It’s Just a Game, Except When It’s Not

And test your NCAA Tournament knowledge on ESPN’s trivia test:

http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/quiz?event_id=3386&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos2

While you’re at it, note how many questions begin with something like “Besides North Carolina, which state has had the most . . .”

Gene Wojciechowski has an interesting analysis on the politics of race and the overhype of Tyler Hansbrough on ESPN.com:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?id=3297944&sportCat=ncb

I do think the media, by and large, tends to reflexively praise white players as ‘heady’ or ‘hard-working,’ while calling black players ‘gifted’ or ‘athletic.’  The one glaring exception, still, is Michael Jordan, who remains the gold standard for basketball players when it comes to judging both athleticism and work ethic.

This may surprise you, coming from a self-confessed Big Four snob, but I was rooting for the Clemson Tigers today.

I spent some good years of my life in Greenville, SC, and have lots of good friends who are Clemson fans.

Plus, I reflexively root for the underdog in almost any game.  Perhaps I was conditioned to react this way by growing up a Wake fan.

Being a Big Four snob doesn’t mean you automatically root for Big Four teams.  Being a Big Four snob means you think that Wake, State, Duke, and UNC are the heart of the ACC, the fixed point around which the rest of the conference orbits.

All four were founding members of the conference.  The ACC headquarters is located in Greensboro, almost at the midpoint of Tobacco Road.  The Big Four set the ACC on the path to becoming a premier basketball conference, starting with Everett Case’s excellent N.C. State teams in the early 1950s.  UNC, tired of State’s dominance (that’s a strange phrase to type), brought in Frank McGuire to revive the Tar Heel program.  Wake hired Bones McKinney; Duke hired Vic Bubas.

The rest of the conference was slower to catch up, and often had to poach from North Carolina to do it.  South Carolina hired McGuire after he left UNC.  Maryland hired Davidson coach and Duke grad Lefty Driesell.  After South Carolina left the conference and Georgia Tech joined, the Yellow Jackets became competitive behind coach Bobby Cremins, who’d played for McGuire at USC.

North Carolina sits at the geographic center of the ACC - or it did, before Boston College defected from the Big East.  That’s the best argument for placing the ACC Tournament permanently in the state; it’s the easiest place to get to for the greatest number of fans.  If you assume that the greatest density of fans is located close to each school (an assumption I don’t think you can make for Duke or Virginia), then the critical mass of supporters for UNC, State, maybe Duke, Wake, Clemson, and maybe Virginia can drive to Charlotte or Greensboro in less than 3 hours.

Charlotte’s been a great host for the ACC Tournament, but Bobcats Arena holds a little more than half what Greensboro Coliseum does.  Although you can walk from Bobcats Arena to plentiful hotels, restaurants, and bars in downtown (I refuse to call it Uptown) Charlotte, in Greensboro you can walk across the street from the Coliseum to Stamey’s Barbecue.

That’s tough to beat.

I woke up Thursday morning filled with anticipation for the posts I’d write on the ACC Tournament’s first day.

Thursday afternoon? Not so much.

The day started off well enough; better than expected, in fact. My dad called and said a friend had offered him two tickets to the afternoon session, which included the Wake Forest vs. Florida State opener. I haven’t been to the ACC Tournament since 1995; the tournament may be, in Roy Williams’s words, just “a big cocktail party for the fans,” but it’s usually a good party.

I used to work with a hardcore basketball fan who had no interest in the ACC Tournament, preferring to go every year to the nearest first-round venue of the NCAAs. The ACC Tournament was too much about seeing and being seen, and not enough about basketball.

It’s tough to argue. Ever since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams (plus that stupid play-in game), the automatic bid that comes with the ACC Tournament title is valuable only to bubble teams who probably won’t get a dance card without it. If Carolina had been bumped on Friday (they weren’t), would the NCAA selection committee have left them out of the tournament? Yeah, that committee sometimes gives evidence of idiocy, but they’re not that stupid.

The ACC Tournament is never going to produce another game like the 1974 N.C. State-Maryland game, widely considered the best ever played. The winner of that game would go into the NCAA tournament as the favorite to win it all; the loser would not go into the NCAA tournament at all. No ACC Tournament game, no matter how well played, how thrillingly ended, is ever going to have such stakes.

