FRONTLINE: Money and March Madness

• March 22, 2011

Tuesday, March 29 at 9 p.m.

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FRONTLINE continues its new monthly magazine program with the lead story "Money and March Madness," an inside look at the multi-billion dollar business of the NCAA and its brand of amateur college sports. In this investigation, correspondent Lowell Bergman gains access to Sonny Vaccaro, a former marketing executive at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, who helped bring about the rapid commercialization of college basketball. Vaccaro’s success made coaches, administrators, and companies rich. But the players remain at the mercy of the NCAA, which, despite a new $10.8 billion contract for its basketball tournament, has continued to insist that the athletes don’t get paid. Now, Vaccaro has left the business world and he’s spearheading a class-action lawsuit that aims to ensure that players get a piece of the action.

Also in this newsmagazine hour, an intimate portrait of a man who’s sometimes called China’s Andy Warhol — Ai Weiwei. He’s a global art star who’s now using his international renown, along with a video camera and a growing underground Twitter following, to push the boundaries of freedom in today’s China. Later in the hour, as the fall-out from WikiLeak’s continues, an exclusive interview with Private Bradley Manning’s father, who speaks out for the first time about his son’s upbringing and troubled youth, Manning’s time in the Army, and why he still believes his son did not hand over the largest cache ever of classified documents to the whistle-blowing site.

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