A list of legends is significant not only for who makes the list, but who gets left off of it. If there are no obvious omissions, then the list of candidates was probably less than legendary in the first place. Not so in the case of the Syracuse University Orangemen. Calling roll on Syracuse’s all-time basketball greats can take up the greater part of a day. The school produced its first All-American, Lewis Castle, in 1912. More recently, Carmelo Anthony, one of the best freshmen to ever play college basketball, led the 2003 Orangemen to the school’s first NCAA championship. In between there were legends such as the incomparable Dave Bing, Roosevelt Bouie, and Louis Orr, who together formed the Louie and Bouie Show, along with names like Derrick Coleman, Sherman Douglas, Lawrence Moten, and John Wallace. Legends of Syracuse Basketball, now newly revised, features twenty-four players, one coach, and one special team. Of the players mentioned, seventeen played in the NBA. Within the book’s pages are stories straight from the legends’ teammates, their coaches, and the legends themselves.

Anyone who has spent time in Syracuse, New York, knows that basketball season is the most wonderful time of the year. And while the local popularity of the sport is known nationwide, the region also has a long and rich basketball history. Sports historian Mark Baker traces the evolution of Syracuse's "hoops roots,"? beginning in the early days, when local, national and college basketball organizations were primitive institutions. It was during this time that one of the first teams to gain a national following was founded here by an Italian immigrant, Danny Biasone, and it was in Syracuse that the 24 second clock was invented. From the outset, Syracuse residents and fans were hooked, and this love of the game has endured, feeding the fanaticism that sustains the sport today.

Syracuse Basketball: A Century of Memories is a collection of the most memorable moments in the history of Syracuse basketball as selected by the editors of The Syracuse Newspapers. Fans of the Big Orange will enjoy reliving the greatest moments, including NCAA finals appearances in 1975, 1987, and 1996, and players and coaches such as Boeheim, Douglas, Bing, Seikaly, and Coleman.

Throughout book are pockets containing facsimilies of newspaper clippings, tickets, postcards, photographs, and other Syracuse basketball memorabilia.

New York Times Bestseller In this candid autobiography, Syracuse head coach and long time college basketball fixture Jim Boeheim reflects on his life, his teachers, and the game he loves. Jim Boeheim walked onto the Syracuse campus as a freshman in 1963 . . . and never walked off. A man who has been written off at various stages of his career and criticized for being disagreeable, Boeheim has experienced it all—triumph, despair, redemption; controversy, heartbreak, and scandal; championships, epic disappointments, colorful personalities, NCAA investigations. His combative personality helped ignite what was arguably the most competitive college basketball conference ever: the Big East of the 1980s, when he and Syracuse battled with Big John Thompson of Georgetown, roly-poly Rollie Massimino of Villanova, feisty Jim Calhoun of Connecticut, and beloved Looie Carnesecca of St. John’s, turning the Big East into a Coaches Conference and the Best Show in College Basketball. Boeheim talks about those days and the coming battles with powerhouses North Carolina and Duke, now that Syracuse has joined the Atlantic Coast Conference. From his association with Syracuse greats Dave Bing (a college teammate), Pearl Washington, and Derrick Coleman, to the Olympics—where he coached players such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Durant—Boeheim has learned many lessons that have helped his team and continue to encourage him now as he nears seventy. His unprecedented fifty-year career as a player, assistant, head coach and icon has given him unique insight into coaching and the college game, knowledge he now shares.

The definitive, compulsively readable story of the greatest era of the most iconic league in college basketball history—the Big East “This book, full of long-standing rivalries, unmatched moments in the lives of coaches and players, and juicy insider gossip, is, like the game of basketball, a ton of fun.”—Philadelphia magazine The names need no introduction: Thompson and Patrick, Boeheim and the Pearl, and of course Gavitt. And the moments are part of college basketball lore: the Sweater Game, Villanova Beats Georgetown, and Six Overtimes. But this is the story of the Big East Conference that you haven’t heard before—of how the Northeast, once an afterthought, became the epicenter of college basketball. Before the league’s founding, East Coast basketball had crowned just three national champions in forty years, and none since 1954. But in the Big East’s first ten years, five of its teams played for a national championship. The league didn’t merely inherit good teams; it created them. But how did this unlikely group of schools come to dominate college basketball so quickly and completely? Including interviews with more than sixty of the key figures in the conference’s history, The Big East charts the league’s daring beginnings and its incredible rise. It transports fans inside packed arenas to epic wars fought between transcendent players, and behind locker-room doors where combustible coaches battled even more fiercely for a leg up. Started on a handshake and a prayer, the Big East carved an improbable arc in sports history, an ensemble of Catholic schools banding together to not only improve their own stations but rewrite the geographic boundaries of basketball. As former UConn coach Jim Calhoun eloquently put it, “It was Camelot. Camelot with bad language.”

"From iconic NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony comes a raw and inspirational memoir about growing up in the housing projects of Red Hook and Baltimore-a brutal world Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised"--