Any ACC Tournament game, though, has at least one thing at stake: team pride. ACC fans spend all winter following their teams, comparing their teams’ strengths to those of the other 11, watching their teams face the other 11 once or twice, wondering if their teams can get through the February slog with something like momentum for March. The ACC Tournament throws all 12 teams and their fans (at least those fans well-heeled, well-connected, or lucky enough to get in) together into one arena. Though the stands are sliced like a pie into team sections, geography, ticket loans, and scalping end up mixing the fans together to a great extent. Duke and Carolina fans wait in the same lines for hot dogs. Wake and State fans use the same bathrooms. (It’s a miracle things have never gotten ugly; imagine the horror of all those tasseled loafers and sweater vests locked in a rioting scrum.)

So at the ACC Tournament, especially, a fan wants to be able to hold his or her head high, take warped pride and phony self-esteem from the athletic performance of kids they’ve never met. (I mock because I can’t help myself from doing it, too.)

Thursday at the ACC Tournament was disappointing on a couple of fronts.  Wake lost, but that didn’t bother me as much as how they lost.  They had beaten Florida State twice in the regular season, and it’s harder than you’d think to beat a half-decent team three times in a row.

Wake could have won that game, though; they were clearly a more talented team.  They came out flat and let the Seminoles jump out to a significant, but not impossible, lead.  They battled back and kept the game close until the last minute.  The final score, 70-60, was deceptive: the score was closer than that through most of the game, but Wake never seemed like a serious threat to win.

They played with no heart and no head.  They seemed to play as if they knew they were more talented than their opponent, and thought that talent alone would see them through.  They showed flashes of greatness (they had one play on ESPN’s Top Ten for the day, and another that was a nominee), but every time they got within a point or two, they lost their sense of urgency, or their sense.  Even in the last three minutes, with the game well within reach, they did not play like they really, truly, badly wanted to win.

The next day, the Charlotte Observer’s Tom Sorensen offered this report on the Wake locker room after the game.  This did not help my mood.  Yes, Wake has a top-5 recruiting class, which is great.  All the talent in the world, though, isn’t going to help them if they don’t also develop some smart, effective leadership and some Randolph Childress/Chris Paul fire in the belly, what my brother calls “Christian Laettner tournament moxie.”

The other disappointment was the tournament itself; or, rather, the feel and look of the Tournament inside Bobcats Arena.  Half the seats were empty.  The fact of it is not unreasonable; it’s easier to take a Friday off than a Thursday and a Friday.  Thanks to expansion, the top three seeds (UNC, Duke, and Clemson, who also have the largest fan bases in the Charlotte area) didn’t play until Friday.

But as I mentioned earlier, ACC Tournament tickets have not been available to the general public since around 1492 (1968, actually).  Scalpers were already thick on the ground around the arena.  If you’re team’s not playing on Thursday, and you don’t care to go, ir if you can’t take both days off, find someone who does care and can go, like my dad’s friend did.  Otherwise, you’re wasting a ticket and embarrassing the conference.

At the same time, my junior correspondents (my kids) tell me that they have never had a teacher bring in a TV or radio on ACC Tournament day, or allow a student to do so.  Again, that’s understandable, thanks to No Child Left Behind and the counter-productive emphasis on standardized testing performance over, you know, education.

Still, it’s a shame.  Truth be told, my primary allegiance to the ACC has less to do with the basketball than the communal experience, the tie that binds a large portion of the population of the Southeastern seaboard.  I love basketball, but in these divided times - when I’m told I hate America because I’m a Democrat - we need some kind of community.

About this time last year I was driving to Atlanta for a trade show, battling a sinus infection and trying to decide just how staticky the signal out of Anderson, SC, would have to get to make me risk scanning the dial for another radio station carrying the ACC Tournament.

I was also thinking, This wouldn’t be a problem if I was still in North Carolina.

Then I was thinking, I should write something about how important the ACC Tournament is in North Carolina.

And here we are.

North Carolina stops for the ACC Tournament.  When I was in grade school, and the conference was still at its divinely-ordained 8-school size, teachers made a mad rush on the A/V room to get a TV for the first-round Friday afternoon session.  Nobody tried to hide it; nobody batted an eye.  A generation before, N.C. kids were let out for two weeks in September to help harvest the tobacco crop.  In the ’70s and ’80s, we all had a very fun form of in-school suspension the first Friday of every March.

Some things just have to come before book learning when you live on Tobacco Road.

The 2008 ACC Tournament (the ‘men’s basketball’ part is generally unnecessary) starts tomorrow, on - nostalgic sigh - Thursday, March 13, at Bobcats Arena in Charlotte.  Over the next few days I’ll have a number of posts on the Tournament: latest news or irresponsible rumors, links to real sportswriting, tips on scoring tickets from fans of early-round losers, and an irresistible argument on why the Tournament should always be in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, here are some links to this year’s tournament hometown paper, the Charlotte Observer:

- Here’s the link to their ‘Hoops’ page, with full tournament schedule and other features: http://www.charlotte.com/hoops/

- Ron Green, Jr., makes an interesting case for returning the ACC title game to Saturday night.   A number of coaches agree with him, including Mike Krzyzewski and Gary Williams.  Personally, I like the all-day rush of basketball that the ACC championship game, the SEC championship game, and Selection Sunday provide.

- Ken Tysiac has an article about the difficulty of obtaining Tournament tickets.   ACC Tournament tickets haven’t been available to the public since - I think - 1492 (give or take), but this year’s ticket has been tough to get a hold of even for dedicated boosters, thanks to the relatively small size of the Bobcats Arena.  Which makes a good chunk of my irresistible argument pretty doggone resistible.

- Ron Green, Jr., has another story that mentions one of my favorite ACC Tournament moments: When then-Clemson coach Rick Barnes got into Dean Smith’s face.  Green places this at the ‘96 Tournament, though, and I’m 99% sure it was in ‘95 (unless my math is even worse than usual).  I was there for the ‘95 tournament, which Wake Forest won.  Barnes took exception to Smith’s in-game comments to Clemson center Iker Iturbe, which led to a heated face-off between the coaches in front of the scorer’s table.  Once fans realized what was happening, it was like The Wave in reverse: every person in the Greensboro Coliseum stood and leaned, craned, twisted, whatever it took to see the scorer’s table.  An embarrassing number of fans started screaming, “Hit him, Rick!”

- And this story from Green about one of my least favorite Tournament moments.

Will Blythe’s book To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever looked at every aspect of the Carolina-Duke rivalry and its place in the life and culture of the state of North Carolina. Written with humor and insight, Blythe’s examination of how this rivalry became great and why otherwise sane people invest it with so much emotion is as definitive as it gets.

So naturally I asked him to say more about it.

BB4: Is the state of North Carolina’s obsession with college basketball just a product of lots of winning teams, or is there something more to it than that?

WB: I suspect the South in general, and North Carolina in particular, enjoyed winning at anything in the long wake of the Civil War, a period that included the Civil Rights era, where the image of the South was comprised of such ugliness as Bull Connor and demonstrators having dogs and water hoses turned against them, of activists buried in levee mounds, and so on. Against this the South offered up (aside from its eventual transformation), well, kickass athletic teams. Not exactly a proportionate response but we offered what we could. Think of Alabama football. And in North Carolina, that desert of a football state, ACC basketball. NC State, then North Carolina, then Duke took their initial turns at success, staring in the late Forties, early Fifties. Had Ultimate Frisbee been around then and had some Carolinian institution dominated in said frisbee, I don’t doubt we would have attached ourselves to that. But thank goodness that was not an option!

BB4: In your book you identify Duke as the “college as launching pad” and use the old “University of New Jersey at Durham” tag (not that I’d argue, personally), contrasting it with UNC as the “college as old home place.” But UNC’s early basketball stars - Lennie Rosenbluth, Doug Moe, Larry Brown, not to mention Frank McGuire - were all from the Northeast. That you know of, did any Carolina fans have trouble reconciling that with their parochialism?

WB: See above answer. They won, didn’t they? And winning, even with imported stars, reconciles a lot of parochialism.

BB4: Did any of those players become “Carolina-ized” by their stay down here, or did they just pass through to play ball?

WB: Yes, indeed. But not just to North Carolina players. Duke and State had many players settle in the state, a process that continues to this day. Think of Bucky Waters at Duke, for just one example. Even the notorious Art Heyman lived in Durham for a long time. There are many ex-Carolina players who have done so. Not long ago, New York native Jimmy Black, the point guard on UNC’s 82 national championship team, returned to the state, settled in Durham with his family, and works as a broker. There are many such examples. Now whether they’ve picked up a drawl, I don’t know. Seems to me the drawl is becoming increasingly optional in the state even for natives. On the other hand, you’ve got my mother, who grew up in Massachusetts and now sounds to many as southern as Robert E. Lee must have sounded.

BB4: I’m listening to local sports-talk radio as I write this, and several callers are jumping all over the irony of a UNC fan who complained about Duke getting all the calls. Can the journalist in you - I presume the Beast can’t - recognize the perspective of all the ABC fans out there who resented Dean Smith’s preeminence just as Carolina fans (and the rest of us, too) resent Coach K’s?

WB: The journalist says that he sympathizes with your pain. The beast just laughs. And after he finished laughing, he wanted you to know that Dean never berated the refs the way K does. And he says that even a Weak Forest fan such as yourself ought to know that. My apologies for the beast’s writing “Weak” Forest. He can’t resist even lame jokes. Again, my apologies.

BB4: No need to apologize for ‘Weak’ Forest; number one, we’re used to it, and number two, it was all I could do to keep from ‘asking’ a bunch of old UNC jokes in the form of questions and passing that off as this interview. But I managed to restrain myself, so now I get to feel morally superior, which is about all that Wake fans normally have left to them.

Anyway, not counting Duke fans, did you sense any weakening of the ABCers during the Doherty era of Carolina basketball? Or maybe a transfer of hatred towards Duke?

WB: Yes, good point. It was a source of great pain to me that during that era it seemed that not only did antipathy towards UNC diminish, there were even sympathetic souls at places like Duke who mourned the lessening of the rivalry. Such compassion stung me deeply. When your enemies stop regarding you as a threat, they become magnanimous in a way that hurts far worse than being reviled. Now on the other hand, I have to assume there were hard-core fans at places like Duke and State and Wake who relished Carolina’s temporary fall and would have loved to see them become the Prairie View State of the ACC. Endless losers. Didn’t happen, though.

BB4: Darn shame, that. Actually, when Carolina slipped under Doherty, I stunned myself by not really enjoying it. OK, I enjoyed it some, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. I would have preferred for my team to raise itself to Carolina’s level of excellence on a consistent basis. Would you rather see Carolina play competitive games against a strong Duke team, or see the Duke program go down in flames? In other words, did you enjoy the ‘94-’95 season?

WB: Did I enjoy the 94-95 season? Was the Pope Polish? When you turn basketball into a moral passion play, as many Carolinians do, Duke being bad, bad, bad merely seems like the disappearance of repressive Marxist-Leninist regimes. Good for the world. That doesn’t mean all bad has disappeared. But we prefer to seek fresh battles elsewhere.

BB4: I moved away from North Carolina in 1984. When I came back in 1990 to go to Wake, I was shocked to hear people talk about the “storied” Carolina-Duke rivalry. When I was a kid, UNC’s big rival was State, which you talk about in your book. Now commentators talk about UNC-Duke as if it’s Oxford-Cambridge, Tom-Jerry, Day-Night; as if it’s immutable. Do you think most UNC fans really hated Duke before the mid-1980s? If Duke declined and another ACC school - like, say, another smallish private school with tobacco money - came to dominate, do you think UNC fans would transfer the rivalry? Or has UNC-Duke reached a point where it will always be there, like Alabama-Auburn, even when one team or the other isn’t a contender?

WB: Hate does seem extremely portable, able to migrate to where the psychic payoff is greatest. So I take your question as incisive. And it is true that in the Seventies, my friends and I didn’t seem to hate Duke as much as we started to in the Eighties, even in the strange year of 1978, when I briefly considered rooting for Duke in the national championship. (I decided against that, however, and have been able to live with myself much more easily ever since.) There’s a scene in my book where Dean Smith points out that your most intense rival changes according to which is most successful against you. He cited NC State, Maryland, and Virginia as rivals to UNC that were every bit as strong as Duke became in the mid-Eighties. But I do think Duke’s private status as a university, and its mostly out-of-state student body, AND that student body’s deification in the media as clever if not smart contributed to a particular animus against Duke, the likes of which I have never seen in my lifetime.

BB4: ESPN, Dick Vitale, and your book have elevated UNC-Duke to a place of national prominence. Does the rivalry feel differently from the inside, so to speak, now that it’s a nationwide event?

WB: True again. I worry that such endless promotion of the rivalry in the way of modern marketing will make many fans from elsewhere recoil against the Duke-UNC bloodbath. But hey, it was sure good for my book.

BB4: Along the same lines, I see UNC gear just about everywhere I go. I’ve seen it on the NYC subway, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, even in the bleachers in Dodger Stadium. As a Wake fan, it’s like little needles in my heart, but how does it make you feel? Do you ever ask someone in UNC gear if they’re really a fan, or just making a fashion statement? And - and be honest, now - do you think it’s a reflection of UNC’s ongoing success, or are people still just trying to be like Mike (Jordan)?

WB: There is a story that I’ve heard more than once that Carolina blue is popular with the Crips, of the Crips and the Bloods. Maybe you’ve just seen a lot of Crips. Of course, if this rumor is true, you wouldn’t want to wear your Carolina blue in the wrong neighborhood. But then, as a Weak fan (Wake, you beast!) you wouldn’t want to wear your Carolina blue anywhere at all. In fact, you probably don’t have any. I can get you some–cheap. Just let me know.

BB4: I have to ask, even though I suspect I know the answer and won’t like it: how do Carolina fans feel about other ACC teams? Intense competitiveness, if not hate? Mild dislike? Lofty disdain? Condescending pity? Not just Wake, but State, UVa, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Clemson? Please tell me that Carolina fans hated Wake just a little bit when Randolph Childress hit the game-winner in OT for the ‘95 ACC title.

WB: Okay, I’ll make your day. At the moment that Childress hit that shot, Carolina fans hated Wake. But I do recall afterwards being willing to root for Wake in the NCAAs in a way I never would have rooted for Duke. Part of the reason was that I really liked Tim Duncan. In fact, I once went down to the Virgin Islands and played two on two with him and a couple of other guys outside his family’s home. He was a cool guy. Even now, I sort of like Wake football and Jim Grobe. However, with its private status and small-size, Wake does have the potential to become a sort of Duke in the eyes of Carolina fans. All you have to do is win a whole lot more.

(Note: as of February 22, Wake Forest was “despised” by 33 Facebook users. I haven’t been this happy since Wake won the ‘06 conference title in football.)

BB4: Any plans to make it to one of the Carolina-Duke games?

WB: I’ll be watching the game from New York. But I’ll be eating barbecue from Allen & Son especially imported for the occasion. May the gods of barbecue and basketball reward me for this offering.

Carolina beat Duke 76-68 Saturday night in Durham to split their regular-season series. You might have heard something about the game; I think ESPN and the North Carolina media mentioned it once or twice.

You know another game in “The Greatest Rivalry in College Sports” is coming up when ESPN plays music fit for round 4 of Rome Vs. Carthage every 10 minutes or so.

For fans of the other half of the Big Four, all the hype surrounding Carolina vs. Duke is infuriating. Wake and State played Saturday, too, you know. OK, Wake came in tied for 7th in the ACC and watching the NCAA bubble float away on the breeze, and State came in (and left) tied for last in the ACC, but the game still mattered.

To me. And to the few thousand other Wake fans. Maybe to the State fans, but you never know with them. And, presumably, to the players and coaches.

What’s most infuriating about the Carolina-Duke build-up is that - it pains me to say this - it really may be the best rivalry in all of college sports. I can’t remember the last time a Carolina-Duke game was a dud. Even in 1994-95, when Krzyzewski was on leave and poor Pete Gaudet looked more and more like Herman Munster passing a kidney stone, the Carolina-Duke games were thrillers. Even in the Matt Doherty era, when Carolina flirted with wretchedness (flirted? shoot, they gave wretchedness their phone number), the Carolina-Duke games were thrillers.

The two teams seem incapable of playing poor games against each other. Viewers always get their Dickie V’s worth.

Dammit.

At some point, I quit resenting the attention paid to Carolina-Duke and just enjoyed the ridiculously consistent high-quality college basketball. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of maturity or fatalism.