Where the Ground Crackles

Notre Dame's loose end

2016-08-19T15:47:00.000-04:00

I wrote this long ago, deleted it when I applied to Notre Dame, and republished it today when a colleague mentioned the Manti Te'o story.

Deadspin reported Wednesday that former Notre Dame Heisman candidate Manti Te'o's tragic yet uplifting story involving his girlfriend Lennay Kekua's death and her previous existence was a hoax. If you keep up with any type of news, you already knew this. The story's development since Wednesday has led to speculation as to who was behind the hoax.

Some think Te'o killed off his fake girlfriend on Sept. 12 to boost his Heisman status. Te'o said Friday that he began to receive phone calls from his fake, deceased girlfriend on Dec. 6 but continued to refer to her with the media because he was not convinced of the hoax until Deadspin broke the story this week. He also said that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo and two others were behind the mostly online hoax and apologized to him via, of course, Twitter. Deadspin reported that Te'o and Tuiasosopo had been friends.

This is all very confusing. Details will continue to emerge in the coming days that will clarify the participation of Te'o, Tuiasosopo and a couple others. What I fear is that Notre Dame's participation will be deemphasized or omitted.

ESPN and The Washington Post reported evidence that Notre Dame could be guilty of perpetuating what it knew to be a hoax.

Dan Tudesco, a 2006 graduate who now works in public relations in New York, set up an online account at fundraising website indiegogo.com on Jan. 9 to solicit $5,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Inc. The initial pitch said donations would go to the society in memory of Lennay Kekua, who reportedly died last fall, and in honor of Te’o, “two individuals who have been an inspiration to us through an iconic season.”

The story goes on to explain Notre Dame's support of Tudesco's effort.

Notre Dame took notice of Tudesco’s tweets about the fund drive and sent a university videographer to shoot an interview with him. The video was posted on the Notre Dame athletics YouTube channel Tuesday.

The Tuesday referred to is Tuesday, Jan. 15, which was one day before Deadspin broke its story. And here is the kicker.

However, Notre Dame officials said Wednesday that they became aware of the hoax on Dec. 26, nearly two weeks before the championship game.

Notre Dame said it did not announce the hoax on or after Dec. 26 because the Te'o family had expressed its own desire to do so once it had collected enough information from investigators. Fine. But 20 days after Dec. 26 it promoted a fund drive that had been started in memory of Kekua. The day after this promotion, Deadspin broke the story. Notre Dame's press conference immediately followed in which athletic director Jack Swarbrick did an excellent job of showing that Te'o was a victim and the university was a bystander.

It is true that the fund drive was also in honor of Te'o. Notre Dame certainly had an interest in showing support, in public and private, for its possibly victimized star. But was it really in Te'o's best interest to show support for a fund that perpetuated the very fabrication of which he was known to be a victim?

ESPN, The Washington Post and perhaps other outlets have posed this question, but Notre Dame has not yet answered it. Swarbrick did answer a related question at the press conference.

Reporter: The day of the national championship game when you guys had knowledge of this, there was a pre game special on the news morning show about his story. Did you guys know they were planning on doing that? Did you do anything to try to talk them out of that? How did you handle that situation?

Swarbrick: Where did it air?

Reporter: I think it was a CBS morning show.

Swarbrick: I'm not familiar with it, so I guess the quick answer is since I didn't know it, I, we didn't -- We were very conscious of the fact that we didn't know what we didn't know. We recognized the challenge of that. If Manti got a question in a media session, you know, about that, how do you respond to that? We recognize the challenge of that and we weighed those difficulties against, on the other hand, these other issues that affected timing. I'll say one thing. When the investigation concluded, when we got the first report from the investigators, the one thing we were certain of is that this was coming out. There was too much online chatter about it. There was not an intention, a belief, anything that this would be a story that didn't get told. It was clear it would. We had hoped the first person to tell it would be Manti, and again, the expectation was that was going to happen next week. He didn't get that opportunity without someone else having told the story.

Later another reporter probed at a possible cover up.

Reporter: Did Notre Dame notify any law enforcement agency or the enforcement arm of the NCAA?

Swarbrick: No, there's no factual predicate for an NCAA violation that we could find. That of course was one of our important focuses early on. No, we did not refer this to criminal authorities. We shared, as I said, all of our information with the Te'os, who in turn shared it with their representatives to pursue it further.

Reporter: Considering at the very least somebody was harassing a star player for the university and potentially there could have been an extortion component to this . . . Why didn't Notre Dame contact law enforcement?

Swarbrick: We believed that was the victim's decision to make, and Manti was the victim here. He and his family in consultation with whomever they choose to consult with had that decision to make. We were not the victim. We've been impacted, but I don't want to confuse this at all. Manti Te'o was the victim of this scam.

Reporter: Was there a discussion about contacting law enforcement?

Swarbrick: Yes, there was a discussion of any response that might be appropriate.

Reporter: Do you still think that was the right decision, based on what's happened to this point?

Swarbrick: I do.

You be the judge.

An in-stadium perspective of the botched offside call at the ACC Championship

2015-12-06T14:13:00.003-05:00

ADDENDUM: An earlier version of this post suggested that the ACC was incorrect in stating that offside on a kickoff is not reviewable. The ACC was actually correct in stating that offside on a kickoff is not reviewable. NCAA Rule 12, Article 4(b) reads:

Article 4: Reviewable plays involving kicks include: (b) Player beyond the neutral zone when kicking the ball.

The correct interpretation is that only the kicker's position can be reviewed. This would only apply to punts since a kicker can never be offside.

Yesterday the Tar Heels were robbed of a chance to send the ACC Championship game into overtime when a referee threw a flag for a recovered onside kick offside that never happened. Carolina would have trailed by eight with the ball at midfield, all three timeouts remaining and 1:11 to go. Carolina didn't play well enough to deserve to win, but I still don't feel like we lost. For me, the game will always feel unfinished.

Everyone in the world now knows that not a single Tar Heel was anywhere close to being offside on the play. Video replay would not have been necessary to reverse the call; a simple still shot with kicker Freeman Jones's foot on the ball was more than sufficient to show that the Heels were too slow, not too fast, to the line. We can speculate as to why the official threw the initial flag, but the ensuing three minutes were far more interesting than the initial call.

The Carolina coaching staff knew the flag was a mistake because it had the benefit of watching up in the booth the same replays you saw on television. Carolina Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham quickly asked a sideline official if the offside call was reviewable, and the official assured him that it was. That sideline official was incorrect. NCAA Rule 12, Article 4(b) states that reviewable plays involving kicks include determining whether a player is beyond the neutral zone when kicking the ball. Since the player in question was not kicking the ball, the play was not reviewable. Accordingly none of the officials reviewed the play to overturn the on-field flag, and Carolina kicked a second time without retaining possession.

But the most curious thing about this error didn't hit me until I was driving home from the airport this morning. Bank of America Stadium has two new 56' x 199' video boards that allow all 75,412 fans to comfortably view instant replays. The video boards had served this purpose all game and would show Clemson recovering the second and final onside kick to secure the win just a couple minutes after the mistaken offside call. However, the video boards did not show the sufficient replay of the mistaken offside call that you saw on your television. What we saw in the stadium was incomplete. The aggrieved yelling that normally accompanies a botched call never happened in the stadium for the offside call. In fact, I knew of the error in the stadium only because my friend's wife texted him what she was seeing on her television at home. The magnitude of the error clouded our ability to recognize this diverted flow of information.

I could speculate as to why the ESPN and in-stadium replays were so different, but I'll let you do that instead while I stick to the facts. Oh, the facts. Here's another one.

Clemson fans outnumbered Carolina fans by a ratio of roughly 5:1. Carolina had ordered its 5500 allotted tickets and 2500 extra tickets, but 8000 tickets could neither satisfy Carolina fans' demand nor fill anywhere near half of a 75,000-seat stadium.

Clemson fared much better since they clinched a berth in the championship weeks before Carolina did and gobbled up the general public ticket allotment before Carolina had the chance. Carolina clinched later through no fault of their own since they were undefeated in conference play. The ACC could do more to ensure a more balanced championship atmosphere.

Clemson was guaranteed a spot in the College Football Playoff with an ACC Championship win, but Carolina had only a decent shot at the CFP with a win. I hope this difference figured into neither the botched call nor the ticket allotments.

Moving forward, I wish Clemson the very best in the College Football Playoff.

Jane Eloise

2015-05-05T15:17:00.001-04:00

On the morning of April 25, I rolled over in bed to grab my phone as I usually do and found my six-hour-old niece on the screen. She was wearing a winter hat and an enormous, adult-looking diaper. The accompanying text message: Jane Eloise. She looked beautiful and smart, a lot like my sister.

I had not had enough time to contemplate how I would feel about being an uncle because my second semester of business school was too busy for comfort. I wasn't worried. Mentally preparing to be an uncle takes only a few minutes. So I mentally prepared, albeit for a bit longer than a few minutes because my sister had led me to expect a nephew instead of a niece. Then my wife, visiting mother-in-law and I drove through three hours of ill-suited rain from South Bend to Evanston Hospital.

We worked our way through several layers of security before arriving outside my sister's room. My sister's husband, Tim, explained that we would have to wait while Jaylyn nursed Jane, so we patiently sat outside an empty nursery with Tim's parents. Nobody else was around. We appeared to be the maternity ward's only customers.

My dad appeared a moment later after mistakenly searching for us in the downstairs atrium.

"Jane blah blah blah blah," he said, "and Jane blah blah blah blah blah blah."

I was not uninterested in what he had to say about this new person, but I couldn't focus on anything he said other than her name. My brain immediately defaulted to Jaylyn's bridesmaid Jane, the namesake of the baby.

Apparently my niece was more than a nameless model in a diaper commercial or a perpetual balancing exercise for my pregnant sister. She had a name, and we were expected to use it. My original family had grown again to Mom, Dad, Jaylyn, Tim, Melissa, Winnie, Jane and I. Jane was a permanent +1, a brand new Christmas stocking coming to a fireplace near me, and I had not met her.

Minutes later Tim said our turn had come, so Melissa and her mom, my dad and I walked into the room. Jane was in my sister's lap, alternately staring at the ceiling and at her mom. She wasn't crying or uncomfortable with her new world in any way. Jane looked like she knew she was exactly where she was supposed to be. My sister smiled.

My dad and sister retold their stories from the past 12 hours, but I couldn't focus on them. I positioned myself by the head of the hospital bed so I could look at my beautiful niece and let her look at me. I hadn't shaved for a week and silently scolded myself for looking needlessly scary to an infant--if infants dislike facial hair as much as some dogs. Jane didn't seem to mind.

"Do you want to hold her?" Jaylyn asked.

