March Madness 2026: As retirement from Sporting News approaches, here's my Top 10 Final Four memories

March Madness 2026: As retirement from Sporting News approaches, here's my Top 10 Final Four memories originally appeared on The Sporting News . Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here . My press pass for the Kentucky-Syracuse NCAA Championship game in 1996, a purple piece of cardboard still buried in one of my desk drawers, identified me as representing the “Memphis Commercial Appeal” and assigned me to sit in Row 1, Seat 19.

That weekend was special for a variety of reasons, not just because I got an unobstructed view of the action. The greatest team I’ve covered during my career as a basketball journalist, the Kentucky Wildcats featuring Tony Delk, Antoine Walker and Rick Pitino, won the championship that year. I took an $80 cab ride to the Bronx to cover Memphis forward Michael Wilson’s appearance at the Slam Dunk and Three-Point Championships.

There was no way to flag a taxi from outside Fordham’s Rose Hill Gymnasium, so I basically begged the promoter to let me squeeze onto a bus carrying the competitors back to Manhattan. I stood next to Chris Collins, then at the end of his Duke playing career and now Northwestern head coach, the whole way. It also was the first Final Four I covered as a representative of The Sporting News.

I still remember sitting at the desk in my hotel room at New York’s Marriott Marquis and filing my weekly column from there. Why would I remember such a thing? Because I’d joined as a freelance contributor just five months earlier, and this opportunity to talk college basketball with the entire nation changed my life in more ways than I can count.