With Cornell in the Sweet 16 of the NCAAs, here’s an article I wrote on the 25th anniversary of Penn’s appearance in the Final Four in 1979, the last time an Ivy League team won at least two games in the tournament. It was was published in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, 2004.

By Stefan Fatsis

It is the game hyperbolists say changed basketball forever: Twenty-five years ago, on March 26, 1979, Magic Johnson and Michigan State beat Larry Bird and Indiana State to win the NCAA championship.

It actually wasn’t much of a contest, with Michigan State winning easily, 75-64. But the game in Salt Lake City did draw what is still the highest TV rating ever in the sport. Its leading men did go on to resuscitate the National Basketball Association. And it did usher in a new era: ESPN had its debut in 1979 and began showing the early rounds of the NCAA tourney a year later, while Mr. Bird’s appearance during the event on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing Nikes was a major moment in the nascent sports-shoe business. “It changed everything,” Sonny Vaccaro, the sneaker impresario who cut the deal, says of that Final Four.

When assessing the happenings of a quarter-century ago, though, the one piece of “everything” observers overlook involves not Magic or Larry or Nike or ESPN or the NBA — all future global touchstones — but another team in the Final Four of 1979: the University of Pennsylvania.

That’s right, an Ivy League team reached the Final Four. It wasn’t the first time. Dartmouth made it in 1942 and 1944, as did Bill Bradley-led Princeton in 1965. But those were different eras. Basketball wasn’t played by as many schools, recruiting wasn’t a cutthroat business, the urban game hadn’t altered the sport. College hoops as we know it really began in the 1970s. (One way to tell: Major basketball-related violations of NCAA rules jumped from 23 in the 1960s to 56 in the 1970s.)

To me, a sports-mad 10th-grader whose oldest brother went to Penn, the Quakers’ march to the Final Four was thrilling. But it wasn’t surprising. Penn had been a national power not long before. The 1970-71 team — whose starting lineup I could recite as a seven-year-old — was undefeated and ranked third nationally before losing to local hoops rival Villanova 90-47 in the NCAA quarterfinals. The 1971-72 team also reached the final eight. Future NBA coaches Jack McCloskey, Dick Harter and Chuck Daly led Penn in the 1960s and ’70s. Digger Phelps, who would become a Notre Dame coaching legend, was a Penn assistant for a time.

In their Final Four run, the Quakers, seeded ninth of 10 teams in the East region, beat Iona, top seed North Carolina, Syracuse and St. John’s. Then came the semifinal game against Michigan State. Penn missed what seemed like a hundred layups, fell behind 31-6 and wound up losing 101-67, an embarrassing footnote to a historic Final Four.

It would be the last time that Penn, or fellow Ivy basketball power Princeton, would advance beyond the tournament’s second round. And that to me is the true legacy of 1979: the marginalization of my alma mater and what it stands for in the mascot-eat-mascot world of intercollegiate hoops.

The decline occurred, as a Hemingway character said of bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly. In the early 1970s, attending Penn cost around $5,000 a year. While the Ivies then, as now, offered no athletic scholarships, Penn could promise an Ivy education and make up most of the cost in financial aid and campus jobs. “It was not a big stretch for middle-income and lower-income families to see that was a fair trade-off,” says Craig Littlepage, who played for Penn in the early 1970s and coached the team a decade later.

After the Final Four run, that began to change. Double-digit tuition increases pushed the annual price tag to $15,000 in the early ’80s (it’s around $40,000 today), making Penn a stretch for middle-class families. “When I went back as head coach, sitting in front of prospects and parents, the first question night after night was, ‘How much is it going to cost us?’” says Mr. Littlepage, now athletic director at the University of Virginia. “It became a factor that could be conveniently used against us in recruiting.”

At the same time, academically comparable schools like Stanford began developing stronger hoops programs, offering free rides to athletes who might have chosen Penn or Princeton. The formation of the Big East conference in 1979 increased competition for players. Penn, sensitive to criticism that its achievement was due to admitting substandard students, didn’t cut its basketball coaches as much slack with recruits. And the Ivy League itself, skeptical of Penn’s success, in the mid-1980s toughened admissions standards for athletes.

