Miracles on the Hardwood

March 19, 2021

In many respects, this history of Catholic college basketball could serve as a history of the sport itself. Gasaway, best known as a basketball analyst for ESPN, takes us from the early days of college basketball through the present. He starts by ushering us back to the period between the late 1930s and the 1950s, when the National Invitation Tournament was more prestigious than the NCAA's basketball tournament (the latter is now the goliath March Madness competition); at that time, teams could play in both tournaments. We meet the earliest big men, including the 6'10" George Mikan, who starred at DePaul in the mid-1940s; and Bill Russell, also 6'10", who led the San Francisco Dons to two consecutive NCAA championships in the 1950s. There is also playmaker Bob Cousy, who was a three-time all-American at Holy Cross in the late 1940s. Gasaway also discusses great Catholic college teams, from the Dons to Villanova to perennial challenger Gonzaga. The author doesn't shy away from discussing racism in this era of college basketball, when some coaches refused to play against teams with Black players on their rosters. VERDICT Both students and fans of basketball will find this a valuable survey of the last eight decades of the sport, even as it concentrates on the fortunes of Catholic teams.--Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL

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January 15, 2021
Of hoops, hopes, holy orders, and habits. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that Catholic schools are good at college basketball," writes ESPN basketball analyst Gasaway. It's not so much that God is on their side but that over more than a century, Catholic schools such as Gonzaga, Xavier, Seton Hall, Villanova, and Georgetown have put their sports energies into basketball, sometimes forgoing football in the process. Granted, Loyola University Chicago had a 98-year-old nun named Sister Jean to cheer on the players when they reached the 2018 Final Four. "We pray hard," she told the author, "and we pray before every game. Sometimes it's only a prayer. Sometimes I give the scouting report then." As Gasaway notes, there are some 250 Catholic colleges in the U.S., and 20% play Division 1 ball. What distinguishes many of these schools is consistent excellence in coaching, which, along with the prowess of its players, is what took schools like Seattle University to an unprecedented "four straight appearances at the NCAA tournament" in the 1950s and lands schools like Gonzaga high in the running today. Gasaway covers the lows as well as the highs, including a point-shaving scandal that shook Seton Hall in 1961, lending the school the nickname "Cheatin' Hall" for some time after, and rivalries between Catholic high schools that spilled over into college, as when Georgetown froze out Washington's DeMatha High for four decades owing to a coach's grudge. The highs make up for those bad patches, and they're appropriately mysterious and sometimes miraculous. As Gasaway concludes at the end of his survey of Catholic playing from the time of James Naismith on, "If there is a specifically Catholic secret sauce for basketball success, it remains elusive." Fans of college roundball, parochial or not, will enjoy Gasaway's lively history.

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February 19, 2021
Gasaway, a college-basketball analyst for ESPN.com, teases out and profiles the notable Catholic-university programs (like Holy Cross, the University of San Francisco, Loyola of Chicago, Villanova, St. John's, Georgetown, Marquette, Gonzaga), their storied coaches (like Ray Meyer, Al McGuire, Rollie Massimino, and Mark Few) and the legendary players they developed (like George Mikan, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Elgin Baylor, Hank Gathers, and Patrick Ewing) to deliver an exhaustively detailed, if sometimes also exhausting, history of Catholic-college hoops, dating from the 1930s to the present day. "The defining quality of Catholic basketball programs is not that they necessarily prevail," writes Gasaway, "but, instead, that they persist--as a familiar, distinct, and cohesive body of the sport's disciples." Casual fans might find themselves a little lost in the weeds of minutiae here, but, ultimately, Miracles on the Hardwood will serve as a vital reference on the topic.

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