Terry FreiCritiques

I enjoyed reading this while my beloved Wisconsin Badgers were making their trip to (and then losing in) the Final Four. The author says in his acknowledgments that he thought of writing this over a decade ago and wishes he would have before so many of the actors died. I agree, but he still did a great job of getting pieces of the story from people who knew the people involved very well.

I enjoyed reading this while my beloved Wisconsin Badgers were making their trip to (and then losing in) the Final Four. The author says in his acknowledgments that he thought of writing this over a decade ago and wishes he would have before so many of the actors died. I agree, but he still did a great job of getting pieces of the story from people who knew the people involved very well.

I am a huge hockey fan and Patrick Roy was my favorite goalie before he retired. So needless to say, I loved the book. I can't really comment on a "story" since this was factual but the layout, writing style and topics/events discussed were well though out and clearly communicated. (Sorry for the bland review, I usually don't review non-fiction.)

The only downfall for this book is that it is a niche book. What I mean by this is that you either REALLY need to love hockey, or the Avs or Patrick Roy to get into it. The average hockey fan may/may not rate it highly.

Style B+
Content/facts B
Flow/lay out B+

Nice addition to my hockey library!

Save by Roy is a well-written book chronicling the rookie NHL coach Patrick Roy and how he took the Colorado Avalanche from mediocrity to a possible Cup contender in the 2013-14 season. This book is by no means a must read for hockey fans (unless you're an Avs fan), but it gives a good perspective on how Roy used time on the ice as an all-star goalie and experience as a QMJHL coach to rally a fairly young team.

The book reads like Frei and Dater's feature articles. It's game recaps and player profiles interrupted by the writers' diary entries. The game recaps are tiring if you're not interested in reliving the season game-by-game. However, the authors make up for it with their frank looks at Semyon Varlamov's domestic violence accusation, individual players trying to make it to the Olympics, and the Avs' place in the Denver sports market.½

I received this book from Library Thing for an honest review.

This was an entertaining book to read. I am an avid hockey fan, and live in Denver. Being familiar with Terry Frie and Adrian Dater, I knew what I was getting myself into. Serious hockey talk and analyzation, as well as some humor and blunt comments. Just the way I like it.

I admit, am a transplant from Detroit, grew up with hockey in my blood, and a die hard Red Wings fan. That doesn't change the fact that I enjoy hockey as a whole, and root for the Avs when they are not playing my Wings. The season of Roy was a great ride, watching it from the front row in Denver. So what I read I was witness to.

Adrian is fun to read. I won't spoil it for those who want to read about the beginning of the Roy era. Overall, a good read in the off-season of the Avs year one. Year two was kind of a back-to-reality season. I like the moves the Avs made this off-season, draft, and free agency, so year 3 with Roy should be pretty entertaining. If you want to read about the behind the scenes aspects of the Avs and Roy, then give this a try. Its not all stats and game-by-game analysis. Good job guys!

I absolutely love hockey and watch more NHL games than probably anyone else you know. If my Blackhawks aren't on, I still watch at least one or two games each day of the hockey season. When a new hockey book is released, I'm probably in its target market.

That said, this look at NHL Hall of Famer Patrick Roy and the building of the 2013-2014 Colorado Avalanche, by a pair of Denver sportswriters, was interesting to me, though somewhat dry, I thought. The book offers some background on every player on the team and, interwoven with that, a day-by-day look at every day of that season.

A more narrative look at the season and the team probably would've been better.

For real diehard Avs fans, this book would probably be a perfect fit. For diehard hockey fans, in general, it's not bad. For others, it's probably too much information.½

The good part is that it wove the story line in with world events in 1939 as war loomed in Europe. The bad part is that the delivery of the story line lacked energy and read more like a chronicle.

I've been a huge hockey fan since I watched the 2001 Stanley Cup Finals between the Devils and the Avalanche—and since I grew up in Colorado, of course I was rooting for the Avs. Even with their string of frankly awful seasons under Joe Sacco, I figured at some point they would be able to turn things around...

I wish I knew just a little more about the strategy behind the various administrative maneuvers, like why players who seem to produce get traded, and I always like finding out about players' backgrounds. I'm always bummed because the NHL GameCenter that I subscribe to always cuts out right after the third period, so I never get to watch the lockerroom reports or post-game presser. At least I can read Adrian Dater, Terry Frei, and Mike Chambers writing about the Avs thanks to the internet!

