This story originally appeared in the March 20, 2016 issue of Sports Illustrated. Subscribe to the magazine here.
They razed NCAA tournament history with a half-ton steel ball. Unceremoniously, too: Northwestern just needed its University Gymnasium out of the way. On April 2, 1940, students making their way to morning classes on the Evanston, Ill., campus—a narrow strip of land along the shore of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago—gaped from behind a guardrail as a crane swung a wrecking ball into the east-facing stone wall of the basketball venue, until it cracked and crumbled.