A: I started out as a student journalist, covering campus news and events, not sports. As a freshman I'd joined the Press Club, a group of students who served as stringers for papers and wire services in New York and Philly and in between, and I filed three or four stories a week to the Trenton Times. My first taste of sportswriting came when I went home to Rochester, N.Y., for Christmas break in 1975. Princeton was participating in the Kodak Classic in my hometown that year, so I quite brazenly called up Harvey Yavener, then the Times' sports editor, and asked if he would be sending a staffer. He said no, and was happy to have me file an advance and two game stories. That's when I first broke into the business. To share press row with Harvey today is a special thrill, because he could have very easily said "No." And I might be a mortgage officer or something.


Q: Did you know immediately that this was your calling?

A: A year later, when I took a course called The Literature of Fact with the author Robert Massie, I realized I wanted to write for a living. The format was intimate: 16 of us, one weekly three-hour seminar, terrific feedback from the professor and fellow students on everything I wrote, and I learned a huge amount. In the spring of 2002 I went back to Princeton to teach Writing About Sports and the Wider World, and I ran it exactly the same way. Only instead of leaving our writings in a box in the reserve room of the library for everyone to read, we posted them on a class Web site.


Q: You played one year of professional basketball abroad, did you ever think about continuing to play professionally?

A: I'm laughing at your question. I wasn't remotely good enough to have played for Pete Carril; and third-division ball in Switzerland in the late-Seventies was like junior-high ball with bigger bodies. I took a job coloring maps for a agronomical consulting firm in Lucerne to make ends meet.


Q: In recent years, the Ivy League has not seen its graduates go on to be that successful in the NBA, why is this so?

A: Part of the reason is that so many spots are now going to international players and high-school-grads-in-training. A huge number of non-Ivy Americans are failing to make the league, too. When an Ivy player can make a living at basketball, even overseas, it's the happy exception.


Q: Do you believe the Ivy League should have a conference tournament?

A: Nobody should have a conference tournament. They demean the regular season and too often send forth a lesser team than the legitimate champ. The Ivies actually have a race every season, and no one denies that their NCAA representative is the best the league has to offer.


Q: Who was the player on the Princeton '97-'98 team that if the Tigers were without, would not have had half the season that they did have?

A: I suppose that everything in the Princeton offense begins with a high-post center who can pass and move and sink the occasional three, so Steve Goodrich was extremely important to that team, but I'm not alone in believing that Mitch Henderson gave the team unusual athleticism and the ability to deliver an assist from virtually anywhere on the floor.


Q: What needs to happen for the Ivy League to see a team similar to Princeton's '97-'98 squad?

A: That team was the result of a kind of harmonic convergence. A quarter-century may pass before we see another like it, though Penn's Maloney and Allen teams, and the Quakers' Final Four group in 1979, were every bit as good in their own ways. One advantage the Ivies have now is that few athletes leave early for the pros, so teams have a chance to grow and gel. And, once they go into nonconference or NCAA tournament play, they wind up facing opponents heavy with underclassmen and not as adept at playing together. In the end, sheer talent has a way of winning out, though. I thought Penn played valiantly against Oklahoma State in Boston last spring. The Quakers were always in that game, but because of the talent disparity, you always sensed that Oklahoma State could turn them away when they had to be turned away. And that's what happened.


Q: In your opinion, who was the greatest Ivy League basketball player of the 1980's? 1990's?

A: Given what they accomplished over three seasons together, I'd nominate Maloney and Allen as co-best of the Nineties. As for the Eighties, Kit Mueller (even though he played from '87-'91), by his senior season, had become as good a center as Princeton has ever had, and that's saying something.


Q: In your opinion, will the disparity between the American game and that of the rest of the world keep on shrinking?

A: The gap has already disappeared. Just look at the Worlds in Indy a summer ago, when a bunch of U.S. pros lost three times, at home, to teams from three different parts of the world: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and South America. The U.S. gets regularly thumped at the Junior Worlds. And foreigners routinely make the NBA's All-Rookie Team without any prior exposure to the U.S. basketball. I've begun to suspect that they excel right away precisely BECAUSE they've had no prior exposure to the American game.


Q: What needs to happen for the United States to return to the superior position in international basketball?

A: The U.S. basketball establishment needs to adopt what coaches in other countries do well: emphasize the teaching of fundamentals, develop players for the long haul, and implement a style of play that uses the entire court, not just power in the low post and athleticism on the perimeter. The foreign influx is already remaking the NBA. Western Conference teams like Dallas and Sacramento, and even San Antonio thanks to Parker and Ginobili, play a more fluid, crowd-pleasing (and, not incidentally, effective) style. I think that's part of the reason the Nets have adopted the Princeton offense. It's homegrown, to be sure, and there are no internationals on New Jersey's roster, but it's a domestic version of the overseas approach to hoops, which puts a premium on passing and shooting and movement.


Q: When, and how, did you decide to write Big Game, Small World?

A: By the late Nineties I'd spent almost 20 years at Sports Illustrated, for the most part going where editors told me to go. After 15 years Time Inc. lets employees take a sabbatical, so I decided to become my own assignment editor and look into basketball stories I'd always wanted to pursue, but knew weren't among my bosses' priorities. (A cache of unused frequent-flyer miles helped a lot.) I'd always made a mental list of places I wanted to delve more deeply into. But two things spurred me on: A terrific book by a London-based soccer journalist, Simon Kuper, called Football Against the Enemy, which used the prism of that game to look at national character and destiny; and the ripples from the Dream Team's appearance at the 1992 Olympics. If not for Barcelona and its aftermath, I don't think there would have been enough there for a book on global basketball.


Q: You've said that your book begins and ends in the pick-up games at Jadwin Gym. Can you tell us a little bit about those games (who was participating, was it competitive, etc.)?

A: Dating back to the Carril days, even back to when Dillon Gym was the epicenter of Tiger basketball, there's been a lunch-bunch game on the Princeton campus. When I showed up, over the summer of 1999, the players included the men's assistants, especially Joe Scott and John Thompson, as well as a bunch of athletic department employees and the occasional professor. Joe in particular raised the level, not just with his own play (he won several Bookstore Basketball tournaments at Notre Dame while in law school there), but also with his, shall we say, vociferousness. Now the Tiger women's staff is in on the action, too.


Q: Was there anybody in your life that thought you were crazy in taking this on?

A: I'd been married the summer before beginning the travel for the book, but my wife, Vanessa, has a vagabond's spirit. She went along on virtually every leg of the journey, we called it our extended honeymoon, and helped immeasurably. She's a filmmaker, and again and again she would see and hear things that I missed. I do recall my father-in-law raising an eyebrow when he heard I'd be taking his daughter to Angola, to the African Championships, which were going on in the midst of a civil war. But you know what they say, for better or for worse.


Q: What was the toughest country to write about in your book? The easiest?

A: The more exotic places (China, Bhutan, Angola) were the most fun, but also kept me on my writing toes, because I couldn't assume the reader knew the backstory to each place. How to fill everyone in without burdening them with too much history and politics and culture? How to keep from straying too far from basketball, which after all was the point of the book? Strangely, after a while, the pure basketball chapters, like the one on Peoria, Ill., cradle of the crossover dribble, turned out to be more challenging, because I found myself missing the richer history and politics and culture, and feared the reader would too. I had to work harder at fitting those more familiar places into some larger context.


Q: After the tragedies of September 11, and all that has followed, what do you believe is the proper role of sports within the grand scheme of things?

A: Perhaps foolishly, I still believe sports have an ability to break down barriers that would otherwise sit in place. New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Avoidance, which holds that globalization increases what people have in common, and the resulting trade and middle-class prosperity lessen the likelihood that nations will choose to chuck the good life for the dislocation and destruction of war. Basketball, via the NBA, has done even more than multinationals like McDonald's to further a one-world outlook, I think, especially among young people. Because basketball has been rooted in most parts of the world since the turn of the century, few people regard the game as "foreign." Or its finest expression, the NBA, as the consumer product of a multinational corporation, even though it is. (Click here to read Alex's reflection on the post-9/11 world.)


Q: Can you describe the emotions that you felt during the Princeton-Georgetown game in 1989? Is there any single game that you covered which you can say was more thrilling and emotional than that one?

A: I've covered a lot of stirring events in 23 years with the magazine. Dan Jansen's first gold medal, in Lillehammer, was special. Michael Jordan dropping 63 on the Celtics in a playoff game in Boston Garden was, too. Watching an American cyclist named Andy Hampsten win the Alpe d'Huez stage of the Tour de France got me juiced as a journalist. The Princeton-Georgetown game, exciting as it was, is just one of scores of NCAA tournament thrills I've been lucky to witness. As a Princeton alum and one-time townie who went to elementary school there, it's hard not to remain attached to the Tigers at some level, which isn't to say I don't also hope that Penn, or whichever other team carries the Ivy banner into postseason play, acquits itself well, too. The UCLA game that was Carril's final victory may have had more of an effect on the non-journalist in me, simply because it marked the end of an extraordinary era.


Q: From more than two decades of sports reporting, do you have a favorite assignment? A least favorite assignment?

A: I dread nothing more than being asked to write about someone simply because "he's hot." There has to be more to work with than simple, bald athletic accomplishment. Overall, the stories I enjoy most are the between-the-cracks ones, or the historical ones, where something has been lost in the mists of time. I loved working on a story earlier this year about the all-white 1963 Mississippi State basketball team, which defied a court order to play against an integrated opponent in the NCAA tournament. Maybe it's because the tale had never been told in all its detail before, at least not to a national audience. And maybe it's because I'd written my senior thesis on Mississippi.


Q: Out of all of your books, which was your favorite to write? Least favorite?

A: Big Game, Small World was my love note to the game. Whereas I'd previously written about its underbelly, in Raw Recruits. Yes, basketball has plenty of ills, but after all those years I wanted to be get a kind of valedictory off my chest. While writing it, I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard every day.


Q: As a reporter, you often write about controversial topics. Do you try to attack these topics head on, acknowledging that one side may dislike the result? Or rather, do you try to take a middle-of-the-road approach?

A: One of the things I emphasized to my students, and believe from experience, is that no journalist can be truly objective. All of us bring to a topic a collection of experiences and even prejudices; baggage, if you will. What's essential is to be fair, to let all sides have their say, and respect the reader enough to make a judgment. Magazines in particular are obliged to bring some perspective to a subject, because from TV and the Internet and daily papers we've already learned the basics of most stories. Again, the key is to be fair if you're being subjective.


Q: What can you forecast for the 2004 Olympics? What will it take for the U.S. to win the gold medal?

A: A lot of psychological matters have to be taken care of to prep the U.S. pros for the Athens Olympics. The team will need two or three superstars, for its own self-esteem. For chemistry purposes, though, they have to be unselfish. It will need at least several pure shooters who aren't defensive liabilities. More than anything, the players and coaches need to spend months together, accustoming themselves to one another, and playing challenging exhibitions. There's no substitute for the cohesiveness that only comes with time.


Q: What is next for you? Besides your column for SI, should Ivy basketball fans be on the lookout for anything else?