The 2013-14 season was incredible because the Avs went from 29th in the league (out of 30 teams) the season before to the third best overall under Roy, with a team full of young players, older journeymen, and a few notable names. This book had brief descriptions of all 82 games (plus the brief playoff run), along with bios of all of the players, lockerroom interviews, snippets of interviews with coaches around the league and general managers, along with a little bit of team history.

I found this book absolutely fascinating, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone. If you're a fan of the Avalanche or Roy and want to read what amounts to an in-depth, 300-page newspaper story about the Avs (and who wouldn't?!), this is definitely the book for you. Even if you're curious about the maneuverings behind the bench and how this team could make this kind of miraculous leap (and the players' reactions to it), this is also an excellent read. But if you're expecting a thorough biography of Roy, or detailed hockey strategy, or anything like that, this isn't that kind of book.

This book is also organized in an interesting way: snippets of history, commentary, and behind-the-scenes action are interspersed with analyses of the games, and there are several dedicated sections to segments of the team. Everything flows together really well and in a way that makes sense, and doesn't seem contrived. Right as you're thinking "Okay, I could use a break from just reading about the games", Frei and Dater had the foresight (or a good editor) to switch to a longer section of behind-the-scenes stuff, or to a collection of player bios.

I found this book totally engrossing, well organized, and super interesting!

This is a very engrossing look into a hall of fame player’s transition into a head coach, with plenty of information about the players and the behind the dressing room door details. With the authors providing a game-by-game analysis intermixed with the star player’s biographies and direct commentary when the situation requires it renders a rich and detailed look at a top caliber team.

I am a new and enthusiastic hockey fan. The Colorado Avalanche 2013-2014 season cemented my fandom firmly in the sport in general and the Avs in particualr. Considering that they went from second-to-last place to third in one season with the legendary goalie Patrick Roy as their coach, his first time coaching in the NHL, was very impressive. This book details the events that lead to Roy being asked to coach and then goes through game by game and player by player. This book was well-written by both authors, with asides from one or the other when necessary.

I received [Save By Roy] as an advanced readers copy. I am a HUGE hockey fan and have the utmost respect for Patrick Roy(although as a New York Rangers fan I hate him with a passion.) I was really excited to read this books and I was not disappointed. It was well written and was almost like a written version of 24/7 on NHL network. It had insider points of view that regular fans don't get. The fact that Roy managed to bring this team to the playoffs after being almost last in the league the season before (only Florida was worse and they don't count) in the amazingly tough Western Conference was amazing. All hockey fans should read this book (even if Roy made you cry when you were younger.)

March Madness and all the hoopla surrounding the annual national college basketball championship tournament had to start somewhere and this book beautifully chronicles the early days of the tournament, focusing on the the first national championship tournament winner, the Oregon Webfoots, who won the inaugural tournament in 1939.

Besides unearthing a lot of interesting information about the games and the players on that championship team, the author also weaves in current events leading up to World War 2, as well as interesting facts about the state of the game at that time. For instance, this was soon after the rule providing for a center court jump ball after each basket was eliminated. Also, James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, was still alive and attended the tournament on the Northwestern University campus in Chicagoland.

Also of interest were the parts addressing the rivalry between this national championship tournament and the "national invitation tournament" now called the NIT which began in the previous year and focused more on East Coast teams.

This is a very interesting book, even for the non-basketball fan, one that I would recommend.

I thought this was an entertaining read and somewhat informative. However, Frei seemed to go into it with a bias in favor of the 1938-1939 Oregon team. He laughed off any claims that the 1939 LIU team might have been as good by criticizing their schedule strength as much as anything. However, the fact is that they beat a team that beat Oregon and had a better record than Oregon. That doesn't necessarily mean that Oregon wasn't deserving of being called the first NCAA champions, but I also don't think that Frei can be considered a reliable source on the issue considering the biases that are hinted at in the introduction. This is an author who has ties to Oregon and grew up idolizing this particular team. He's hardly a reliable source.

