xtcian

11/18/02 I know the full-scale

11/18/02

I know the full-scale dedication to a sports team seems onerous to many of you reading this blog; indeed, my Iowa youth was filled with Vikings fans (distended-bellied swine with cheeto flakes in their moustaches, polishing off cans of Schlitz while screaming at their Zenith TV sets) who made me queasy at the whole notion.

And I probably would have gone on with my life with very thinly-tethered sports affiliations, rooting for the underdog in every game as I still do in those late-night hoops games from the West Coast. But I never thought I'd go to school where Dean Smith was coaching, and within thirty seconds of my arrival in Chapel Hill, I suddenly understood why people hung their school hats on the irrational hook of school pride. In short, Dean Smith, and everything he is, represents the kind of patriarch I want to be in my own family, should I be lucky enough to have one.

In my junior year at Carolina, I was blessed to serve with the finest staff ever to grace the pages of the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. Silly name, yes, but this is a paper that produced Charles Kuralt, Ed Yoder, Jeff MacNelly and a host of famous journalists. In my day, we had the Dream Team of Jean Lutes, Laura Pearlman, and Matt Bivens in the editorial office, making my job as columnist a total dream. Writing for the paper with Pete Corson and Greg Humphreys as cartoonists was almost unfair.

I had an incredible run for those years, avenging almost all of my childhood trauma and getting to have sex with a variety of sorority girls from towns like Blowing Rock, NC. Two of my columns managed to make that magic leap to the refrigerators and dorm doors about town: one was about buying condoms at the Rite-Aid, and another about why I hate fuckin' Dook so much. The latter got me in good with the Sports Information people back then, and serves as a reminder that one should always "go with what you know" for me, loathing Duke University is like shooting fish in a barrel. When I turned in the first draft, I was worried that the editorial staff – a throwback to the Algonquin Round Table brand of intellectuals – would think that I was slumming with such an obvious topic.

Anyway, that column describes a true story about how I came to wrap my brain so intricately with the fortunes of the UNC men's basketball team (and if you need more proof, there are books dedicated to the subject). And if any of you follow college hoops at all, you know that last year was pretty much a meltdown for UNC's program, going 8 and 20 amidst swirling rumors of a team on the edge of mutiny. Five players transferred, and stories abounded about new coach Matt Doherty's draconian style. The program itself has been in a worrisome, transitional state ever since Dean Smith retired in 1997 and it hasn't been very easy for anybody who has stuck it out. By the end of the season last year, I had abandoned my tradition of staying with the TV until the final buzzer; it was just too sickening.

So with three freshman starting the first game tonight, anything could have happened. And it did: we tore Penn State a new duodenum, crushing them by 30 points. It was the first time any of us allowed ourselves a Carolina smile in almost two years. It's the sort of thing that's hard to understand, and I realize how dumb it is to read, but when a team that has a 90% graduation rate, that is about the family more than the victories, that has a tradition going back to 1911, that favors smart team passing over showboating dunks, that has a spiritual grandfather who still sends birthday cards to men on his 1961 squad, that is the source of so much of your happiness from a tumultuous decade in your life when that team start winning again, it's a fantastic feeling.

hootin' and or hollerin' with the Tar Heel faithful at Ship of Fools tonight