Only a small handful of America's college basketball players gearing up for this week's NCAA tournament will go on to fame and fortune in the NBA. What lies ahead for the rest? If a peek at the current lives of several past all-tournament players is any indication, today's crop will develop into tomorrow's mix of success and disappointment.
Some past tournament stars stand out thanks to stellar pro careers that reinforced fans' memories of them. Remember Indiana State's Larry Bird tussling with Michigan State's Magic Johnson in the 1979 championship game (which Magic's team won)? Or Isiah Thomas leading Indiana University to the 1981 title before going pro after his sophomore year?
The UCLA dynasty in the 1960s and 1970s under famed coach John Wooden was largely powered by two big men--Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton. Both would go on to become NBA superstars.
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But a huge part of the tournament's appeal is creating heroes whose names aren't necessarily Alcindor, Bird or Walton. Perhaps only big-time fans will remember those whose hoop glory was defined by March Madness, and who have since gone on to varying degrees of success during life after basketball.
Fans from the mid-1980s will undoubtedly recall Dwayne McClain, an athletic forward from Villanova who scored 17 points in the 1985 title game to lead his team to a memorable 66-64 upset of Georgetown. McClain only lasted a year in the NBA, but after a lengthy playing career overseas he found he had a knack for business.
While in Australia, he founded Higher Level Records, an independent record label he later sold to Warner Music. Since coming back to the U.S. in 2005, he's settled into a sales and marketing job with ATX Communications, a voice and data provider for businesses, outside Philadelphia.
McClain's teammate Harold Jensen is also in Philly, where he's a partner with Sparks, an event planning and conference consultant that works with high powered clients like Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Adidas (other-otc: ADDDY - news - people ).
Jensen, a shooting guard who scored 14 points in the '85 final, caught the entrepreneurial bug a year out school, when he realized it was time to move on from basketball. He started up event planning group Showtime with a fellow Villanova alum, and then spent 18 years building up the business before merging it with Sparks in 2005. He now helps run a 400-employee firm with offices in the U.S. and overseas.
And don't try telling him that sports don't truly provide business and life lessons. When it comes to bidding on projects and executing a business plan, building the right team and working together is essential, he's found.
"All the things you talked about in the locker room, it's fun to apply that in the real world. You have to understand the competition, and the same preparation helps," Jensen says.
Meanwhile, Michael Graham, an intimidating inside presence on Georgetown's 1984 championship team, hasn't been as fortunate. After flunking out of school and missing the '85 Final Four run (could Villanova have pulled off the upset if they'd faced him?), Graham was last seen hawking photos of himself and ex-teammates on eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ).
Many all-tournament players truly feel they took away important business and life lessons from their time on the court. John Vallely, a starting guard on UCLA's 1969 and 1970 championship teams, now literally makes his living by imparting the wisdom of Bruin coach John Wooden. After a business career that took him through the real estate and clothing industries, Vallely opened a motivational speaking business, which centers around Wooden's philosophy of focusing on preparedness, not results.
"He never talked about winning," Vallely says of his old coach. "The only thing we can control is our preparation." So focused was Wooden on preparing his teams on fundamentals from the ground up that he began each season by teaching his players the proper way to put on their socks.
Vallely took the lessons to heart later, when his life took a tragic turn. Several years ago, he and his wife lost a 12-year-old daughter to cancer. Not long after, he himself was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Despite the intense grief, Vallely knew that pursuing the best possible treatment for his daughter and following doctors orders to exercise and maintain a positive outlook, while remaining true to his duties as a husband, father and businessman, was the only choice he had.
"The only thing I could control was my family's approach. Today, we feel successful in our effort to do everything possible," he says. It's an approach he also applies to business, one that truly mirrors that of his 1970 UCLA team.
Lacking a dominant big man after losing Alcindor to graduation the previous year, the team was not supposed to win the title game against Jacksonville. Vallely and his Bruins teammates didn't necessarily expect to win. But they expected to execute the fundamentals and be as well prepared as possible.
Still, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Bruins did, in fact, win the game. Vallely noted that Jacksonville's practice session before the game was a loose affair with lots of laughs and loud music.
"Then when we went out, it was 35 minutes of perfection. Dribbling drills, running the fast break, everything working," he says.
Indeed, in basketball as in life, winning and losing happens to everyone. But dogged preparedness provides peace of mind over the result.
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