I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. My interest in it was twofold--I am a longtime fan of college basketball and I now live in Oregon. The book is a fascinating account of how the NCAA Tournament came into being. It was not dreamed up by focus groups or hard-nosed marketing specialists looking to improve the NCAA "brand," but appeared almost by chance, with no great expectation of huge success. Many college teams were not even interested in playing in the tournament that first year. The author has done a lot of research and he tells a very appealing story of the days when schools actually thought about whether playing certain games would hurt the players' academic work, when athletes stayed in school for four years, and so on. The individual stories of the players increase our interest in what happened to them on the court. Yes, all the Oregon players came from Oregon and Washington, most of them from very small towns, but that is just one of the amazing things about the team's success. Throughout the book, the author intersperses the basketball narrative with news clips about the impending World War II. They were playing at a time when the U.S. involvement in a war was hotly debated and controversial. In addition to this explicit contrast, there is another implicit contrast--the tournaments of that time against the March Madness of today, where every second of the experience is monetized by somebody, the hysteria is over the top, and legions of middle aged men make very good livings criticizing 18 year old kids 24 hours a day. The tournament has, for me, become too bloated to be enjoyable. That's one reason why I enjoyed this book so much. At bottom basketball is a game, a wonderful game, and these young men played it the way it should be played.

Interesting retelling of the story of the first NCAA Basketball Champion and the University of Oregon Webfoots (not Ducks) basketball team that won it. Relatively quick read, but it may not appeal to everyone.

The biggest issue for me is that the author tried to associate it with the lead up to World War II, without making a great connection.

I liked this book, but it was not my favorite. I felt like the subject could have been presented in a more compelling manner and it just didn't pull me in the way I thought it would. I did enjoy the brief interweaving of WWII lead-up and more of that might have added an extra layer of interest to the story. It was interesting to see how the tournament developed and kind of amusing to see how many teams declined invites to play in it during the first year.½

I have a love hate relationship with March Madness. I love it because I love college basketball and as a diehard Kansas Jayhawk fan have had a dog in the fight every season for the past 25 years. I hate it in the same way heavy drinkers hate New Year’s Eve or hipsters hate when their favorite band signs to a major label; the amateurs who come out of the woodwork every March complaining about their brackets being busted and debating about where players will fall in the NBA draft.

I don’t like gambling, fantasy sports or the NBA so I’m mostly irritated by the chatter about everything but the basketball games and the unique qualities of a single-elimination tournament where the better team often doesn’t win. I also don’t care too much for basketball games being played in football stadiums (or aircraft carriers, casinos and resorts) but that’s a topic for another time.

Maybe it’s because UConn and Kentucky are in the Final Four this year and the teams I generally root for didn’t survive the first weekend, but this year’s tournament has been especially disappointing. The feeling of dread I feel every March has only enhanced with each game and each tweet I’ve read about how this or that team losing just killed someone else’s bracket (newsflash: nobody cares about your bracket).

For solace I’ve turned to and found respite in a book about the very first NCAA Tournament, which took place way back in 1939, a year when that feeling of dread had more to do with pending war than it did a basketball tournament only a few thousand fans were lucky enough to watch in person. In the book, Terry Frei recounts the journey of the Oregon Webfoots to the first ever NCAA national championship in Chicago and the tournament’s modest beginnings.

The Webfoots, which we know today as the Ducks, were in many ways a team ahead of their time, playing a frenetic pace for their time with enough height, officially and unofficially, to earn the nickname the Tall Firs. Their coach, Howard Hobson, was one of the early masterminds of the game who tinkered and toiled with Naismith’s peach basket game in ways that have become commonplace for modern day programs.

Frei recounts more than just the basketball games. By dropping in short news items throughout, he places the season in context with world events and the coming war that would change so much of American culture. The mini history lessons provide an informative context for the events on the court as the Webfoots’ magical season takes them through a long cross country trip highlighted by a game at Madison Square Garden in New York, a tough Pacific Coast Conference schedule and another long train ride to Chicago for the national championship game against Ohio State.

In the end, “The Tall Firs” were too much for the Buckeyes and took home a trophy that had been broken in two pieces earlier in the game when Oregon guard Bobby Anet crashed into the table it was sitting on trying to save a ball from going out of bounds. As evidenced by the crowd reaction back home recounted here with photos and press clippings, the national title was taken very seriously by hometown fans but at the time. But the second-year National Invitational Tournament at Madison Square Garden was also staking claim on a mythical national championship so Oregon’s win wasn’t celebrated or recognized as a true national championship the way it is today.