"I don't know how," I said. "I know I'm supp-"

"Babies are resilient," she said. "Just hold her. You'll do fine."

So I put one hand behind her head and my other arm under her body. Then we looked at each other for what seemed like an hour. Jane was a person all her own, not quite her dad and not quite her mom. She had a lot of hair. She moved her mouth as if she was stretching her jaw. Sometimes she sneezed. Her eyes had a unique shape that reminded me of nobody I had ever met. She was gorgeous. I passed her to Melissa and took a few photographs.

-----

In the late spring of 2010, my mom called me at work. She told me she was at the hospital to have her blood drawn. She felt lethargic and somehow believed that her blood test results would come back with bad news. My mom had always been optimistic and healthy, but she sounded different that day on the phone. I was worried.

Hours later we were together at the hospital when an emergency room doctor told my mom she had acute myeloid leukemia. Another doctor was quick to tell us that the five-year survival rate was 50 percent, a rosy forecast compared to today's WebMD. My mom needed to start chemotherapy as quickly as possible.

With my dad and sister in Chicago, my mom and I hung together in North Carolina to take the early punches. We hoped for good news, but it was all bad. My mom asked me to call our family and her best friend. They all had a lot of questions, some of the same unanswered ones I had. I told everyone we were getting treatment as quickly as possible and learning new things every day. We couldn't know the exact, ultimate course of treatment until later.

Several doctors unloaded a lot of medical information on us in the following days. We learned about chemotherapy, AML, stem-cell transplants and the salient metrics from her past and future blood tests. One doctor said something that broke the mold of everything else we heard.

"Our goal is to get you through this in one way or another," he said, "because we want you to be around for a grandchild someday." He nodded in my direction.

Some readers must think I smooth the rough edges of blurry memories, and maybe I do. But I remember that moment well. My mom's moistened eyes darted in my direction, and one corner of her mouth mustered a sad smile. We said nothing. The moment passed.

My mom and I never talked about the things we wanted her to live for. I focused on her survival because the bounties of life, the big moments and the little pleasures we take for granted, would have overwhelmed me. My mathematics education had taught me to simplify, simplify. Or maybe I got that from her.

-----

She stepped off the elevator looking the happiest and healthiest I have ever seen her. Her hunched shoulders, hushed voice and wide eyes gave away her excited anticipation.

While I was unknowing and asleep, my mom had packed her bags in Chapel Hill for a 13-hour drive and indefinite stay in Chicago with her daughter, son-in-law and newborn granddaughter. She had left at 4 a.m. We would have called her with reports from the hospital to keep her awake, but my mom doesn't touch her phone when she drives. She had survived cancer with a stem-cell transplant from her sister. She doesn't take chances.

When we all walked in together, Jane wasn't on Jaylyn's lap. My mom's attention went straight to her daughter, and I think she momentarily forgot who else was in the room. Jaylyn pointed to the nearby bassinet, and my mom walked to it.

She looked and smiled at her granddaughter, Jane Eloise Stenta, for a long time. A week later she wrote:

When I looked at Jane, she was so tiny and real. I loved her so much, as much as I love you and Jaylyn. I never thought it was possible to love anyone else like that. I also thought what a perfect little miracle she was. I couldn't take my eyes off of her.

I do not know what my family did to deserve any of this. The last five years taught me that so much of life is out of our hands. Sometimes good things happen, and sometimes bad things happen. All we can do is let each other know that we love each other.

After all, Jane is only beginning to understand how much we love her. I'd better call my sister to tell her again.

Why Stuart Scott won

2015-01-06T14:05:00.000-05:00

The last few days have been hard for Tar Heels. Longtime ESPN journalist Stuart Scott passed away Sunday morning after a seven-year battle with a rare form of cancer. He was 49. He is survived by his parents, siblings, girlfriend and two loving daughters.

The loss of Stu is not unique to those who share his alma mater. Stu belonged to sports fans of all colors, even the ugly, darker blue, because of what he did. He brought life to the joy and anguish of our fanatical existence, which is an enormous part of some of our lives.

I didn't grow up on SportsCenter like many of my peers. In fact, I didn't start to watch entire episodes until I went to Carolina in 2003. But well before I became a regular viewer, I knew who Stuart Scott was. I couldn't attribute it to him at the time, but my high school basketball teammates used to relive each other's highlights in the post-game locker room back in 1999.

"Boo-yah!" point guard Jason Epner would say while stroking the air with his eyes closed. "Just call him butter because he's on a roll!"

Playing sports was cool long before Stu arrived at ESPN in 1993, but talking about sports was no different from talking about the daily news. In 1992, you might have heard someone say "Did you see Jordan's dunk? That was fun to watch." Now you're more likely to hear "Did you see Jordan's dunk? He was breakin' off somethin' proper!" Stu made talking about sports cool.

And he did so in the face of criticism from people who could sense his charisma taking the sportscasting world away from the old guard. Even as a rookie reporter at ESPN, Stu held his ground while complimenting his forward-thinking peers in his columns. Stu worked for everyone, even middle-aged white guys, but he opened the door for sports fans who were young and creative.

Stu was diagnosed with cancer in 2007 and began to disappear from his regular ESPN gigs. We heard that his cancer was tough, but we also heard he was tougher. He beat it, but it came back. Then he beat it again. Then it came back again. As sports fans, we felt his battle morph into a war, and the sports metaphors worked their way into our unwilling subconscious. Stu was fighting, and we wanted Stu to win. We hoped for a day when he would return to the desk as a permanent fixture in our daily lives. That day never came.

I knew we had lost Stu, but I also couldn't shake the thought that Stu lost an unfair fight with brass-knuckled cancer. We didn't know about the brass knuckles until this week. To give you my perspective, my mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, and I am thankful that she has now been cancer free for years. I know the "beat cancer" story better than I ever thought I would. Stu's passing is a reminder of how far we still have to go.

This past fall I enrolled in Notre Dame's full-time MBA program. As unsettling as it occasionally was to be a part of a rival institution of my alma mater, I also giddily awaited Carolina football's Oct. 11 appointment in South Bend. I hoped that Notre Dame would be 5-0 atop the rankings so we could spoil their season. I got my wish.

A couple days before the game, I went to the Grotto to light a candle and pray for a few things including the Heels. To my surprise, I didn't pray for a win. I prayed that Carolina would fight hard and make me proud in front of my new friends and classmates. I knew I could plan to have a great time with the many Carolina friends and family who were on their way, but I also knew that I couldn't control what seemed to be the most important thing to everyone: the outcome of the game. I didn't want to ask for too much.

Carolina's maligned defense earned an early 14-0 lead in what I describe as the third-most exciting five minutes of my life (I'm married, and I was at the 2004 Miami game). That and the rest of the game were an unforgettable experience shared with the people I love. We lost by the narrow margin of one possession. Carolina had fought hard. I walked out of Notre Dame Stadium disappointed but proud. I got exactly what I prayed for.

After Stu's passing, I watched a bunch of tribute videos and old broadcasts of his. For some reason I scrolled past his Jimmy V Perseverance Award acceptance speech. I think I wanted to see him at his professional best aside from his illness. But because his speech was at the top of any search results list, I eventually clicked on it and watched.

I discovered that in his last year, Stu came to understand that beating cancer wasn't about the length of his life as he had stated. Beating cancer was about how and why he lived. For him, that meant being with his daughters and training through mixed martial arts, the latter to prove to himself his own physical mettle. For each moment he did what he wanted to do with his life without regard to cancer, he won.

The final score didn't matter.

I heard that message hours before last night's tip off between Carolina and Notre Dame. I didn't go to the Grotto this time because it is butt-cold in South Bend, but I'd be lying to you if I said the end result didn't hurt. I wanted the Heels to extend their pregame tribute to Stu for 40 minutes of determined basketball. I went to bed feeling like we lost a game we should have won not because our team deserved it but because Stu deserved it.

This morning I thought of what Stu would have said over last night's SportsCenter highlight reel if he was behind the desk. Despite his rooting heart, he would have been as cool as the other side of the pillow.

Tar Heel.

You are in our hearts, Stu.

I say 'college;' they say 'potato'

2014-05-12T14:54:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I write something that adds little-to-no value to a story that already exists. Oops. This is one of those somethings, but you might laugh if you keep reading, have at least a small sense of humor regarding the Carolina scandal, and have not read The Daily Tar Heel in the past month.

The DTH published an article titled "Student-athletes weigh in on balancing academics, big-time college sports." Hearing the voices of student-athletes instead of administrators or journalists on this hot issue sounds refreshing, but sometimes you only get to hear from rehearsed guys like Marcus Paige who can successfully balance rigorous coursework and a sport.

I clicked on the link anyway, hoping that I might find something fresh and encouraging. Former Carolina football players Devon Ramsay and Mike Ingersoll gave me something so fresh that I laughed for the first time since the scandal broke eons ago.

In terms of academic-athletic balance, Ramsay said a football major might be helpful for student-athletes who are sure they want to go to the NFL.

“I think it would be OK for guys who know from the get-go that that’s what they want to do,” he said. “But I’m also nervous that some guys would feel pressured to do that major and really kind of lose the opportunity of a college education.”

Ingersoll also said he thinks there should be a program in college that prepares student-athletes for life in professional leagues.

“Careers in the NBA and NFL are some of the most unique and sought after careers in the world,” he said. “Why don’t you put (athletes) in classes about money earned, invested and owed?”

Ingersoll compared student athletes to students who go to college for other specialties, such as fine arts.

“Drama is a major for students who want to go on Broadway — why can’t I take classes for the NFL as far as managing money, dealing with the lifestyle and dealing with women,” he said.

Technically, I was a guy who knew from the get-go that he wanted to go to the NFL. The only thing I wanted more was to play football for the Tar Heels. Unfortunately, my physician told me that I was moderately underweight for my 73-inch frame at 165 pounds; he recommended milkshakes. Also, I had played football for a season when I was 13, and I sucked at it. Barring putting on a startling freshman hundred in pure muscle and suddenly being willing to get my pants dirty, playing football was something that evidently waited for me in heaven. In this life, I hope to one day earn an advanced Carolina degree just so I can come out of the tunnel at commencement. I would be the one running with a helmet and an American flag.

So I can't honestly say that I wish Carolina had a football major when I was there. I can understand that Carolina football players have always been many steps closer to the League than I was, but even the best of them have to temper their expectations of going pro because of injuries and developmental uncertainty. Besides, I have to state the obvious--do college football players really need more hours of football? They must really like football. One of my majors was mathematics; I could not have imagined putting in 40 extra hours per week for the UNC math team if it even existed. I guess I didn't really like math.

