Seth Davis has a book to promote. The CBS college hoops analyst and Sports Illustrated writer has penned "When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball," a book about the famous 1979 battle between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird -- the game that altered the history of college basketball, and the sport at large, forever.

As part of his promotional tour, Davis allowed me to pester him with mostly nonsensical, oftentimes-mumbled questions. Below is the first half of what resulted. Part Two -- which covers all the fun stuff, like Davis' thoughts on blogs and Buzz Bissinger -- can be read here. Enjoy.

OK, so the book is "When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball." I'm a bit of a younger guy, I suppose -- I'm 23 -- and a lot of the book to me was new information, but was that a conscious decision behind it? Will someone who was around and a college basketball fan in 1979 know all of this? Were you aiming for a younger audience?

Well I think because of your age, you're used to a world where everybody knows everything as its happening. Even for people who were around during this time and watched the game and were big basketball fans, just because there was a fraction of media outlets around now, so much of this story really is not known. People have said to me, well, you know, so much is known about Magic and Bird it can't be that challenging, well yeah, a lot's known about what they did in the NBA, but for a lot of people watching this game, this is the first time they'd ever seen them play. You just didn't see them during the course of the season.

I have a nugget I keep coming back to in the book. The night of the title game, Bryant Gumbel on the NBC pregame show made a comment during some highlights: "If you haven't seen Larry Bird play, you're in for a treat." Think about that. It would never have occurred to me last year on CBS to say, "If you haven't seen Derrick Rose play, you're in for a treat." So, I think that any history book if it's done well -- and I hope this one is -- that just because you weren't alive when it was happening, it can still be interesting. In fact I hope the opposite is true. Now that you know what's happened since, you can go back to certain points in time and say this is where it all began.

One of the more interesting, probably less well-known parts centered on Larry Bird's shyness. Growing up with him as a big star, it surprised me that he was so cripplingly shy. He almost didn't get out of his hometown, that sort of thing.

Yeah, that's a great example. One of the first things that knocked me out when I was doing this research was, I never realized how close Larry Bird was to not playing college basketball. I go back to the moment when Bill Hodges rolls into French Lick and knocks on Bird's door, and Larry's mom answers. He explains he's an assistant at Indiana State and he'd like to talk to Larry, and she slammed the door in his face. "Leave him alone, why don't you all leave him alone, he doesn't want to play," and so on. If Bill Hodges had listened to her, and shrugged his shoulders and said "I guess we're not getting him," we would never have known who Larry Bird is. So at the end of the day, I wanted this to be a coming of age story. What happens in college? You arrive a boy and you leave a young man. That is what really happened to those guys, and more than anything else that's the story I tried to tell.

There's a good amount in the book about Magic Johnson's recruiting process -- there's even a passage where former Michigan State head coach Jud Heathcote catches a little heat for, well, not cheating, but for some borderline unethical stuff -- so I'm wondering if in your research you got a chance to see what recruiting was like in 1970s, 1980s. Was it sleazier than now? With less information and transparency, could coaches get away with more?

That's a great question, and I cover a lot of recruiting, so that's one of the ways that offers you a touchstone to compare it to. I would say that the world of recruiting is much sleazier now. It's not even close. The reality is the sport has grown to the point where there's just more money to be made, so all of that corruption comes with money. Which is not to say that cheating was invented in 1985 -- people have been cheating since men were in caves.

I think the more salient observation I made is how underexposed players were. If Magic and Larry were coming up today, they would be on national television in high school more times than they were in their actual college careers. You've got ESPN2 and ESPNU and all these internet outlets -- no one slips through the cracks anymore. There are no cracks. Someone like Larry, he would have been playing AAU, he would been more exposed, he would have been forced out of French Lick and played against better competition so he would have understood how good he was. And in Magic's case, (then-Michigan coach) Bill Frieder talked Magic out of going to Howie Garfinkel's Five-Star camp, which was really the only place akin to modern recruiting where players and coaches came from across the country and everybody was there to see everybody. Johnson to go do that because he wanted to keep Magic under the radar and save him for Michigan.

So if you go back and read what recruiting coverage there was then, Magic Johnson was highly thought of, but it's not like, you know, LeBron. They were able to keep a relatively low profile for him because again, there weren't many ways for someone to get a high profile back then.

Obviously most everyone already knows the ending of the book, or if they don't, they can look it up on Wikipedia in five seconds. How did you go about creating a narrative that could still serve as some sort of climax for readers, even though they know essentially how the story ends?