There were also no bracket pools to speak of, one and done superstars (there was no NBA to leave school for, after all), shouting sports commentators or even a sellout crowd in a basketball arena, much less a football stadium to witness it. But while Temple University can boast of winning the first ever NIT a year earlier and LIU can claim a national title for winning the NIT after an undefeated season in 1939 (despite playing only one game outside New York City), only Oregon can truly say that they were the original NCAA tournament champs. Before the Madness.

If like me, you’re not really looking forward to the Final Four, pass the time replaying the games and “what ifs” in your head and check out March 1939: Before the Madness.

We've come a long way since the Tall Firs won the first NCAA basketball tournament. Terry Frei gives you a sense of the basketball and the larger historical forces at work in March 1939. "Before the Madness" certainly has more than one meaning in this book.

I received this book through Library Things early reviewers program just in time for March Madness, great timing! This book was more about the 1939 NCAA champion Oregon Webfoots (now called the Oregon Ducks) than being strictly about the March Madness tournament. The author goes into detail about the coach and all of the players, including how they were recruited to the program. This led to one of the more humorous factoids (to me at least) that this championship team was known by the nickname "The Tall Firs" since their front court was so tall and towered over the opposition. I then flipped to the front of the book with the player stats and saw the height of the "Tall Fir" frontcourt... 6'8", 6'4", 6'4"... that would be a backcourt today! Their guards were under 5'11"! How times have changed!
Overall this was an enjoyable book but probably much more enjoyable to Oregon alumni or people in the Northwest. It was an interesting glimpse into the past and how close something we all enjoy (and makes a ton of money) almost never came into being!

The perfect gift for the Oregon basketball fan. Not being one of those, what I found most interesting was the utterly haphazard manner in which the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament (the Big Dance, March Madness, etc.) came into being. Primarily as a challenge to New York City's dominance over the college basketball world, the NCAA tournament was a slapdash affair that barely created any stir at all... at first. In fact several teams either refused to participate outright (Colorado, Kentucky) or opted instead for an invitation to compete in the second annual NIT tournament at Madison Square Garden. Hard to envision anyone turning down a trip to the NCAA tournament and a shot at a national championship today.

The writing is good and the research impressive, obviously this was a labor of love for the author having grown up hearing about the "Tall Firs" of Oregon and how they prevailed in 1939. Anyone not motivated to fall in love with a seventy-five year old college basketball team (when the games were played without a shot clock, a three-point arc, no rules against goaltending and so on) will find this book pretty tough to get into and slow-going throughout.

I’m a relative newcomer to the joys of March Madness. I’m also a history buff so I am interested in learning about the history of the first NCAA championship tournament. Unfortunately for me, this book, whose title is almost as long as the book itself, is less about the championship than it is about the champions. That would be great if I were an Oregon Duck’s booster but I’m not and I don’t need to know about the fraternity affiliations of every player on the 1939 U of O squad. Oddly, the book also dedicates a lot of space to coach Clair Bee and his Long Island University Blackbirds, a team which didn’t even participate in the first NCAA tournament.

That said, there is a lot of good information about how the NCAA tourney came to be and about that events that led up to its creation. It’s just interspersed among a lot of Oregon and LIU information and other participating teams didn’t get mentioned as much as I would like.

Although Frei does a good job of fleshing out the personalities of the characters in the story, there are sometimes when his writing style is downright confusing. Sentences such as ‘Adler made the second of a two-shot opportunity to make the CCNY lead two points, and the Beavers held on for the 38-36 victory’ had me rereading the paragraph trying to figure out which team was victorious.

There are also some factual errors in Frei’s book. He reports that Colorado all-star Byron ‘Whizzer’ White (yes, the Supreme Court justice) played football for the Pittsburgh Steelers after graduating in 1938. White played for the NFL’s Pittsburgh Pirates for one season in 1938 before accepting a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford. There was no Pittsburgh Steelers football team until 1940.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for information about the 1939 Oregon Webfoots basketball team, you have come to the right place. If you want a more general description of the first NCAA tournament I would keep looking.

**Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review book was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.

