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The Booster: How Ed Martin, the Fab Five and the Ballers from the Hood Exposed the Hypocrisy of a Billion-Dollar Industry

2018

Synopsis

Rolls of Hundred Dollar Bills.... Custom Jewelry.... Exquisite Gifts.... Designer Clothes....

Where did all that money come from?

And where did it go?

How and why did an auto-plant electrician dole out a fortune to teenage kids and their families?
If you were Eddie L. Martin...if you got thrills from excellence in basketball...if you loved hanging with some of the game’s greatest young stars - you found a way.

They called you Big Ed, Uncle Eddie, the man with the 50-dollar handshake...the Super Booster.

You were the stylish money-man to budding superstar athletes. And more than that. You were there with a handout and a hand up for the kids from broken families who had no heat in the house, no food in the fridge.

In Carl Martin’s take-no-prisoners examination of big-time college basketball and the money machine it has become, he peels back the veneer. Now for the first time the soft underbelly of big-time college hoops is probed by someone who has actually been there, done that. Martin tells the full and true story of what drove his father’s obsession to open his heart and his wallet to those kids.

What really happened before and after the roll-over accident that triggered an FBI investigation of the University of Michigan’s Fab Five and triggered a nationwide scandal? That question and many other mysteries are resolved in these compelling pages.

The Booster goes well beyond the Fab Five fallout to lay bare the exploitation of black athletes by forces far bigger and more sinister than an over-generous booster. Author Martin exposes the double standard that bars kids from even a meager share of the billions they generate for elite college athletic programs, the NCAA, and sports apparel companies.

It is a revealing and riveting story on many levels, powerfully told.

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