“Each year it became more and more difficult,” says Bob Weinhauer, who coached the Final Four team. He left for Arizona State in 1982, after Penn lost to St. John’s in the first round of the NCAAs. “I didn’t think it was going to be possible to compete outside the Ivy League,” he says.

Mr. Weinhauer’s last Penn team was my first as a fight-song-singing, streamer-throwing undergrad. When he left, we knew times were changing. My sophomore year cratered with a humiliating loss to Dartmouth. The next season: a shocking fourth place in the Ivies. My senior year, the team won the league and made the tournament — with a 13-13 record.

Penn and Princeton have had their share of spotlight moments since then: the Tigers losing by one point to tournament top seed Georgetown in 1989, beating UCLA in round one in 1996, cracking the top 10 in the polls in 1998; the Quakers posting a 25-3 record in 1994, beating Nebraska in the first round that year, earning a No. 21 ranking in 1995.

But the academic cost disparities, the dramatic spending increases by power conferences, the far greater number of revenue-hungry schools building quality teams, the tournament’s growth from 40 schools in 1979 to 65 today — all have made it tougher to compete nationally. In that context, it’s amazing that Penn and Princeton have done as well as they have, scaring if not beating a sports-factory opponent every March.

So while the irrational fan in me wishes the Final Four were still a possibility, the responsible critic of college sports is thankful it isn’t. “It’s not something we realistically believe can happen again,” Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky says. Then he laughs. “But we wouldn’t turn down the opportunity.”

It’s official. Slate’s sports podcast, “Hang Up and Listen,” will be a regular thing.

On it, I join Slate editor and podcast moderator Josh Levin — our own John McLaughlin, only shaggier– and NPR sports reporter Mike Pesca for a highish-minded weekly discussion of a few things sports. Our goal is to be lively, thoughtful and smart. And even funny. Mike’s good with the one-liners.

This week, we weigh in on the NFL’s elusive disciplinary policy, the rise of the tweeting athlete and Delaware’s finger-in-the-eye decision to legalizing sports gambling. You can listen here. Even better, download Slate’s podcasts, which you can do on the same page.

I’m very proud of this book, both the reporting and writing. As I said in a Q&A last week on Westword, Denver’s alt-weekly:

Yes, hilarity ensues when I become just the second writer in league history allowed to join a team for training camp (after George Plimpton in 1963). But putting on the pads was always just a means to an end — to understand and describe the hidden reality of life in the NFL. Because, and only because, I was willing to eat with the players, lift with the players and humiliate myself in front of the players, those Broncos came to respect and trust me. Then they were not only willing but eager to open up to me about what it feels like to play this physically and psychologically brutal and operationally dysfunctional sport. Here’s a response that I received from an ex-Bronco that you won’t find on the book jacket: “You so eloquently captured the mind-fuck that is the NFL.” I couldn’t ask for a better endorsement than that.

I hope to be doing some media and events around the new, cheaper model of the book, and will update accordingly here.

I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast today about whether a National Spelling Bee that’s broadcast in prime-time on network television is a good thing.

I’m sure it’ll generate a comment or two that I’m dissing the Bee itself. I’m not. The Bee is awesome. It shows off kids at their smartest. It fosters a love of language. It makes people — competitors and viewers — appreciate the breadth and depth of English. It teaches kids to focus, study and perform under pressure. And, not insiginifcantly, it makes them realize that life is a crapshoot: Sometimes you get a word you already know, sometimes you don’t.

My beef with the Bee is the move to prime time. I like watching kids spell on TV as much as the next logophile, but in my mind the issue is whether the Bee needs to be on ABC with spellers spelling until the ratings-friendly time of 10 p.m.  What’s best for the competitors? That, to me, is the only question worth asking.

