"Shades of The Big Chill and Hoosiers permeate this novel of basketball, politics, love and war, the major new work by the bestselling author of North Dallas Forty, spanning over thirty years from 1960 to the present, featuring high school buddies, their girls and their varied careers, ending in the super-heated, high-stakes world of a southwestern university's championship basketball team." "The novel centers on Pat Lee, the star player on his Michigan State champion high school team, now the recruiting coach of an NCAA powerhouse. Lee, a decent man with ideals, is badly shaken when the school's star player rapes one of the students - and the university's athletic department's response is to cover it up. This sets in motion an explosive series of events in which Lee takes stock of his life and winds up confronting the corrupt system he has, against his will, been a part of for twenty years, ending in open warfare against the powers-that-be who go far far higher than one might imagine." "This is not a sports book. It alternates between the present and the Sixties, during which Pat Lee and his high school teammates come of age against the backdrop of the optimistic Kennedy years through the Vietnam era and beyond." "Behind today's headlines, this is a no-holds-barred story of the cut-throat world of big-time college athletics - where the players' education and well-being take a decided back seat to the television revenues they generate. As former All-American Bill Walton says: "The Conquering Heroes does for college basketball what the author's own ground breaking North Dallas Forty did for professional football."" "The Conquering Heroes is a genuinely compelling human drama of a man fighting his way back to self-respect against the odds; fighting to recapture, if not lost innocence, at least some of the pure love of the game of roundball, not to mention the game of life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved