Looking forward to looking back at ACC Tournament
Edward Cone
News & Record
3-13-05
The happiest moment of my life came 30 years ago last week as the clock ticked down on North Carolina's victory over NC State in the championship game of the ACC basketball tournament. Sue me, I'm shallow. My wedding day and the whelping of healthy offspring rank right up there on the Happiest Moments chart, but I was pretty sure those things were going to happen, and nobody knew that the Tar Heels would beat David Thompson and the defending national champions.
The ensuing Sports Illustrated cover still hangs on my wall, the same copy I rode my bike to Golden Gate shopping center to purchase for 75 cents: Phil Ford in an Afro and blue Chucks, fingers splayed above the ball as he drives past Mo Rivers on a scuffed hardwood floor. They are both wearing gold chains around their necks, and their uniform shorts look like hot pants compared to modern fashion. "Upset in the ACC," says the headline. "Phil Ford kicks up his Tar Heels."
I was 12 when Carolina won that ACC tourney championship over State, and at 12 you don't really have a life, or a sense of proportion. That's why 1975 meant more to me than Carolina's two subsequent national championships, sublime though they were. I have those Sports Illustrated covers on my wall, too -- James Worthy dunking one-handed as Patrick Ewing waves at the ball, Eric Montross shooting over Chris Webber. But when I was 12 I had to walk outside after watching the game on television because our house was just not big enough to contain my catharsis.
Maybe you remember the feeling, the excitement of tournament week. It was a big deal in Greensboro, it really was. You had school that first day, and the luckiest kids left early for the Coliseum. The rest of us had to rely on our teachers to let us listen to the games on those little transistor radios kids had back then, before portable radios mutated into boom boxes and then shrunk back into iPods. It was on a school day in 1975 that Carolina came back from a big deficit to beat Wake Forest after Wake turned the ball over when a high pass was ruled to have touched the bottom of the scoreboard. It was a very controversial call, but as seen on my transistor radio it seemed to be correct.
Two years later Phil Ford would be part of the UNC team that really and truly broke my heart by losing to Marquette in the national championship game. He would go on to be the NBA rookie of the year and have some personal problems and become an assistant coach at Carolina and have some more personal problems and now I think he's doing OK, working for another old Tar Heel, Larry Brown, up in Detroit with the Pistons. But all of that was ahead of him, ahead of us, in 1975.
Then he was a freshman from Rocky Mount, the first freshman to start for Dean Smith, and he was going up against a Wolfpack team that had not only won a national championship the previous season and gone undefeated the year before that but was led by David Thompson, to my impressionable 12-year-old self the greatest ACC player in history, who as it turns out may actually have been the greatest ACC player in history (as opposed the greatest player to ever play in the ACC, which is something else again, and probably answers to the name Michael Jordan).
So this win, this moment, was not just victory, it was Victory, with Nike herself winging in from Samothrace to cut down the nets. The NCAA tournament seemed almost an afterthought, which was good, because Carolina flamed out early. But they had done what I needed them to do, and I couldn't ask for more.
Now that I am older than Phil Ford and Mo Rivers put together at the moment of that Sports Illustrated photograph -- now that Phil Ford and I are pretty much the same age, a couple of 40-somethings, peers in chronological terms at least to the iteration of Dean Smith who coached that day in 1975 -- I find myself telling my own children that it's just a game, and I sort of mean it.
But games are important, as self-contained dramas in their own right and as chapters in an ongoing story. There are plots that stretch over seasons, like the saga of decline and rebirth experienced by this year's Carolina seniors, and players and campaigns and eras that become markers in our lives. Like carbon-14 dating, basketball lore pinpoints memories in time, which is why at some level I will always associate courting my wife with JR Reid's flattop haircut. The emotional rewards of fandom are high and the costs reasonably low, except as measured by ticket prices, and the shared experience with friends, family and strangers is something more real than the games themselves, although only after the games are over.
This weekend the tournament is in Washington, not Greensboro, which feels wrong for all kinds of reasons, including tradition, geography, neutrality and what Virginia's Wally Walker did to Carolina in the first ACC championship held in the DC area. That was 1976, and I had this black-and-white TV, and, well, I'd rather not talk about that one.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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