Kids are incredibly resilient, so blowing a word in front of an audience of millions might not look like a big deal. But it could be. So Just as it’s legitimate to ask whether the Little League World Series needs to be on broadcast TV, it’s fair to ask the same about the Bee. ”Adolescent sports aren’t meant to be entertainment for adults,” Boston sports psychologist Richard Ginsburg says in my friend Mark Hyman’s new book, Until It Hurts, about America’s unhealthy obsession with youth sports.

In 2007 and 2008, I wrote the script and was color commentator for ESPN’s coverage of the National School Scrabble Championship. It was great fun. I think the shows turned out well, we exposed a few hundred thousand viewers to Scrabble and smart kids, and most of the competitors seemed to like the attention.

ESPN dropped out this year and, while I was disappointed, I was also a bit relieved. For starters, I could focus exclusively on the kids I’d brought to the event and didn’t have to worry about making a show. (I started a Scrabble club at my daughter’s Washington, D.C., elementary school last year; four of my players joined the 200-player national championship in April, and I talked about it on NPR.) While most of the players thought having ESPN around was pretty cool — and were happy to do whatever the producers asked of them — not all were entirely comfortable. This year felt saner — because it was exlusively about the competition, the kids.

And that’s the dilemma with televising events like the Bee or Scrabble or Little League. Is the absolute virtue of exposing couch-bound, brain-locked Americans to two hours of kids being smart trumped by the distraction and the glitz and added pressure? Do events lose sight of their purpose when the cameras start rolling?

That’s the start of the headline on my piece in the sports section of yesterday’s New York Times. The rest of it: Except American Interest.

Bemused friends and NPR listeners are familiar with my longstanding infatuation with team handball, a sport that has nothing to do with guys in wifebeaters smacking a tiny blue ball against a wall in Brooklyn, or even my old pal Jake Plummer. As I mention in the Times piece, I fell in love with the sport when I was an 18-year-old intern covering the Empire State Games in 1981 for WVOX radio, the local radio station in New Rochelle, N.Y. I re-fell in love while covering the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

As I’ve noted before in the WSJ and on NPR (repeatedly), team handball is a seven-on-seven court sport that embodies all things American. You run, pass, dribble, throw (fast), block, jump and set picks. There’s strategy, finesse, power and speed. It’s violent and high-scoring. Yet handball — only the insecure feel compelled say “team” — is one of only three sports in which the U.S. has never won an Olympic medal.

I believe this is a national tragedy. I believe the president and Congress should allocate stimulus money to handball. I believe every school gym, from sea to shining sea, should be covered with Gerflor Taraflex courts and stocked with Cawila Pro-90 balls. I believe every no-chance D-I (and II and III) basketball and football and baseball player – and some still youngish ex-NFL quarterbacks and Double-A third basemen and D-League power forwards, too — should be directed to USA Team Handball and told that this is their national duty, and their destiny. While I’m at it, memo to Mark Cuban: Your best player loves the sport. You once employed the brother of an Icelandic national-team player. You run a TV network. Start a league!

When America ascends to its rightful place atop the Olympic handball podium, then — and only then — can we call ourselves the greatest sports country in the world. (Well, then and when we win the World Cup, which will happen in my lifetime.)

The Final Four of Everything is edited by Marc Reiter and my friend Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. Contributors include George Vescey (New York athletes), Roz Chast (phobias), A.O. Scott (worst movies by great directors), Joe Nocera (financial villains) and Mary Matalin (conservative texts). My pals Franklin Foer, Drew Magary, John Thorn, Alan Schwarz and Will Leitch are in there, too, deconstructing, respectively, pundits, breakfast cereals, baseball moments, instant replays and 21st century sports books. Memo to Will: I’m flattered that you included Word Freak, but would it have killed you to move it into the Elite Eight?

The Final Four of Everything publishes on May 5. You can but it from one of these fine online retailers or, better yet, support your local independent bookstore.