Terry Frei's __March 1939: Before the Madness__ is an engaging account of both a college basketball team and its coach and the early efforts of two competing groups to establish a tournament to decide the nation's top college basketball team. Both the NIT and the NCAA tournaments, begun in the last years of the 1930s, have of course survived and flourished. The University of Oregon (my alma mater) won the first NCAA tournament and Long Island University the NIT. Lots of disagreement about which was better, good cases on both sides, etc., provide insight into the public's growing interest in basketball on all levels. Frei presents solid, lively accounts of early players and coaches and good background about the sportswriting of the era, including its role in popularizing nicknames for the Oregon teams (Webfoots, Ducks, Tall Firs).

The jacket suggests some kind of connection will be made to the onset of WWII, but there is no real connection, of course, and the"Newsreel" paragraphs are more like interruptions than context. Ongoing references to Clair Bee, coach of LIU and author of juvenile sports books, have more relevance to the main story. This is a good book, not great, with clear, lively writing throughout. Ten pages of appendices provide statistics for the main players and teams in both tournaments. Good footnotes and index.

This is an excellent book, interesting both in its subject matter and presentation. Frei discusses not only the first NCAA tournament and the team that won it, but other events of the era that give context to the team's performance. These events include the lead-up to the second NIT tournament, the political scene both in the US and in Europe (on the eve of World War II), and the famous individuals in and around the University of Oregon campus at the time.

The book is relatively short, just under 200 pages, which is a plus--any longer and I would have been bored, any shorter and information may have been left out--and written in grounded language.

The only problem I have with this book is its frequent copyediting errors. There was nothing egregious, but they appeared over and over again and it was, at least to me, noticeable.

This is the story of the road to the first NCAA tournament. The author who has a connection with the Oregon Ducks (who were called the Webfoots back then) did tend to focus on their story more than on the story of the other teams that advanced in this first tournament, but it was still a very interesting story. In addition to including what was going on in the basketball world, the author also included paragraphs giving an overview of what was happening in the World in regards to World War II. The author had also followed through with additional information about the post-tournament life of each Oregon player and how World War II and/or the Korean Conflict affected them. It's very readable. I can envision this book being a hit with many college students who are somewhat reluctant recreational readers. This review is based on an advance e-galley of the book provided by the publisher through NetGalley with the expectation that a review would be written.

Subtitled "A Novel of Hitler's Siren and America's Hero," Olympic Affair is a fascinating piece of historical fiction based on a true story - the love affair between American decathlete Glenn Morris and famous German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The two met during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, which is better known for Jesse Owens than this story. I'd never heard of Morris before this book.

Although she claimed she was not a member of the Nazi party, former actress Riefenstahl had made some controversial pro-Nazi films, such as Triumph of the Will, and was definitely close to Hitler and his cohorts. She was at the Olympics to make the documentary Olympia. Morris went on to short careers in the NFL and in Hollywood. Frei implies the latter was due to Riefenstahl giving him the idea that he could be a big star. He starred in one film, Tarzan's Revenge (along with another former Olympian, 1932 backstroke gold medalist Eleanor Holm), that flopped.

Later in her life, Riefenstahl admitted the relationship, expressing sadness that they did not continue it. Morris seemed to have grounds for more regret, given that the affair may have broken up his later marriage to his pre-Olympics sweetheart, and pretty much ruined his life. A small-town boy from Colorado, Morris comes off as rather naive in the book, which he probably was.

Author Terry Frei is a sports columnist for the Denver Post. The book is well-researched, and includes a bibliography and an extensive author's note at the end that tells what's true and what's not. I thought the book was a little long, and that some of the repetitious detail about the pre-Olympic practices could have been left out. Some of the conversations seem a little stilted, especially those with the supposed U.S. governmental agents who meet with Morris about Riefenstahl.

Nevertheless, I'd recommend this book, especially for sports fans. It was interesting to read about how the 1936 Olympic team was chosen, its journey by ship to Berlin, (most of) the pre-competition practices and recreational activities, the competitions themselves, and the follow-up track meets across Europe. Even reading about what happened to the oak seedlings gold medalists were given at the 1936 Games was interesting.

© Amanda Pape - 2013

[I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, in exchange for an honest review. It will be given to either my university or my local public library. This review also appears on my blog, Bookin' It.]