To their credit, these guys did give me an idea for a different new major at UNC: Teach For America Training. I joined TFA after my graduation and could have used a couple years of preparation--perhaps in the School of Education--instead of the five-week TFA summer institute. The TFA-Charlotte corps had five women for every man, so Mike Ingersoll, your lady issues speak to me. At least they did in the beginning. I am married to one of them, so maybe I built that plane while I flew it.

But to extend my extension of their suggestion lays bare the weakness of our arguments. Why not have a Google major at Carolina for students who want to work for Google? And you can't have a Google major without having an Apple major. If one employer like the NFL can influence a course of study at Carolina, maybe they all should. Then Carolina would be a corporate-driven training campus. Where would we put all the light and liberty?

If only Ingersoll knew that he could have enrolled in a number of money management courses at Carolina. Was he unaware that they existed? Did someone discourage him from enrolling in these courses? Were these sections closed to students who were not in the business school? These are hard questions for an unpaid blogger to answer.

Nevertheless, if the Ramsay-Ingersoll recommendations come to their fullest fruition, we would have to amend the football motto by addition: ANSWER THE BELL. LEARN NFL FOOTBALL. DEAL WITH WOMEN. Can you imagine the charm on the DEWW 110 professor?

OK, I'll stop with the sarcasm. I'm not siding with the NCAA cash cow, and I do think that college athletes are exploited. Specifically, I think it is a joke that many athletes gravitate to a couple atypical majors, and I recognize three causes: student-athletes who are unable to academically achieve in higher education regardless of their busy schedule, student-athletes who are willing to sacrifice their education for an easier-than-overtime path to graduation, and academic departments that are unwilling or unable to accommodate student-athletes' schedules. Carolina has put significant effort into fixing the first cause, but the others still need quite a bit of work.

College is college because it gives students the liberty to shed light on personally selected disciplines that will help them contribute to society later in life. Maybe football is one of those disciplines, but playing Division I football is more than enough preparation for whatever football might come after graduation. To his credit, Ramsay seemed to know this when he said those who would choose to major in football might "lose the opportunity of a college education." Ingersoll seemed a bit more lost.

But I have to admit I'm happy that they said what they said and that the DTH was right there to quote them so . . . warmly. It feels good to laugh while reading a story with a headline that includes the words student-athletes, academics and big-time college sports. I thought it might never happen.

Was Duke scared?

2014-02-12T21:15:00.000-05:00

Official word to postpone tonight's 9 p.m. Carolina-Duke tilt came at 5:40 p.m. amid miserable winter weather conditions. Several initial reports incorrectly credited the weather as the sole reason for the postponement. Fortunately, Carolina Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham showed us a sliver of another reason.

"Duke's bus is not able to get to their campus to pick up the team in time to be able to make the trip to Chapel Hill, so we can't play this evening," he said. "The safety of the teams and officials is the number one priority, and this was the best decision to make at this time. Coach Williams, Coach Krzyzewski, (Duke AD) Kevin White and I will be on the phone with the ACC and will make a decision as to when to play the game as soon as possible."

ACC rules dictate that a game must be played if the officials and teams can get to the game safely. Fans are not considered in the rules, but it is true that upwards of 20,000 people will be safer without a game to attend tonight.

However, I can't not mention a few facts that, when paired with some reasonable assumptions, could tell an additional story.

Because driving was predicted to be dangerous around 8 p.m., Carolina planned to admit students to fill the empty seats of the ticket holders who would stay home. This happened twice before in the history of the Dean Dome, and the result was a student section so large that it filled pretty much the entire lower level and then some. Typically, alumni fill the seats that are closest to the court while students are dispersed in random sections throughout the arena. You can imagine the difference when you stack this deck with 10,000 wild cards. If I was an opposing player, I'd prefer the alumni in the front rows. I wonder which seating plan Duke prefers?

The officials were ready to go. ESPN had put its equipment in place more than 24 hours ahead of tip-off. Clearly, nearly everyone who was necessary to the execution and broadcast of the game was well aware of the conditions and planned accordingly. Everyone except, perhaps, the Blue Devils.

Duke's players had to attend their afternoon classes, you might say.

You'd be wrong. At 9:31 a.m. Duke canceled all classes effective at 12:50 p.m. The Duke athletic department had all morning to figure out how to get its team on the eight-mile ride to Chapel Hill eight hours before tip-off to avoid the expected weather complications. Instead, they either stuck with a departure time that was set last summer or were the victims of a lousy bus company. If they knew the bus would be late, they could have used any of a few hundred beat-up yellow school buses.

Cunningham got it right. Postponing the game was the best and only decision to make at the time of the decision. I just wonder what was going on over at Duke after 9:30 this morning.

From my comfortable couch in Asheville, it appeared that Duke was just plain scared.

My response to the CNN student-athlete literacy report

2014-01-08T15:51:00.001-05:00

UNC posted a response to the CNN report shortly after I posted this. Please note the addendum at the bottom of this post.

This week CNN published a report on illiteracy among college student-athletes and, more specifically, among UNC-Chapel Hill student-athletes.

Former UNC-Chapel Hill learning specialist Mary Willingham researched the reading levels of 183 UNC men's basketball and football players from 2004 to 2012. She reported that 60 percent read between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels and 8-10 percent read at or below a third-grade level. That means 70 percent of revenue-sport Tar Heels were not ready to read college textbooks, which are written at a ninth-grade level according to CNN. The same report stated that 25 percent of revenue-sport Tar Heels would not have qualified to take classes at a community college.

CNN requested similar records from 37 public universities but received very little in return.

Arizona State, Rutgers and Michigan State denied CNN's request based on privacy laws. CNN has since appealed those decisions with no results to date. ASU was, however, happy to report that it employs one (!) learning specialist to work with all (!) of its student-athletes. Perhaps ASU felt good enough to report this after it discovered that Kentucky employs zero (!!) reading specialists for all of its student-athletes.

Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah, Michigan, Florida and Florida State all said they do not keep records of entrance exam scores or results of reading evaluations for athletes. Could we reasonably extrapolate that they don't keep records for any of their students? Athletes are students, after all.

Maryland never replied. South Carolina acknowledged receipt of the request but refused to respond.

Many other schools complied and responded with ACT and SAT data. In CNN's report, a college-literate test score was a reading ACT score at or above 16 or a reading SAT score at or above 400. Some of those schools used this standard to report a percentage of revenue-sport student-athletes who were not ready to read at the college level. Others reported their revenue-sport student-athlete ACT and SAT reading test averages next to either the averages of non-athlete admitted students or the averages of all admitted students. In short, these institutions reported that anywhere from 7 to 18 percent of their revenue-sport student-athletes read at the elementary level.

Most of the reporting schools came out better than Willingham's version of UNC. And given UNC's elite status among public universities, I can't imagine the unreported achievement gap between non-athletes and revenue-sport student-athletes would be a pretty thing to see.

As an educator and UNC alumnus, I am trying to digest this blizzard of information as objectively as possible. A few red flags, some in favor of UNC and some not, immediately come to mind.

I work for a North Carolina community college that sets higher standards for college literacy: at least an 18 on the ACT reading section or at least a 500 on the SAT reading section. Again, these are the standards for a community college in North Carolina. Admitted students who don't test as college literate have to take a separate placement test that forces them to enroll in one, two or three sequential, no-credit, developmental courses. I was surprised to find that CNN's standards for literacy at major research institutions were so much lower. It is unclear whether Willingham's reported 25 percent of Tar Heels that could not qualify for classes at a community college came from the 16/400 standards or the 18/500 standards. I suspect it came from the 18/500 since my employer and UNC both exist in North Carolina.

I cannot fathom that so many major research institutions do not keep records of their students' ACT and SAT test records. I know they require each applicant to provide scores before granting admission, so their statement leads me to believe either that they destroy the data upon admission or that they are lying to protect their student-athletes' privacy. But why didn't they just say they were protecting their students' privacy? They would have sounded more competent if they did.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I know a team of people is dedicated to meeting UNC student-athletes wherever they are and improving their academic abilities. As everyone knows, at least one of those people went rogue and broke the rules, and a professor and department chair did the same. We paid for it as an institution, and the athletes involved will suffer as a result for who knows how many years. Despite these missteps, UNC has maintained a commitment to giving all its student-athletes resources that other universities apparently do not.

CNN's statistical reporting was bad enough that I, an educator with a journalism and mathematics degree, do not understand the facts behind Willingham's numbers. Why does the report state that 25 percent of Tar Heels weren't ready for community college coursework while 70 percent of Tar Heels weren't ready to read on a college level? Further, CNN reported reading scores while omitting math scores, something annoyingly negligent but also unfortunately American.

I do not mean for these criticisms to undermine the larger purpose of CNN's report. The United States has perhaps the most advanced higher education system in the world paired with a disappointing secondary education system to feed it. Combine these with the big-money machine that charges $60 to go to a football game, and you wind up with some academically unprepared college student-athletes.

Some say that it simply isn't fair for an underachieving male student who excels at either of two sports to take the spot of the best student of either sex that UNC does not admit. Others would expand that to say it might not be fair for an underachieving student of either sex who excels at any sport to take the spot of the best unaccepted student. I'm not sure which statement is closer to the reality. Any college sports fan with a bachelor's degree has considered these matters of fairness. I know I have. It is a crisis of conscience and economics, and we have to have a conversation about it.

A few UNC fans say that the University is unfairly at the forefront of these conversations. They say that other universities seem to handle these issues better by staying out of the spotlight and keeping their players eligible. This stuff happens nearly everywhere else, you have heard your friends say. Why does the media always target us?

I think the media targets us because we are the nation's first public university and one that "with lux, libertas - light and liberty - as its founding principles, [charts] a bold course of leading change to improve society and to help solve the world's greatest problems."

Yes, that is the end of UNC's mission statement. It's just a mission statement, you might say, and you'd be right. Not all mission statements mean something, but ours does. That's why I pause every time I see UNC as the poster child for what is happening at universities across the country. We are leading this conversation. Our faculty, students and alumni are the ones writing critical letters to The Daily Tar Heel because we know that when we lead our university to a better day, others will follow.

Addendum: UNC also posted a response to the CNN report shortly after I posted mine. I agree with its first point, that Willingham's emphasis of a couple student-athletes' inability to read and write is an unfair representation of the majority of Tar Heel student-athletes. These alleged case examples are too statistically insignificant to merit Willingham's and CNN's condescending detail. If all but one Tar Heel can sound out "Wisconsin," then it is inappropriate to mention that one could not near the lead of the story.

Willingham has not met the University's request for the data that supported her statistical claims. She should. I certainly hope that she simply hasn't had time but will do so in the very near future.

UNC stated that "a subcommittee . . . established guidelines and procedures for the admission of student-athletes and other students with special talent." It would be informative for UNC to add an explanation of at least some of those guidelines and procedures on the page.

