Free A Season Inside by John Feinstein

top players going up against other top players on a daily basis, sometimes two or three times a day.
    Because they have become such showcases, the three major camp operators—Nike, Howard Garfinkel, and Bill Cronauer—have become almost as cutthroat in recruiting players to their camps as colleges are in recruiting them to their schools.
    Nike was started in 1978 under the name “Athletes for a Better Education.” The players were required to attend classes in the morning that purportedly helped prepare them for dealing with the academic pressures of college.
    Now, that name has been dropped, and what you see is what you getat Nike. It is a basketball meat market—coaches watching players while players watch coaches to see who is watching them most carefully. Coaches who have contracts with Nike can use their influence to get players invited to the camp, and they let recruits know that.
    Nike puts a lot of money into college basketball. It pays a lot of coaches a lot of money (unlike the pros, Nike can’t pay the athletes to wear their shoes—that’s against NCAA rules—so it pays the coaches, often more than $100,000, to provide shoes); it sponsors the annual coaches’ all-star game at the Final Four and it runs the summer camp. No one wants to mess with Nike.
    It was in Princeton that Dale Brown noticed Jent. In some ways Jent did not have, as the scouts put it, a good camp. A shooter, he did not shoot very well. The consensus, and no one is ever sure what creates a consensus, was that his stock dropped during the camp.
    But Brown loved him. He liked the way he played, diving for balls, willingly giving up his body. “I can coach him,” he told his new assistant Craig Carse. “Let’s try to get involved, even though it’s late.”
    Brown wrote Jent and his parents a long letter telling them how impressed he had been with Chris and asking if they would consider adding LSU to the list of schools that would visit Jent’s home. “The letter was so flattering,” said Arnie Jent, Chris’s father, “I really couldn’t say no.”
    Once Brown decides he wants something—or someone—he will do almost anything to get it or him. Brown is one of college basketball’s true characters. Some hate him and ridicule him. Others see him as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, always tilting at a windmill somewhere. Brown has done battle with the NCAA, “as crooked an organization as there is in this country”; with Bob Knight, “a truly evil, cunning, and sick person”; and the recruiting process itself—“What we really are, all of us, is a bunch of white slavers going into Africa to bring back the biggest, best studs we can find.”
    He is a nonstop talker who will tell you about his poor, fatherless boyhood at any hour, day or night. He loves to recite sayings. “I can still remember sitting on the fire escape of our building when I was ten years old, and my mother coming out and telling me, ‘Be different than me. Be yourself. Don’t be frightened.’ I’m not frightened of anything.”
    Probably, that is true. Brown took over the LSU program in 1972 when it was one of the worst basketball schools in the country in aleague, the Southeast Conference, that had traditionally been Kentucky and the nine dwarfs. He had turned LSU into a power, reaching the Final Four in 1981 and 1986 and the Final Eight in 1987.
    The ’87 loss rankled, though, because it had been to Indiana and Knight, a game in which LSU had a big lead only to lose by a point at the buzzer. The game had been controversial, Knight drawing a technical foul in the first half and then slamming a phone in anger while the officials watched and didn’t react.
    “He should have been out of the game, gone,” Brown said. “He stole that game from us. He intimidated the officials. Everyone in the country knows it but no one will say it. Well, I’ll say it. I want that son of a bitch to know there’s one guy who isn’t afraid of him. I want to play him,