FIVE: The Night Dale Brown’s Bench Met the Best – Book review

At first glance, it’s hard to decide which was more unlikely, that the LSU men’s basketball team would beat powerful Kentucky in 1978 after all its starters fouled out or that Sonny Marks would write a book about it more than 30 years later.

FIVE: The Night Dale Brown’s Bench Met the Best was a labor of love for Marks, an attorney and lifelong LSU basketball fanatic. Marks was 9 years old when LSU pulled off the incredible upset on Feb. 11, 1978.

“We almost always went to the games, but my dad got sick, so we listened on the radio,” Marks recalls.

Marks is an accomplished newspaper writer who still produces a tennis column for the American Press in Lake Charles, but this book went to depths of research and interviewing that he couldn’t have imagined.

The result is a great read for LSU hoops fans, anyone who was intrigued by longtime coach Dale Brown, or those who enjoy an easy read about a fun team that won against all odds.

“I’ve always been eaten up by LSU basketball,” Marks says. “Dale has always been a larger-than-life figure for me. I love basketball. The idea came when I was in first-semester law-school exams sitting in Barnes & Noble when I should have been studying more. I was reading The Bad Guys Won! by Jeff Pearlman about the ’86 Mets—a one-sitting book. I thought I could write about this LSU game. But the game is just a backdrop to the people in it, primarily Dale.”

Hoops junkies will love revisiting the people, from Jordy Hultberg, Joe B. Hall and Kenny Higgs, to Kyle Macy, DeWayne Scales, Art Tolis, Rudy Macklin and Ron Abernathy.

On some of those names, if you have to ask, well—you need to read FIVE just to know. If you already get fired up seeing those blasts from the past, you know the book is worth the read.