Players and Pretenders tells the story of the flip side of basketball s March Madness, where the game is played by average players for love, not for money. At the end of the 1970s at Bard College, where there was no pretense of institutional support, Charley Rosen gathered his hoops hopefuls and put together a basketball season whose impact reached far beyond the court.Writing with a humorous touch, Rosen details the Running Red Devils season, simultaneously examining the lives of those who made it so memorable and providing a glimpse of how the team members existed off the courts as...

During the 1972-1973 basketball season, the Philadelphia 76ers were not just a bad team; they were fantastically awful. Doomed from the start after losing their leading scorer and rebounder, Billy Cunningham, as well as head coach Jack Ramsay, they lost twenty-one of their first twenty-three games. A Philadelphia newspaper began calling them the Seventy Sickers, and they duly lost their last thirteen games on their way to a not-yet-broken record of nine wins and seventy-three losses.
Charley Rosen recaptures the futility of that season through the firsthand accounts of players,...

"Sugar considers aspects of the league's dysfunction in light of basketball's rapidly increasing popularity during the 1970s and 1980s"--