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While taking in the carnival that is March Madness -- three weeks of collective sports fixation and widespread wagering that only Janet Jones would call friendly -- it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that NCAA basketball barely registered on television 40 years ago. How March Became Madness, a collection of more than 50 interviews gathered by longtime insider and current Vice Chairman of the Chicago White Sox Eddie Einhorn, outlines the how and why of college hoops' meteoric rise. Einhorn entered the sports business when he founded TVS (Television Sports) in 1960. The fledgling network was the first to broadcast college games on TV, decades before Dick Vitale, and its success gave the entrepreneur unbeatable perspective and access. He's seen everything, from TV's first primetime game (UCLA vs. Houston at the Astrodome in 1968, an event he put together) to the era of billion-dollar, multi-year television deals, and this book makes all the connections between both eras.

The roster of coaches that Einhorn coaxes stories from, a Hall of Fame cross-section that includes everyone from UCLA's John Wooden to Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, would be enough to make this book a must-have. But he wisely includes observations from broadcasters, NCAA executives, marketers and players like Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, and packages the book with a DVD of the pivotal Astrodome game. How March Became Madness can sometimes read like The Greatest Generation for the hardwood set. Nobody has anything bad to say about the halcyon days of coaches like Wooden and Ray Meyer, and the chummy interviews linger a bit on the good ol' days. But it's hard to imagine a more well-rounded, in-depth look at how March Madness became a national affliction.