A Good Man: The Pete Newell Story »

Bruce Jenkins is a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins, North Shore Chronicles, and Inside Maverick’s. Ron Fimrite is a sportswriter, enjoying a thirty-four-year career with Sports Illustrated, and the author or editor of several books, including Golden Bears: The History of Football at the U.C. Berkeley and  Birth of a Fan.

Pete Newell is considered one of the finest basketball minds in the sport’s history. His death in 2008 spawned tributes from around the country, including legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and Bob Knight, who considered Newell his mentor. Newell, Knight, and Dean Smith are the only men to coach championships at the Olympics, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the National Invitational Tournament (NIT), and of the three, only Newell won the NIT at a time when it was considered the nation’s most prestigious tournament. He had a fiercely competitive rivalry with Wooden and won his last eight meetings against Wooden’s UCLA teams before retiring in 1960. Although he retired for health reasons, he continued to teach the game, notably at the famed Big Man’s Camp, for the rest of his life. Based on hundreds of interviews of veterans of the game, A Good Man is Bruce Jenkins’s complete biography of Pete Newell.

Boston Globe

"James Naismith invented basketball. He did so in order that Pete Newell would come along a few years later to perfect it. Newell operates what is called a ''Big Man's Camp'' each year, but the biggest man of all runs it. Count me among the embarrassed legions who only now realize that the greatest unwritten story in basketball was Pete Newell's. Thanks to Bruce Jenkins, it is unwritten no longer."

— Bob Ryan, Boston Globe

Foreword Ron Fimrite ix

Introduction xiii

Chapter 1 Allie's Boardinghouse 1

Chapter 2 This Pier is Condemned 7

Chapter 3 Florence 19

Chapter 4 The USF Years 29

Chapter 5 The Michigan State Years 65

Chapter 6 Berkeley, Before the Storm 77

Chapter 7 Cursing the Hills 107

Chapter 8 Mr. Newell and Mr. Wooden 117

Chapter 9 The Ref Was Crooked 133

Chapter 10 My Name's Dalton, What's Yours? 145

Chapter 11 Smoke from the Hallways 181

Chapter 12 The Original Dream Team 195

Chapter 13 Tear Gas on Campus 207

Chapter 14 Two Really Bad Drivers 221

Chapter 15 In Search of Kareem 249

Chapter 16 The Big Man's Camp 261

Chapter 17 Dissecting the NBA 279

Chapter 18 Loose Ends 293

Chapter 19 An Afternoon at Kapp's 309

Pete Newell's Coaching Record: Scores and Statistics 315

Index 329