Born. Bred. And ’Til I’m Dead.
I don’t remember the moment that I became a University of North Carolina basketball fan because I have no recollection of not being one. My father was a Tar Heel fan, so I guess it was the minute I was born in Memorial Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC at 1:11 pm in late March six days before North Carolina lost the National Championship game to Indiana.
However, much like the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the Tar Heels roared back the next season, and Coach Smith won his first title in the National Championship game against Georgetown when “Mike” Jordan became “Michael” Jordan. It was a victory that led to the capture of the above photo. We were in New Orleans for that Final Four as well.
I think I was around five or six years old when my mother had to correct me as I sat at the kitchen counter attempting to cheer for the Tar Heels by spelling out their name except I was chanting “T-A-R H-E-L-L”. Perhaps it was foreshadowing because “Tar Hell” is an accurate description of my constant anxiety this week leading up to tonight’s game.
In elementary school, when my best friend and I played basketball in the driveway, we pretended we were Hubert Davis, Jeff Lebo, Joe Wolf, and Rick Fox, and our opponent was N.C. State.
That changed rapidly when Coach K and company made Duke a household name with back-to-back National Championships in 1991 and 1992.
I’ve hated Duke basketball and Coach K for over 30 years.
I do remember the day I realized that the University of North Carolina was more than a basketball team and that it was a school that I could one day attend.
Around the age of seven, I was playing with my Fisher-Price kitchen (Spolier Alert: The whole kitchen thing didn’t take), and I realized that the “U” in UNC stood for university. And I knew at that moment that UNC was the college I wanted to attend.
Life plays out a little differently, and I almost didn’t choose to further my education at UNC. As a junior in high school, I applied to two universities, UNC and Wake Forest. I was fortunate enough to be accepted at both. My parents…