Should basketball players skip college and play professionally in Europe? Should they even go to high school at all? I write about the possible trans-Atlantic trend in the April issue of the Atlantic:

Lance Stephenson’s nickname is “Born Ready”—as in, ready for the NBA. But on a winter night in a tiny gym in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the 6-foot-5 high-school senior mostly looked ready for a time-out—of the preschool variety. Stephenson slumped when teammates failed to pass him the ball, shook his head in disgust when they missed shots, jogged back lazily on defense, and whined about fouls. Stephenson’s other nickname is “Sir Lance-a-lot,” but he seldom looked heroic, and seemed to be doing little to lead his team, three-time defending New York City public-school champion Abraham Lincoln, as it beat host Paul Robeson, 81–72.

Then the final statistics arrived: 38 points and 14 rebounds, including 17 of Lincoln’s deficit-erasing 27 fourth-quarter points. During an after-school practice the next day, Lincoln’s coach, Dwayne “Tiny” Morton, said the performance highlighted Stephenson’s main flaws: impatience and thoughtlessness. Still, Morton was unwavering on the question of ability. I asked how many players he’d seen in his 14 years as a coach at Lincoln who were ready for the NBA, born or otherwise. “Two,” he replied. “Sebastian and Lance.”

Read more. . .

Photo of Lance Stephenson from SLAM magazine.

I got to know Shanahan and Broncos owner Pat Bowlen pretty well, and recognized that their relationship was as much a friendship as a business partnership. Bowlen once described it to me as a marriage — a marriage suffused with trust. Before the 2007 season, when he extended Shanahan’s contract through 2011, Bowlen told me: “He might as well know that I have the faith in him until he and I both agree it’s probably the end of his coaching career.”

The owner deferred to Shanahan on just about every internal football decision, on and off the field, like sacking the GM who was with the team for 16 years, Ted Sundquist, after a season that could hardly have been blamed on the front office. Some people in Denver viewed their relationship as too one way, that Shanny had Pat’s number. But Bowlen’s no pushover, and no fool. He doesn’t make decisions to respond to public pressure; he is justifiably proud of the competent operational systems that he and Shanahan imposed over the years; and he understands as well as any owner I’ve ever met in any sport that operating a professional franchise is a fickle endeavor, that success is cyclical, especially in a league like the NFL, and dependent on too many outside factors. (Look at how many injuries the Broncos suffered this season.)

I haven’t spoken to either Bowlen or Shanahan, but I’d be surprised if one of two things didn’t happen: If something didn’t flip in their relationship, if Shanahan maybe overstepped his sense of security, perhaps in refusing the day after the team’s season-ending blowout in San Diego to agree with Pat’s apparent request to make changes to the coaching staff, as my friend Jeff Legwold of the Rocky Mountain News reports. Or, maybe more likely, if Bowlen didn’t just conclude that the franchises’s long-term business (and football) prospects would be improved by a change.

But this isn’t your garden-variety firing. Shanahan is no Mangenius anymore, some young, disposable coach. Love him or hate him — and fans do both, of course — he’s an institution in Denver. Players and executives griped about Shanahan’s omnipotence, about his entrenched habits and routines, but I never once heard anyone question his abilities as an organizer and a coach.

There was a fundamental belief, even a cockiness, that the Broncos had figured out how to make an NFL organization operate efficiently and effectively, that the team wouldn’t win every year but it wouldn’t embarrass itself if it didn’t. But after three really bad seasons in a row — a run that I think began with the benching of Jake Plummer when the Broncos were 7-4 in 2006, but that’s just me — the Teflon may have worn off. I wouldn’t say Mike Shanahan was the Great and Mighty Wizard, but he certainly stopped looking quite so invincible, maybe even to Bowlen.

George Plimpton did it all. He co-founded the literary magazine the Paris Review. He boxed and pitched and quarterbacked and dribbled with the pros. He wrestled the gun from the hand of the man who shot his friend Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles. 

He interviewed Hemingway in Madrid and Ali in Zaire. He was in Lawrence of Arabia — and the Simpsons. He threw legendary parties. He was tall, erudite and impossibly enthusiastic. In George, Being George, a friend of his puts it this way: ”George saw everything out there as one huge, old swimming hole to plunge seriously into and come up with a fish in his mouth.

More. . .