Shooting a free throw is a science

2013-12-19T13:14:00.000-05:00

Excluding Marcus Paige, Carolina has shot close to 50 percent from the charity stripe this season. That is bad enough to lose to undermanned teams like Belmont and Alabama-Birmingham between unforgettable wins over the best teams in the country. If you believe the head coach, the Heels' struggle at the line is the players' fault.

"I'm tired of talking about free throws," Williams said after last night's loss to Texas. "You've got to be tough enough to step up and make the dadgum thing or go play soccer."

I love Roy Williams, but I don't agree with his statement that making free throws is all about toughness. Making a free throw is mostly physical and only partly mental.

My authority on this subject is limited since I haven't shot a competitive free throw since my senior year of high school in 2002. But in my early high school days I took lessons from a private shooting coach, and shooting a free throw was one of the most important lessons I learned. I feel like I have to explain why I think the Heels stink at the stripe because nobody else seems to share my opinion.

To consistently make free throws, a player must minimize his movement. This can mean slightly different things to different players, but the basics are always the same. The shooter should slightly bend his knees with the ball near his midsection and pause. Then he should lift the ball to his shooting pocket, which is slightly above and in front of his forehead. Finally, the player should extend his knees and shooting arm.

This is a slight simplification. For instance, a player could struggle with slow rotation because he is palming the ball instead of correctly placing it on his fingertips. He might also have off-center rotation as a result of poor follow through or hand placement. But the striking thing to me is that some of Carolina's most talented players don't seem to demonstrate my aforementioned simplification.

I know our numbers stink, but you don't have to show me the number 59.6 for me to know that most of our players will miss half of their attempts. We have guys with shooting pockets near the backs of their heads. We have guys who appear to ball fake before they raise the ball to their shooting pocket. Sometimes I think I'm watching a friend play Just Dance 3 instead of watching a Tar Heel shoot a free throw.

As a passionate alumnus with little access to the team, I am left to wonder why our players look so inept at the line before the ball clangs off the back of the rim (if we're lucky). I can only guess that the coaching staff wants each player to shoot the ball in a way that is most comfortable to him. You can go to a middle school basketball game to understand why that philosophy doesn't work: shooting a free throw is a science, not an art. Very few players, even very few talented players, instinctively know how to shoot a basketball with optimal accuracy. Shooting a free throw is a skill that has to be taught and learned.

I'm sure the Heels shoot free throws at practice. But if some of them shoot free throws at practice with the same form they use in games, I think they are wasting their time.

In Roy's defense, only one of my team coaches ever offered any advice on my shooting form. The rest of them only had us shoot free throws in practice. Understanding the nuts and bolts of an effective stroke is something completely separate from coaching five players to operate on the court like the fingers on a hand. I know Williams loves and excels at the latter, but I wonder whether his players get effective instruction on the former.

They should.

Oh, Christmas tree

2013-12-19T12:18:00.000-05:00

This morning my wife, Melissa, called me at home on her way to work.

"I saw a free artificial Christmas tree on the curb," she said. "Could you get it?"

"Sure," I replied. We had never had a Christmas tree. Living in our first home was a great reason to finally upgrade our Christmas.

"You should put it in your car," she continued. "We can figure out what to do with it later."

This seemed odd since I figured we would put the thing together in our house and put gifts underneath it. I said goodbye without asking for an explanation since I wanted to be the first to get to that free Christmas tree. Curbside merchandise does not last long in West Asheville.

I was in such a rush that I barely covered my boxers and T-shirt with a pair of blue jeans. I jogged to my car in the 22-degree chill, scraped a bit of ice off the driver's side of a completely frozen windshield and drove the half block to the location my wife had described.

Sitting next to a large Rubbermaid tub and on top of an enormous red bag overflowing with green branches was a pizza box with a handwritten message: Free 10-foot Christmas tree. Happy holidays.

Then I understood that the tree was much too large to fit in our person-sized house. Melissa's intention was lost on me, but I had no time to think since my brain was approaching a freezing temperature. Besides, we would figure it out later.

I quickly loaded the Rubbermaid tub into the trunk of the car. I couldn't lift the red bag because of both its girth and weight, so I grabbed bunches of branches and chucked them into the backseat of my Toyota Corolla. I'd neglected to bring gloves on this half-block journey, so the combination of the cold and the prickly branches quickly numbed my hands. A few minutes later, the remaining branches had overtaken the backseat and console. I tossed the few ornaments into the passenger seat and carefully drove back to our driveway with no rear view.

The sign said 10 ft. I packed it in my car anyway, I proudly wrote to Melissa.

No. Put it back :), she replied.

I had never been so delighted to see an emoticon. Melissa followed up with a phone call to say that yes, she had seen the sign, but no, she did not read the most important part of it. She apologized, but she didn't need to. I got a blog post out of it.

Please get in touch with me before my afternoon trip to Goodwill if you are a department-store owner or giant looking to decorate for the holiday season.

Winnie

2013-12-11T17:41:00.000-05:00

On Oct. 27 my wife, Melissa, and I adopted Winnie, a 4-year-old yellow Labrador. Melissa had grown up with a Labrador that lived to be 17 years old, an extremely long life for the breed. I, in contrast, had never had a pet in my life. I went from being a boy who desperately wanted a dog to a man with no particular affinity to any dog or the idea of getting one. In hindsight, it was a sad regression.

Weeks earlier Melissa found an advertisement for Winnie on Petfinder, so we went to the rescue shelter that was vetting her prospective new families. An employee told us that Winnie's adoption was already pending. A little heartbroken, we looked at the other dogs in the shelter.

"I don't think our dog is here," she said. She was right. We went home and told our families the bad news about Winnie, and everyone was sad that somebody swooped in before us. Even though the shelter had taught me that meeting a dog was the most important factor in adopting, Winnie's Petfinder ad had hooked me. I wanted Winnie, and so did Melissa.

Winnie's advertisement resurfaced a couple weeks later. The pending adoption had fallen through because Winnie "couldn't go on a walk without a leash." Our standards were lower and lawful.

We met Winnie for the first time in a play yard at the shelter, and we loved her. We also hit it off with Winnie's owner, who was a great mom to Winnie and her eight-year-old boy. Winnie's family had recently split and could no longer give her the time and attention she needed. We set the adoption date for a week later so the family could say goodbye. We left excited but slightly nervous. We felt too lucky.

We set up another meeting in the middle of the week to demonstrate our commitment and to see our new girl again. As we were all about to leave because of the chilly weather, I realized I had left behind my flying disc. When I ran back to grab it, Winnie ran by my side. I kept running after I grabbed it to see if she would continue to follow me, and she did. I was proud of that moment. Winnie knew I was her friend.

Winnie's adoption day went as expected. We signed a few papers. Winnie's first mom held off her tears until she got in her car to drive away. Winnie initially refused to get a treat we had laid in our car. She patiently sat on the gravel as she tried to work things out in her furrowed head, so we sat with her for awhile. She eventually got in the car. I sat in the back seat near a quiet Winnie while Melissa drove us home.

The days that followed introduced us to everything about Winnie that we couldn't gather in our two previous meetings. She was a 60-pound lap dog if we sat on the floor. She knew how to sit, wait, and lie on her stomach. She destroyed indestructible toys and once ate a foot-long bone in 30 minutes, but she had a perfect sense of what was hers to chew and what was ours to leave alone. She preferred grumbling to barking when she needed something. She was shy if we touched her on the top of her head but affectionate if we rubbed under her neck or on her stomach. She was so frightened of our neighbor's stone pig that we had to change our walking route. We accidentally discovered that she knew the word "cat" when she looked out all the windows of our house like a helpless guard watching a prison break.

We fell more in love with her as weeks went by. We even loved her when she whined at 4 a.m. to protest her closed crate. She was patient with us while we learned to make her crate more comfortable and open and to trust her to be about the house while we were away. We were patient with her after she ate four whole bananas, a sock and a sponge. (The bananas and the sponge exited the front end, but the sock shot out of her rear like a cannonball. We are now much more responsible about putting things away.) The three of us negotiated these understandings until we felt like a family that naturally got along.

On the Thursday morning before Thanksgiving, Winnie was not waiting outside our bedroom door as usual. I walked to the front room and found her on her daybed. She slowly followed me back to the kitchen to watch me pour her breakfast, but she didn't eat much of it. A minute later, she laid on the floor and began to tremble.

Melissa and I took her to the vet. By midday we heard the bad news: Winnie had a 105-degree fever and, much worse, a dangerously low white-blood-cell count. She needed to be hospitalized at an internal medicine inpatient facility that couldn't admit her until 9:30 the next morning. We took her home that night expecting her fever to hover around an improved 103 degrees, but she began to tremble again. We followed the vet's instructions, wrapping her in cold towels and pointing a fan at her. It didn't help. She quickly became unresponsive.

Melissa and I agreed that our job was to keep her alive for ten more hours so she could get the hospital care she needed. We carried, drove and carried her again to the nearby emergency room. Her fever had climbed to 106 before they gave her fluids and determined she had no digestive obstruction. We were relieved to have her somewhere safe overnight.

Melissa took her to the hospital the next morning and told me that Winnie seemed more spirited. We both knew the intravenous fluids had only temporarily revived her, so her outcome was still uncertain. The various veterinarians we had seen led us to believe that Winnie was suffering from a viral infection or cancer. The hospital allowed visitors for an hour each morning, so we planned to see Winnie on Saturday and Sunday. We didn't think beyond Sunday because the doctor told Melissa that Winnie needed to improve within 48 hours to make it.

I was necessarily optimistic until that Friday night. I didn't want to be in our house because every part of it reminded me of her. We hated looking at her unattended things, but we also couldn't bear the thought of putting them away. Winnie had followed us everywhere we walked, so the simple act of moving from one room to another reminded us that our girl was missing. We watched a sitcom on Netflix, but I could not pay attention to anything.

I sent a text message to my family: She is in the best place she can be. She deserves to meet everyone.

Saturday morning we heard our first piece of good news: Winnie's white blood cells had increased in number. The doctor said she wasn't "out of the woods," but she was going in the right direction. Winnie was happy to see us but quickly became lethargic, so we got a lot of kisses on Saturday morning. We left feeling better.

Winnie giving me a kiss

Sunday brought more good news. Winnie's white blood cells had returned to a normal level. The pattern of fluctuation in her blood counts allowed the doctors to eliminate cancer as a possibility. The new tentative diagnosis was either a viral infection or a rare bone marrow-suppression reaction to Panacur, a parasite medication she had taken weeks earlier for the first time.

Winnie at the hospital

Sunday morning Winnie seemed to be back to normal. She wanted to play for our whole visit. We joked that we should ask the doctors to knock back her white blood cells so we could get all the affection we had received the day before. I was told to return the following afternoon to bring Winnie home, and I did.

