The Secret Game ─ A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph

The true story of the game that never should have happened.

Something was happening to basketball.

In the wartime fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing the game forever. Within six months, his Eagles would become the highest scoring college basketball team in America, a fast-breaking, hard-pressing juggernaut that would shatter its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. The last student of James Naismith, basketball's inventor, McLendon had opened the door to its future.

Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasn't the Blue Devils, but was an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Comprised of former college stars from across the country, they dismantled every team they faced, including the Duke varsity. They were prepared to play anyone-that is, until an audacious invitation arrived, one that was years ahead of anything the South had ever seen before.

Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation's sporting past. The riveting true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how handful of forgotten college basketball players not only changed the game forever, but also helped to usher in a new America.

Scott Ellsworth has written about American history for the New York Times, theWashington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is the author ofDeath in a Promised Land, his groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Ann Arbor, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.