournament. The winners of the two semifinal games face off in the championship game.

The tournament has become a critical part of US culture. People fill out brackets with predictions about how the tournament will unfold and bet on the games; the NCAA, the schools, and the media make a lot of money from the tournament. The American Gaming Association estimated that $3.1 billion would be wagered on March Madness in 2022. As Dick Weiss tells Stevie, “CBS is paying the NCAA a billion dollars for the TV rights” (47). Weiss also tells Stevie that the presence of TV makes the games longer, since there are more time-outs to allow for commercial breaks during live broadcasts. Weiss says, “I’m old enough that I remember when games were played in about ninety minutes” (47). In Last Shot, the demand for March Madness basketball is such that ESPN televises all four final practices live. Due to the popularity of college basketball and the tournament, personalities like sportscaster Dick Vitale have emerged as national celebrities.

John Feinstein, whose first book was about college basketball, uses real-life college basketball media personalities in the book, including ESPN’s Vitale and CBS’s Jim Nantz. He also includes real-life coaches and players such as Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, and Connecticut star Emeka Okafor. The inclusion of real-life individuals reveals Feinstein’s familiarity with college basketball and helps add interest and verisimilitude, or authenticity, for sports fans who recognize these important figures from the sport. The economic details he includes indicate that he’s keenly aware of how money contributes to the circus-like atmosphere of the Final Four; he began his career as a sportswriter in 1977 with The Washington Post, and his book draws on his decades of sports reporting.

Almost right away, Stevie confronts the commercial spectacle of the Final Four. The narrator writes, “He had been at the Final Four for less than eight minutes, and he was already feeling a little overwhelmed” (44). The location of the Final Four, the Superdome, reinforces its outsized impact: Typically, domes are for football games, not college basketball games. The Superdome seems to the protagonists like it could hold 80,000 people. Stevie “couldn’t get over how big the place was” (40-41).

The huge spotlight and financial impact of college basketball makes the sport vulnerable to scandals. In Last Shot, this scandal centers on fixing the Final Four. In general, scandals in college basketball center on players receiving gifts or money, which John Feinstein alludes to with the fictional Brickley Shoes. For a long time, rules prohibited players from receiving compensation for their talents. Schools and media could make millions off players, but players could receive only a scholarship in return for the countless hours they invested in the sport. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA doesn’t have the right to stop college athletes from profiting off their abilities; they can sign endorsement contracts, for example, as professional athletes do. Last Show reveals that college basketball, while fun and exciting, is a billion-dollar industry geared toward making money, and the main priority of the Final Four is to garner maximum profits from the sport’s popularity in the United States.