We hosted Thanksgiving for family and friends three days later. Winnie was the miracle of the season and received probably more attention than she was ready for. She got some new toys, a new winter jacket and some tasty things to nibble, but she still insisted on sneaking some green bean casserole. That's my girl.

Today we returned to the stone pig for the first time in a month. She wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't surprised.

Winnie befriends her old rival

We are thankful for our growing family this holiday season. Our girl came home.

Introduction

2013-10-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

If Illinois is among the states with a feverish high school basketball culture, then the Waukegan High School gymnasium is the shrine of American high school basketball. It is an old, free-standing hotbox of noise with permanent rows of benches on all four sides of the court. Before each game, the lights extinguish to blackness except for one spotlight on ROTC students presenting the colors for a stirring vocal rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. In this community a high school basketball game was and remains a ritual of respect. Luckily, the Dawghouse was consistently home to the third and fourth rounds of the IHSA playoffs so that players and fans from neighboring communities could experience the magic. I was one of them.

The status of the Dawghouse is absolute, but questioning Illinois basketball seems fair since neighboring Indiana has garnered most of the attention with the classic 1986 film Hoosiers.

When I was only 2, America learned that rural Indiana basketball fans drove in headlight-illuminated caravans through cornfields to wherever the local school was playing that Friday night. The coaches won enough or faced town-hall meetings regarding their employment. The gyms were small but loud even minutes before the tip. And every farm household, of course, hung a basketball hoop on a barn or silo. They didn’t need to pour concrete around the goal since frequent play killed the grass and compressed the dirt into a suitable half court.

High school basketball wasn’t like that for me. My backyard court was concrete, and the hoop was attached to a pole that served no agrarian purpose. My suburban alma mater’s following rose and fell with the performance of the team. I played for winning freshman and sophomore teams while the varsity team struggled to win and attract enough of a crowd to fill half the gymnasium. By the time I was old and barely good enough to play varsity myself, we were competing for conference championships and earning the top seed for the Illinois High School Association playoffs, the original March Madness. The gym was bursting at the seams, and it had almost nothing to do with me.

The most important thing to know about my high school basketball career is that it was unlikely to have happened. In my college and adult years, I discovered my natural preference for games that did not involve breaking a sweat. Poker, backgammon and chess have occupied my attention since I left Libertyville High School in 2002. My coaches would be sad to know that their game did not stick with me, but four years of play ain’t bad for a beer-brewing chess player. Competitive basketball is a grueling, body wearing thing. At times I needed physical therapy to put shoes on my feet.

What has stuck with me is the spirit of competition, the thrilling feeling of giving my best effort and being met in the middle with an equal effort working against me. That experience triggers something great in us no matter what the medium might be. In my lazy man games, I win some and lose some. In more organized competition, the end result is always disappointment with the exception of one champion.

My top-seeded basketball team never made it to the Dawghouse. An eight seed outplayed us for it. You might think it would kill me to replay our final game and opportunity in my head, but it doesn’t. I cried in our empty bleachers in the same spot I watched games as a kid until a cheerleading friend consoled me onto my feet. I walked away from playing the game forever without regrets.

I knew I was lucky to have played basketball for Libertyville. I think I did it because I witnessed a 17-year-old redhead try to hit what could be the Dagger in the Dawghouse in March 1994. Eight years later I walked into my varsity locker room and found my teammates watching the game on a fuzzy television screen. Many of them, like me, were basketball players because of that moment in time. I sat on the bench in front of our lockers and felt like I was 10 years old again, wanting to have faith in a basketball floating through the air. Back in 1994 it seemed that nothing else mattered. In a way, nothing else did.

I'll never forget that. I even have the tape of that. I watch it every once in awhile. That was unbelievable. Oh, my gosh. And against Libertyville, which is my alma mater. That was the most memorable game.

~Jim Ackley, 1930-2012, scorekeeper for Mundelein High School boys basketball for 50 years, when asked weeks before his passing which game he remembered the best

The Pancake Batters try to get cooking

2013-05-29T14:07:00.000-04:00

The Chapel Hill News published a much abridged copy of this post on May 29, 2013.

In a late winter morning my phone buzzed with an ominous reminder: Don’t forget to register for the Chapel Hill softball league.

I love softball, but my team’s inaugural 2012 season was filled with errors, injuries, 14 losses and only two wins. We were bad enough that The Chapel Hill News published a series of columns in which I described the stooges who were George’s Pitches and the Pancake Batters. My phone was laughing at me.

Later that same day I ran into our catcher Ben and told him about my reminder.

“I know what we need this season,” he said. I expected him to say hitting, fielding, athleticism, awareness or some daunting combination of these, but he didn’t. “We need new uniforms.”

I quietly disagreed with his prioritization of last season’s $3 blank green shirts.

Within weeks, most of my teammates had recommitted to another season. We filled the open spots with a pitcher who promised to hit a few homers and bring along his uncle, a restaurateur who could go to the opposite field with power, and a nimble outfielder. On paper we looked much better.

As the season approached, I fired myself as manager because of our dismal first season and hired Ben. With his leadership, new uniforms were on their way along with a better, shorter name: the Pancake Batters.

We opened the season against Sutton’s FDH, one of 2012’s best teams. And you know what? We won.

Our veterans were elated, and our rookies said our expectations were too low. I could feel that same giddy confidence as when I saw that I was the youngest player by at least a decade at the 2012 preseason coaches meeting. How could we not win against much older men? How could we not keep on winning if we had upset Sutton’s on opening night?

I’ll tell you how. By losing many consecutive games.

In the next game we stormed back from a six-run deficit to tie newcomer Vinny’s in the last inning. I came to the plate with two outs and the winning run on third. I flew out to left-center field, and we lost in extra innings. Shortly after we lost another game in extra innings, and then we blew a five-run lead in the last inning while tempers flared.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, our most valuable player, our rookie pitcher, suddenly came down with a case of gout and missed a game.

“He said he would be back Monday,” Ben said, “but I think gout can put you out for life. We’ll see.”

Being the only other player willing to loft a softball from 50 feet away to men armed with metal bats, I proceeded to walk what seemed like a dozen hitters in three innings before Ben gave me the hook.

Our second baseman took over until he took a line drive to the sternum and went home. Ben had no choice but to put me, perhaps the worst option, back on the mound. I walked their lineup until the game ended by the mercy rule.

Before long we were 1-6 despite our pitcher’s return, so I figured it was time to write another column for The Chapel Hill News about being a loser.

They sent a photographer to shoot our rematch with Vinny’s, and our guys must have thought he was from Sports Illustrated because we put up nine runs in one inning. Minutes later an umpire ejected an opposing player after some sort of outburst.

Some guys just can’t handle losing to the Pancake Batters.

New uniforms at the spring game

2013-04-14T22:38:00.001-04:00

I missed Carolina's spring game this weekend because I was out of town. The event did not produce much football news besides solid performances from freshman backup quarterback Mitch Trubisky, Ohio's top recruit, and early enrollee tailback Khris Francis.

The biggest news was the new uniform unveiling, which turned a football team of grown men into sugared up 5-year-old boys at Chuck E. Cheese's or, to be perhaps more accurate, 8-year-old girls at a Justin Bieber concert.

I wish I could get that excited about getting dressed for work in the morning. I do have some nice pants.

My reactions to Carolina's 2013 football schedule

2013-02-25T22:26:00.002-05:00

Carolina released its 2013 football schedule today. Here are my immediate reactions.

We will play at South Carolina to kick off the college football season on Thursday, Aug. 29. I forgot!
No I didn't.
I thought we might play Virginia Tech, Virginia and NC State this year, and I was right. I have a weirder feeling that we will beat them all.
Again.
Didn't the Big Ten ban FCS games? I wish the ACC would do that so we could beat South Carolina four times each year.
Will the Tar Pit chant "not our rival" to Old Dominion?
Nope. Again, schedule South Carolina many, many times.
The Duke game moved back to Thanksgiving weekend, where it belongs this year more than ever.
Carolina will play its second Thursday night home game in history against Miami. This time Charlie Brown won't play. No word on Lucy. Anyone who complained about parking for the Florida State game should get a free ticket to this game, go, have a great time and keep his mouth shut. Football is fun. Parking is always a hassle when you're having fun.
Including two bye weeks in a schedule is disrespectful to fans. To protest, I will boycott college football. On the bye weeks.
See you in Columbia.

This recent training video is courtesy of GoHeels.com. I like the Farmer Fred-like coach.

Dexter Strickland and Paco

2012-12-31T18:04:00.001-05:00

My wife had to work today while I had the day off, so she charged me to use our nearly expired coupon for T.C. Anderson's car wash in Durham. As I approached the counter to present the coupon, I heard a loud cackling noise coming from the back of the store. At first I thought it was an unruly child, but my curiosity grew when I saw a middle-aged couple calmly singing "You Are My Sunshine" into the corner of the room toward the commotion. They were engaging in conversation and song with Paco, a talking parrot.

"How long has that bird been here?" I asked the cashier.

"We've had him for 10 years," she said.

I finished my transaction and slowly walked toward the couple and caged bird, trying not to disrupt their rhythm. Paco danced to the song, alternately running in a circle and twisting his head like Stevie Wonder. His singing was only intermittent but awkwardly loud, like a call on speakerphone with terrible reception.

The couple must have sensed my presence behind them, so they backed away. It was my turn to talk with Paco. I approached the cage and silently read the posted instruction sheet while Paco eyed me with anticipation. It said that Paco liked to say hello and goodbye and would, as had already been demonstrated, respond to one specific song. Since I had been to T.C.'s many times but never heard anybody talk with Paco, I felt suddenly self conscious about talking to a bird in the presence of other people. Singing alone seemed even more embarrassing, so I turned to walk away.

"Bye bye," Paco said. I stopped and turned toward Paco to briefly reconsider, but I decided again to leave the bird alone.

And then, as I was watching NC State lose its bowl game on television in the waiting area, I noticed that UNC basketball guard Dexter Strickland was doing the same thing. An older gentleman also noticed Dexter's presence and introduced himself before asking when Carolina's next game would be. Dexter seemed happy to chat with the guy. They shook hands before Dexter left and struggled to shove what must have been a thick wad of singles through a slit in a wooden box labeled "tips."

Frustrated that I was too timid to be my friendly self around a Carolina athlete in public yet again, I walked back to Paco, who saw me coming from a mile away since his side of the store had cleared. He clawed at the front side of the cage as if to wave hello. I leaned in close.

"Dexter Strickland dunked on Miles Plumlee in 2011," I whispered, "but I still feel like I have nothing to talk about with him. Isn't that silly? Also, he is a tremendous tipper."

"Bye bye," Paco replied.