I think you do that by getting details. When I would do these interviews with people, I would always remind them that the smaller the detail the greater the value. I think by offering up as many little details as you can find, it kind of transports the reader to a different time and place.

I think people knew the skeletal details of what happened. Obviously, I'm as big a college basketball fan as there is anywhere, and I did not know the name of the coach for Indiana State in that game. I remember a conversation I had with Jack McCallum very early on in this process about what he thought of the idea and who he knew that could help me, and I remember asking him "What was the name of Bird's coach in that game?," and he said "His name was Bill Hodges and I think he died." Bill is alive and well. Again, the skeletal details people know, people know a lot of people watched, that Michigan State won, that they went on to rejuvenate the NBA, but the details of the actual story of what happened, most people didn't really know any of that. At the end of the day, I realized the book was going to succeed or fail based on finding those sorts of details.

Bill Hodges is actually one of the sadder parts of the story -- he goes to the NCAA Title game and then all of a sudden, the next year, his life is in turmoil and he's practically banished from coaching. 

It's amazing, isn't it? As a writer, you hope to just have one story like that to tell in the book. Having four guys like that -- who were all so accomplished and complex and sympathetic in some ways -- it was like manna from heaven.

You make reference to it in the title, but a major theme of the book is the way Bird-Magic affected the business side of college basketball. (NBC, who televised the insanely popular Bird-Magic game, failed to re-acquire the rights to the tournament, giving way to CBS and the modern NCAA Tournament format.) Who would you say profited the most off of Bird-Magic -- CBS the network, the NBA, or NCAA basketball itself?

Well probably Seth Davis, right? [Laughs.] Thank God CBS made that move so long ago, little did I know, huh?

I think it's a great question. I think the answer's all of the above. I mean, I think that people talk about the impact that game had on the NBA. I think a little that's been lost is the impact it had on the tournament. The fact that the NCAA could sell it to a higher bidder at that time. The fact that they go could go back to a dome in 1982. The fact that they could expand the tournament four times in a six-year period and then never expanding it again. As I argue in the prologue, it really was the golden age of the NCAA Tournament. You have these six players that would dominate the NBA for two decades coming in that period, and then the expansion, and then two of the greatest championship upsets in all sports, not just in college basketball.

The Bird-Magic game was the official pivot from the tournament and college basketball revolving around UCLA. College basketball was built on John Wooden's back. He got it on TV and gave people a reason to watch. As I quote Billy Packer quoting Eddie Einhorn in the book, a lot of people felt like UCLA's run was over that was the end of the tournament because that was the only reason people would watch. Now, this David and Goliath story, these upsets in championships -- the NCAA tournament became what you watched to see things emerge. You're not tuning into see something you already know. You're tuning in because somewhere along the line Stephen Curry, a guy who you hadn't heard of a week before, is going to become someone that all of America's going to fall in love with and root for and really be interested in. That was an ethos that was established in a two-hour period, when everyone stopped and watched this game.

At the end of the book, there's a media lament from the founder of ESPN Bill Rasmussen, who worries that the sense of wonder about the NCAA tournament has been replaced by information. Did Stephen Curry defy that last year?

Stephen Curry is a direct descendant of Larry Bird. ... Now imagine if Stephen Curry had made it to the championship game. He was already a big story. If he had made it to the championship game every man woman and child would have watched to see if the little guy from the little school could have pulled it off. The fact that Larry made it to the championship game and hadn't received a lot of exposure beforehand sort of set up this perfect storm where it could really have maximum impact.

Is Stephen Curry the exception to the rule? Are we at risk of losing even the Stephen Curry's? It feels like that's one of the themes of the book -- that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing with Larry Bird.

No doubt, those guys are fewer and further between, but they'll always be there. To me that is always going to be the unique charm of the NCAA tournament, and they don't even have to make it to the championship game, they only have to win one.

To me, that's why when we talk about changing the tournament and should we expand it, and who deserves to be in, I'm always going to protect the little guy. The difference between the NCAA tournament and every other playoff is every other playoff is designed to crown a champion. The NCAA tournament certainly fulfills that purpose. You get a true champion. But it's also about Bryce Drew, one of the iconic moments in sport, and that was a second round game. That wasn't for the championship. That part of the tournament has been preserved and has even increased in its attractiveness because there's so little of that elsewhere.

That really is the ethos of the tournament. [...] That part has been preserved and I think will continue to be preserved, because it's really how I think the tournament butters its bread.

Read Part Two of the interview here.

Related: College Basketball Media