The 2001 Mr. Libertyville High School pageant

2012-12-12T22:42:00.001-05:00

Last week I was having lunch with my colleagues when the topic of pi reciting arose. Pi reciting is the competitive task of reciting as many memorized digits of pi as possible while a witness holds the reciter accountable by silently reading the printed digits. I cannot call it a feat because simply saying “3.14” would qualify one as a pi reciter. The idea is to be able to recite an impressive number of digits or more than anyone else you know.

My department chair’s student had announced to the school over the speaker system that his math teacher could recite the first 200 digits of pi. This was not actually true; apparently the student held a playful grudge and thought the public statement would embarrass his teacher.

“I think most of you already know that I was in a school-sponsored male beauty pageant in high school,” I interjected. “The guy who placed second recited the first 314 digits of pi. It was legitimate; he had distributed the 314 digits to everyone in the sold-out theater. His name was Roger Hsiao.”

What I did not tell them was that Roger stumbled in the middle of it, probably around digit 200, and then recovered only after a couple digits of help from a judge.

“I never forget pi,” he said as he shuffled off the stage, shaking his head. “I blew it.” The misstep had shaken him and probably cost him the title of Mr. Libertyville High School in the final interview.

I had watched his performance in the wings in swimming trunks and an Australian Outback hat, hating myself for choosing a talent that neither required rehearsal nor inspired awe. I had chosen to wrestle an inflatable crocodile into a garbage bag. I knew I would look foolish following Roger's effort, but I had no option to do anything except for what I had already barely planned. None of the contestants had divulged his talent to anyone prior to the big night, so nerves were high. I guess they got to Roger, and they were about to get to me.

I went out there, and the sound guy cued my techno mix track filled with Steve Irwin quotes like “IT’S FEEDING TIME” and “I HAVE NO FEAR OF LOSING MY LIFE.” My friend pulled on a fishing line that dragged the croc onto the stage. I was feeling too nervous to honor Irwin’s guile, so I decided to end it quick. I pounced, rolled around a bit and stuffed half of the pool toy into the bag. The other half wouldn’t fit. I quickly ran off stage to startled applause.

“Did you win?” my colleagues asked. “Did you beat Roger?”

“No,” I said. “Ben Polite won. I think he wore a Speedo in the swimwear portion.”

I resolved to find video footage of the pageant to surprise my colleagues, but LHS could not find it in its archive. Perhaps this blog post will stir the video to the surface.

A brief look at Carolina's football rivalries

2012-11-16T12:11:00.001-05:00

Note: This post mentions Carolina football rivals in unflattering terms. Before you get bunchy underwear about something I wrote, remember that I'm not insulting schools. I'm insulting football teams and occasionally their fans and maybe, by extension, you.

Last night's matchup between the Heels and the 'Hoos got me thinking about Carolina's diverse football rivals. When I arrived on campus in 2003, rivalries were not evident because Carolina football was not evident. It took time for me to learn what my new friends had known for years about the five rivals.

I'll start with Duke, the proximity rival. I have to include the Devils in this post because they are eight miles away and culturally opposite of Carolina for many ugly reasons. Unfortunately, the rivalry suffers because Duke football suffers. Duke students have not supported their team for many years, so the game can feel like solitaire. That said, Duke did reclaim the Victory Bell this season. Perhaps the changing of hands will change the atmosphere of the Tobacco Road gridiron rivalry, but it probably won't. Fans make a football rivalry; a team only plays in it. All-time series record: 57-36-4.

NC State is the contemporary rival. The best part of playing the Wolfpack is its fanbase, a loud bunch that seems to root against Carolina more than it roots for its own team. Beating State is a joy, but the magnitude of that joy does not compare to the despair of losing to them unless, of course, you refer to the 2004 or 2012 victories. Current and past head coaches at both schools have hurled insults through local media and sometimes apologized. All-time series record: 64-32-6.

East Carolina is the rag doll rival. Awhile ago I read that the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation requiring the continuation of the series. Fine, I say. East Carolina fans are passionate enough to care more about their own team than State fans. Game day in Greenville is a fun experience, but I suspect it is at its best when the Heels are in town. All-time series record: 11-2-1

South Carolina is the forgotten rival. Most Heels fans want to see this game as at least a biannual fixture, but South Carolina has no room for us because it already faces out-of-conference Clemson each year. At least that's what they would say. South Carolina fans have a football arrogance that can be found at most SEC schools, but the Gamecocks' 1971 departure from the ACC intensifies that arrogance. South Carolina narrowly escaped its last encounter in Chapel Hill. I hope the result will be different next August when the Heels and Gamecocks kick off the season on a Thursday night in Columbia. All-time series record: 34-18-4

Virginia is the classical rival. I think traditional might be too strong of a word since most Carolina football fans care more about beating ACC newcomer Virginia Tech. But Carolina and Virginia share the oldest rivalry in the South. If you have ever seen a black-and-white photograph of Carolina football fans, then you were looking at people who hated the University of Virginia football team. I have to respect that. All-time series record: 59-53-4

The source of my back pain could be Carolina's punt return team

2012-11-02T11:47:00.003-04:00

I am taking today off work because of increasing back pain that started Monday night without apparent cause. I feel undue guilt for missing work since a lot of people depend on me every day, so I will list possible moments of injury to rationalize my absence.

1. I transported a heavy laptop case and two textbooks to and from work in the passenger seat of my car Monday morning and afternoon. I lifted them into my lap while sitting in the driver's seat before exiting the car.

2. My wife and I cleaned our house Sunday night in preparation for hosting her brother. As was her custom for the few months since our wedding, she pointed to our ottoman full of blankets, magazines and board games and said, "Please lift." As was my custom, I lifted.

3. NC State was tied with my Tar Heels with less than two minutes remaining when State head coach Tom O'Brien decided to eat all three of his time outs and settle for overtime with the ball inside the State 25. He figured he had an advantage in overtime since the State passing attack had toyed with our secondary for much of the game. Carolina head coach Larry Fedora decided to gamble on third and long when he called a time out to stop the clock. It could have been a disastrous decision if the Wolfpack moved the chains, but the Carolina defense made the stop. Fedora called Carolina's last time out with 30 seconds on the game clock, and the stage was set for the most unexpected if not the most electrifying finish in series history.

I was sitting with my dad, my wife and my friend Daniel in the upper level near the 50, a perfect location to watch a game-winning play that spanned 74 yards. Most of my readers know what happened next. The injured Giovanni Bernard substituted himself back into the game when he heard his favorite play call. Carolina faked a full rush and dropped back for the return. Gio beat the first man and crossed the field where a wall of blockers greeted him. Play-by-play voice Jones Angell lost his mind. Sixty-thousand fans lost their minds. Hundreds of thousands of fans not in Kenan lost their minds. Five years of futility vanished in 17 seconds.

My friend Daniel really lost it. His vocabulary shrinks to a set of 15 words, not all publishable, when the Tar Heels find themselves in this sort of elation or, as he demonstrated last year at Virginia Tech, dire disappointment. I did not lose my mind until Gio crossed the goal line because I was scanning the field for flags, but Daniel seemed to know what would happen as soon as Gio sprinted toward the NC State sideline. He jumped and used his words. When he saw I was not, he wrapped his arms around my waist and repeatedly thrust me into the air.

The remaining 13 seconds of game clock resulted in a botched PAT that turned into a two-point conversion, a kicking team fumble recovery and a victory formation. It was plenty of time and material to "Jump Around," a basketball tradition that I am happy to see has crossed over into Kenan. But my back might not be happy about it or Daniel's celebration.

Either work, family or Carolina football really tore me up. I know you can relate. I only have video footage of the football incident courtesy of GoHeels.com. Enjoy.

Note: You might need to press control+escape to exit full-screen mode.

A big chess win

2012-09-25T12:13:00.000-04:00

Last week I earned the highest-rated win of my online chess career in a three-days-per-move game that lasted for four months. My opponent was a Carolina alumnus and football fan who was rated as an expert at 2027 before he fell. My rating was 1579. Any pairing separated by more than 200 points is supposed to be instructional and noncompetitive. But when he made an early mistake that cost him a pawn, I stopped scheduling other games to focus on clinging to my small material lead.

I would not have bothered to post this here, but chess.com had a nifty gadget that displayed the game and allowed me to narrate. My comments appear in the box below the board after certain moves.

What a thrill.

Nov. 20, 2012 addendum: I found a post on the North Carolina Chess Association's blog that correlates rating gaps to match and game results probabilities. I also found a page at ascotti.org that, according to the NCCA post, is not quite what it purports to be.

My interpretation of the post and page is that I had a 3 percent chance of winning, a 6 percent chance of drawing, and a 91 percent chance of losing. These probabilities are based on the 448-point rating gap that existed at the end of this game. The rating gap at the beginning of the game would have been a better predictor, but I do not know what it was. I think it was smaller.

My opponent's rating has since fallen to 1906, which puts our current rating gap at 291. If we played again today, my odds would improve to a 7.5 percent chance of winning, a 15 percent chance of drawing, and only a 77.5 percent chance of losing. That is rosier but still daunting.

Looking for heroes after Penn State

2012-08-10T17:42:00.001-04:00

A year ago Penn State football and Joe Paterno were evidence that morality and competitive revenue sports intersected and had done so for many more years than I had been alive in a place appropriately called Happy Valley. The Nittany Lions were a team worth cheering for even if you had no connection to the school because they reportedly did things right while the NCAA babysat other competitive programs.

This idea really settled in when the UNC football scandal broke my heart back in the summer of 2010 after a couple exciting seasons. I stuck with my Heels and still do. I thought things had to get better because they could not get worse. I was wrong, but most of the proof did not come out of Chapel Hill (although some of it certainly did).

My colleague John graduated from Penn State and, like most alumni, respected Joe Paterno before the Sandusky story broke. He smiled when he talked about Paterno’s old-school savvy and Coke-bottle glasses. He joked that he knew I was a good guy when I told him that I was jealous of his coach and the stability he offered Penn State.

John is one of the best high school teachers I have ever known from either side of the red pen. He is brilliant, patient and painfully modest. Teaching in the room next to his is the definition of humbling. I once watched him interact with his little daughter at an end-of-year faculty barbecue and commented to another colleague that he was such a good dad.

“John is good at everything,” she plainly said to me. She was right.

I could tell John struggled to discuss the Penn State news last fall during class changes. I tried not to push it. His dejection reminded me that he was once a kid who looked up to his elders like any other kid. Everybody knows that those feelings are lasting, but it didn’t matter for John.

“It turns out my hero wasn’t such a hero,” he wrote to me soon after Louis Freeh’s condemning report.

The Penn State tragedy reminded us to think for ourselves and question authority. Those of us who did not attend Penn State do not have to consider discarding our own personal heroes today, but maybe we should look for more of them.

Some are right next door.

Our losing season

2012-06-24T22:58:00.000-04:00

The 2012 Chapel Hill men's softball season will put my pessimistic honesty to the test. I am already off to a challenged start. I could not figure how to start such a post, so I searched for my copy of Pat Conroy's My Losing Season, a memoir of his tenure as a college basketball player at The Citadel. I planned to find a suitable epigraph that would give me some direction and perspective. I evidently never found the book, so here is my own perspective.

I wanted to play on a softball team for years. A broken face and concussion interrupted and practically ended my high school baseball career in April 2002. That loose end annoyed me for a decade. In 2007 I socialized my way onto a decent team in Charlotte and enjoyed playing second and first base for a few Sunday-night games. My then-girlfriend-now-fiancee watched me play that season and decided she wanted to marry a man who owned a jock strap.

After moving to Chapel Hill in 2008, I either coached junior varsity baseball in the spring or forgot to register for the local league until it was too late. What I did not know then is that many of the teams had been in the league for longer than I had been alive and never forgot to fill the schedule to capacity by an early March deadline. Last winter, two years removed from my brief coaching career, I finally registered on time. I sent an e-mail to my friend Roddy to ask him to play and recruit other guys to field a complete team. We decided to compose a roster of our friends regardless of their skill level. Anybody with any experience would be a pleasant accident.

In preseason practices we found that about half of our guys were accidents. But even the other guys could hit a 12-inch, slow-pitched softball lofted to a mouthwatering height of six to ten feet. We figured that defense would be our primary weakness. Judging fly balls, throwing, catching and understanding game situations were all obvious concerns that we subconsciously ignored. This was easy to do because our least experienced players were also our most optimistic. As the team's player manager, I found this quite endearing. Our practices consisted of nothing more than batting practice and ball shagging. We christened our team with $3 uniforms, the name George's Pitches and the Pancake Batters, and a bat with the foreboding label "Freak Show." I anxiously awaited our first rundown.

I attended the preseason coaches meeting and discovered that the next youngest guy was at least 10 years older than me. Another fellow wore two knee braces. To the meeting. Things were looking up for the Pitches. One purpose of the meeting was to debate a couple flexible rules. The American Softball Association of America had recently lowered the maximum pitch height from 12 to 10 feet to make the ball easier to hit. To my surprise, all of the coaches wanted the ceiling to remain at 12 feet. The guy with two knee braces really wanted to keep the ceiling at 12 feet.

"Two years ago I pitched to a guy who broke my arm," another guy wearily said. "I didn't see the ball, but I felt it."

I was in the presence of older men without the reflexes to protect themselves against a 50-foot line drive. I felt a wicked urge to go against the grain on the issue and did exactly that, but my vote meant nothing. The ceiling stayed at 12 feet by a 7-to-1 vote. I left the meeting without making a single friend.

We opened the season against a church team composed of middle-aged men with scant athletic ability but more than 20 years of league experience. Some of them had children who attended the high school at which several of my teammates and I taught. I did not know it at the time, but some of those children attended that game to watch their daddies invoke the mercy rule on their sprightly, young teachers. A botched play at the plate saw one of those daddies run over our starting pitcher, whose shoulder turned a puffy yellow. He sat out the first half of the season while it healed. I saw the son of one of those opposing players at school a couple weeks and many consecutive losses later.

"I heard you have a softball team," he said to me.

"I do," I replied, still unaware of how he knew how I spent my Monday and Wednesday nights. "A few teachers play on the team." I went on to identify them by name.

"You have a young team," he said.

"Yup," I said. "We are young compared to the other teams."

"Don't you think it's strange that older guys beat you by double digits?" he fired.

"No," I said and proceeded to explain our plight. We discovered early that our defense, which actually improved as the season progressed, was not our only problem. Offense was our other problem. Optimistically speaking, those were our only two problems. Hitting a slow-pitched softball was easy, but we failed to hit it where the fielders were not. We had no guys with home run power and no guys with the patience to wait for a good pitch. They all looked good to us. The ball was big and yellow and slow. It was hard to miss but harder to resist.

To say that hitting was our only offensive problem would have been an understatement. We overran bases that could not be overrun. We stopped on bases that should have been overrun. We even took an illegal lead off and paid the price with an automatic out. If Yogi Berra was watching, he was also blushing. When I was about to introduce our defensive troubles to the bold 17-year-old, he tired of listening and interrupted my monologue.

"My dad almost killed your pitcher."

It was not long after that short conversation that I was running to second base on a fielder's choice and tore my hamstring, which had never happened to me before. Without a good reason to heal or someone to tell me otherwise, I decided to play the rest of the season with the injury. I pulled, strained or tore that hamstring at least a dozen times. I learned to run slow and play out of position to protect it, but fielding ground balls was painful.

One night my fiancee yelped when I turned around in my boxers. A large purple stain had suddenly appeared on the back of my leg above the knee. Worried that it was a dangerous infection or bite, I went to my doctor. He explained that my hamstring was bleeding from repeated tears. Somehow that made me deeply satisfied.

At some point we found ourselves with no wins, ten losses, another sidelined infielder and many bloody knees (and many bloody bedsheets and therefore many bulky, bloody loads of laundry). Those optimists I mentioned earlier still thought we could win a game. I was certain we would not. My fiancee often asked me whether we would win, and I invariably said no. Do not misunderstand. I played with a great attitude and cheered my teammates. I enjoyed every inning until we played a Sunday-night game against the second-worst team in the league and lost by 20 in three innings that lasted for 25 minutes.

The game was a makeup on an irregular night, so most of our best players were absent. Our defense was really something to see; I think we committed eight or nine errors in three plays. The game ended when the home-plate umpire spoke a few inaudible words with the scorekeeper and walked back to the field.

"Who is the coach?" he asked only loud enough for the infield to hear. I raised my hand. He dropped his head so that the brim of his cap covered his eyes. He gave me the grimmest come-hither gesture I have seen in 28 years. I jogged toward him with the awful feeling of knowing exactly what would be said and that it did not need to be said. It was insulting. I was suddenly the face of something I did not want to represent on my own.

"It looks like we've reached the third-inning run rule here," he said with eyes still directed downward. "I'm very sorry."

"OK," I said. I wished I had something better to say.

The dugout after that game was tense. Losing by the mercy rule was nothing new, but the 20-in-the-third rule felt quite fresh. Our earnest left-center fielder explained to everyone that we should be embarrassed. I already was only because of the umpire's odd gesture. But I also knew that our lineup was the weakest it had been all year. Even crazier than the humiliating loss was that we all knew we could easily beat the team that had just beat us by 20 in three innings.

"Did they cancel the game?" my fiancee asked when I walked in the door 40 minutes early.

"No," I said. "We lost in 25 minutes by 20 runs. We will beat them tomorrow."

I was not showing resolve. I just knew we would have a better lineup than them in 24 hours, and we did. We won by 2. They were surprised, but we weren't. Still, we celebrated on Franklin Street and recounted the game inning by inning. We thought it might be the only opportunity. A day later I refreshed the league results page a dozen times. I wanted to see a 1 in that first column. It was important to me. Winning is more fun when you're a loser.

We beat the same team a second time a week later to take two of three from them. Then we lost in the first round of the playoffs to the best team in the league. As was the case ten years ago, I did not want it to end. At least now I can regret this season instead of my lost season of 2002.

We will be back next year. And maybe with several strokes of good luck and good health we will be back in 38 years, which is exactly how long one of the current teams in the league has competed. Their roster has undergone a few makeovers, but their name is still McCauley Street and their two white-haired founding players are still swinging away.

Amen.

How I feel about losing to Duke

2012-02-09T22:33:00.001-05:00

I went to the Dean Dome last night and saw my favored Tar Heels lose to the Duke Blue Devils after earning a falsely secure 10-point lead with 2:38 to play. The comeback was the result of a perfect storm of missed free throws, turnovers, a player control foul and an own field goal. Duke escaped defeat with a 3-pointer only after the game clock had expired.

A mere 20 seconds earlier I had calmly explained to my mom that Tyler Zeller's first made free throw, which extended our lead to 2, meant nothing unless he also made the second. I knew that Duke would shoot a 3 even if they trailed by 2. Zeller missed his second. Duke rebounded. Austin Rivers dribbled down the clock while he enjoyed a mismatch with Zeller that eventually gave more than the space he needed to release the game-winning 3-pointer with less than a second on the clock. The backboard light went off a millisecond before the ball slipped through the rim like it was greased with Crisco.

It took the wind out of me. I felt like the bottom of my stomach had opened so that the cheese fries and Yuengling inside could spill to the concrete floor and onto the rows in front of me. I acted as cool as I could and sensed the rest of the 21,000+ fans doing the same, but I could not look. I was too miserable to be willing to see anyone's misery.

"We did not deserve to win," I said to my mom before I left. The walk up the hill, which I had expected to be a celebratory sprint to Franklin Street only minutes before, was laced with frightening screams of frustration from passing cars and high dormitory balconies. In any other situation I might have dialed 911. We walked in silence to Franklin Street. Disappointed students still filled the coffee shops and bars. The rush was off.

This game and that shot will be on ESPN Classic every time we play Duke, I thought. I will have to watch that shot on TV again minutes before we play them in Durham.

I will close my eyes.

"I'm over it already," I lied to my fiancee to make her think I was more together than I was. We drove home. I read the few already published stories to try to understand what had happened in the last two and a half minutes of the game. I sent an e-mail to my closest Carolina friends to ask whether this was the most brutal loss in series history. I felt like I had to know. The e-mail's subject was "Honest question. Read when calm." I knew I would wonder whether my memory was a dream the next morning; I dreaded that futile moment of hope. My head hit the pillow, and I was almost asleep three hours later.

Morning was unkind. My alumnus carpool buddy canceled, so I drove the half hour to work with only my thoughts. I tried to count all the Duke fans I saw on a daily basis and was pleased that I could only think of two. I decided to be the first to mention the game to each one so they could not catch me off guard. Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio made only a brief mention of the game. They were more excited that Will Ferrell announced the starting lineups at the New Orleans Hornets game. The audio made me laugh, so I decided to e-mail the YouTube video to my closest Carolina friends. I could not imagine any of them smiling until at least noon, but maybe they could if I could. I worried about some of them. None had replied to my e-mail. Perhaps none had been calm enough to even read it.

We were on the better end of a game like that against Duke in 2005, I thought as I pulled into the school lot. But now I realize that even that game did not have a do-or-die buzzer beater without the calming influence of a timeout. This game was jarringly offensive. This game made me angry.

My instinct all day was to not talk about the game. My friends must have felt the same. A colleague who approached me about Carolina football's National Signing Day results last week barely glanced in my direction today, and that's fine. The only person with whom I discussed the game in person was a Duke fan at work. I congratulated him with a rough half hug.

You might wonder why I am writing about this. Of course Duke fans might read this and foam at the mouth, but that's fine too. I am writing this for Carolina fans who feel the same way I do. We all talk about how we come together during the game, but now we will stick together after the game. That is easier for me if I know someone else feels the same way I do. I should probably call those friends who did not reply to my e-mail.

Roy said the best thing about last night's loss was that it should tick off the team and make them more determined to work harder. The best thing about it from a Carolina fan's perspective was that it made the impending second match-up one of the biggest in the rivalry's history. Carolina fans will be way up for the game in their homes or out with friends. The world will not see that; they will have to settle for Cameron Indoor Stadium, which Duke students struggle to fill. The last two minutes of last night's game spilled gasoline on Tobacco Road. Now it is up to the Heels and us, their fans, to light a match on March 3 at 7 p.m.

I hope this video will make you smile in the meantime.

Unexpected Carolina sports weekend

2011-12-12T17:38:00.000-05:00

The Dec. 9-11 weekend was unexpectedly phenomenal on three athletic fronts that had almost nothing to do with the Carolina victory over Long Beach State Saturday evening.

My fiancee and my friend Daniel's wife, Kathryn, lured him and me to Franklin Street at 10 a.m. Saturday for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Holiday Parade. We both resisted at first but caved when we discovered the other had received as much pressure to attend.

"I'll go if J.D. goes," Daniel reportedly said. I had not been out of bed for 20 minutes by the time we accidentally set our lawn chairs next to a dozen children who could barely walk.

The parade was surprisingly enjoyable despite boasting roughly three too many martial arts groups for elementary and middle school children. The RE/MAX float's hot air balloon flame nearly ignited a crosswalk stoplight. The Orange County Jammers Senior Cheerleading Group was a nice surprise.

But my favorite moment came from a trailer full of adolescent girls who signed Christmas carols for the deaf while a musical pickup truck towed them along. The driver either struggled with a sticky accelerator pedal or exercised a sharp sense of humor when he suddenly jolted the truck and trailer forward. The girls lurched for an overhead bar to stay on board. They smiled after a few tense seconds, released their grips and began to cautiously sign what was left of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" with noticeably less excitement.

"There goes Roy," Daniel said just as the parade ended. I spun around in time to see Carolina head basketball coach Roy Williams walk into Chapel Hill Sportswear.

We nervously stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes while we deliberated what to do. Of course we followed him. The receptionist informed me that Roy was upstairs. When we were halfway up the steps, Roy began his descent with a little boy. We were unsure of what to say and whether we should awkwardly continue our climb. Kathryn broke the ice.

"Is he yours?" she asked.

"He's mine all right," he said, patting the big-eyed kid on the head. We smiled and walked up the rest of the stairs. Roy led the Heels to victory over Long Beach State that night after trailing by five at intermission.

The Carolina men's soccer team won its second national championship against in-state rival Charlotte the next evening. Before the game began, I read a national sports story that was most uniquely relevant to me.

Former Carolina quarterback T.J. Yates led his Houston Texans on a fourth-quarter comeback to defeat the Cincinnati Bengals and clinch the franchise's first playoff berth with a last-second pass to wide receiver Kevin Walter, an alumnus of my alma mater Libertyville High School. Yates has been unexpectedly under center for nearly three games after the starter and backup went down with long-term injuries. The media seemed to write off the Texans, but Yates has proved them wrong with an unblemished record. Yates is the first ever Tar Heel to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. I was eager to spread the news to my friends until I realized that nobody in the world could appreciate the news as much as I did.

Go Heels. Go 'Cats.

The doctor and the accountant

2011-10-10T00:41:00.000-04:00

My friend Ryan is a doctor. He is also a brother, but I rarely see him in this role since he and his only sibling, Chris, live many miles apart. Each time I see them together I am struck by their similarities: tall, athletic, intelligent, talented, polite, humble and kind. They both seem to be the first to listen and the last to speak with confident, knowing voices. They treat each other with at least as much respect as they treat their friends.

Years ago I was walking with the two of them and a friend to downtown Chapel Hill. I must have been focused on the friend because I remember turning back to the brothers and finding them tangled like rabid shoelaces on the ground. The other friend and I halted to gauge the circumstances of the bizarre image. They threw no punches and said no words. They were not upset, but they grunted every few seconds like Greco-Roman wrestlers as they rolled along the paved road, over the curb and onto the grass. With their knees settled on something soft, they gave each other a long moment of rest until Ryan lunged for a temporary advantage. They continued like this for another four minutes until they rumbled dangerously close to the hood of an unknown parked car. They separated without a word to each other and seemed indifferent to the reactions of their company. They were hypnotized.

"I don't have a brother," I stammered.

After a few minutes of limping off their nicks and brushing off the dirt, they explained that they wrestled on a near-regular basis without any provocation. Their simple explanation was wholly consistent with their honest personalities. I did not press with questions.

Ryan returned to Chapel Hill this weekend from his medical residency in Brooklyn for the Carolina-Louisville game, and his brother did the same from his accounting job in Charlotte. We partied enough Friday night to postpone the tailgate until after the noon game. We cooked hot dogs, burgers and sausages and drank home brews while we listened to Wake Forest upset Florida State on my car radio, which fell silent after the game ended. I checked to see if my battery was dead. It was. I called AAA, and we began an hour-long wait. Ryan took a trip to the dormitory bathroom. We found a flying disc in my trunk and threw it around.

"I wonder if I can hit Ryan from here," Chris said as he eyed Ryan's return from 240 feet away. He threw a wide-arcing backhand toss that flew for at least five seconds before plunking an unsuspecting Ryan, whose eyes were directed downward at a set of stairs, square in the stomach. Ryan picked up the disc and ran at Chris. Had I known what would happen for the next five minutes, I would have begun recording immediately. I got the hint minutes later when I saw the two tangled again in the mulch beside the parking lot. Ryan freed a hand to grab a littered, plastic salad tray with lettuce and tomatoes, dumped it on top of Chris, and whopped him on the head with it until it snapped into pieces. An elder fellow tailgater walked by with a concerned look.

"They're brothers," I said. "One's a doctor. The other is an accountant. They'll work it out."

He nodded. I will embed the rest of the skirmish below.

Needles and courage

2011-09-26T22:29:00.001-04:00

I used to be afraid of needles. Actually I was afraid of something more specific: blood leaving my arm through a needle. I warned all my pediatric nurses that I experienced an inexplicable light-headed reaction seconds after they drew a few milliliters of blood from my arm. I also told them I could handle shots, which was the truth, in case they thought I was a wimpy ass kid they could complain about at lunch time.

"But you seem so calm," they each said, laughing to themselves. Then they drew the blood, sometimes without reclining the chair or putting up my feet, and it was lights out. I typically spent the next 15 to 45 minutes wrapped in a fleece blanket and hung upside down in a dark room while a nurse practitioner held a Capri-Sun to my lips. Then my mom and I walked on eggshells to the family minivan in oppressive heat. Sometimes I stopped halfway to lower my head and burned my palms on the hot blacktop pavement. I returned home dazed, punctured and burned. At least that is how I remember those episodes. I could have made a dozen bucks each time if the law allowed for petty pediatric malpractice. But I wouldn't have if it did. As bad as I felt for myself, I felt almost as bad for the nurses.

My mom told me I inherited my fear from her. I cannot remember seeing my mom have any similar problems, but I doubt I was with her when she might have had them. I told her that I was not afraid and that what happened to me was a knee-jerk reaction. But she insisted I was afraid.

Decades later, or admittedly a few years later, my mom tackled chemotherapy and multiple bone marrow biopsies, accomplishments that I am embarrassed to write in only one independent clause. But that was sort of how she did it: quickly and with grace. She asked a lot of questions and requested plenty of drugs that might have lessened the pain, but I don't remember any complaints. And the drugs did not lessen the accomplishment because fear is always justified.

"I love my doctors," she would say after she was alert enough to lift her head off my shoulder. "I couldn't feel a thing." My high school teammates who used to brag about trying to drink a gallon of milk in one hour would have described my mom with a word: gritty.

My mom received dozens of blood transfusions before her stem cell transplant last October, so my fiancee and I met at the Dean Dome one summer evening to donate at the UNC blood drive. I was less afraid than I was years before only because my mom seemed to handle things a hundred times worse with ease. I should have been more worried for myself.

I shook like a leaf and sweated like a pig for an uncomfortable hour-long donation. My body temperature seemed to rise, fall, and rise again in mere minutes. The pain of the needle was only slight as always, but my body still winced at the drawing of blood. The nurses explained that I neither drank enough water nor ate enough food. I explained I was just a wimpy ass kid. I continued to shake in the canteen afterward, but I was happy. I could not wait to tell my mom what we did. She was surprised and concerned for my health. The sick caring for the healthy must be nearly exclusively human, and it showed me, like many other things did that long summer, that my mom was still my mom.

Needless to say, the American Red Cross was not eager to have me back and neglected to call me for a year. But late last June, a bit more than a year after I watched donated blood from anonymous strangers keep my mom going on her way to her transplant, they called me to ask whether I would donate again.

If only you knew I used to hang like a bat in pediatric storage closets, I thought to myself. "Sure."

And so I drove to Durham on July 6 to donate again. I drank so much water that I had to stop at a gas station on Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard to take the longest pee of my life. I ate so much food that, well, you can imagine. I farted razorblades.

It was worth it. My donation lasted eight minutes, and I did not feel anything but a brief needle prick. I contained my stupid pride in the canteen while I flipped through the future appointments book and made small talk with other bandaged North Carolinians. They gave me a free T-shirt as a trophy. I called my mom.

Today I returned for my third donation and quickly learned that a nurse in training would administer for me. I knew I had to give more this time. I told her I preferred to use my left arm, but she quietly asked me if she could use the big vein in my right instead. I consented. She asked a billion questions of her supervisors and told me she was nervous. She tightened my arm band, loosened it, tightened it, took it completely off and put it on again. She taped a plastic tube to my wrist and told me I was hairy. She poked a slow poke. She and her colleagues decided to forgo the needle guard for reasons I was unwilling to see. I must have grimaced.

"Are you OK, sir?" she asked as much for the nurses breathing down her neck as for me.

"I'm fine," I said as convincingly as possible. She was a momentary model of my mother. Deliberate, nervous, poised, transparent. Steadfast. I called my mom.

"I donated blood again," I said.

"What?" she blurted. "Are you OK? Are you driving? I would have come to get you."

"I'm fine, Mom," I said.

"Next time I'm going with you," she said.

I thought that was a great idea.