Lucas: Old School

By Adam Lucas

This one was for the old Atlantic Coast Conference.

Well, not that old. You know—mature. Grizzled. Not old, just experienced.

Tuesday marked the final game Raycom will broadcast from the Dean Smith Center, and as much as we complained about them, as much as we wished they had a different camera angle or a different replays or even a different tipoff time—I kind of miss them already.

There's a simple reason why. Because Jefferson Pilot became Raycom which, for many of us growing up, absolutely was ACC basketball. Some of the best nights of our lives have been spent pondering Terry Holland's confusing resemblance to Tom E. Smith on those Food Lion commercials or waiting for that opening shot of the Heels going through pregame in those familiar blue warmups with the "U-N-C" in tombstone-like letters on the left chest or—some of you still remember—humming that eternally catchy "Sail with the Pilot" jingle.

The reason why those many school nights and dozens of Saturday afternoons mean so much to so many of us is because so many of them were just like Tuesday night. They were really, really good basketball games. We stayed up late on a school night and bit our fingernails and somehow the Tar Heels pulled it out, and then the adrenaline was still pumping so hard that it was 11:30 p.m. and we couldn't think about going to sleep.

Syracuse was outstanding for 40 minutes. But as Jim Boeheim said—and imagine if I'd told you during one of those Saturday afternoon ACC doubleheaders in the 1980s that Boeheim would someday be discussing an ACC game in which he was a participant—"North Carolina is playing as well as anybody in the country."

They really are. Coby White was just his usual self against the Orange, which is to say that he scored 34 points, dove on the floor to get loose balls, and set another Carolina freshman record (he's the first Tar Heel rookie ever to have three 30-point games).

And the crowd loved it. Carolina put over 21,000 people in the Smith Center in the middle of the week, and they helped the cause. Some crowds are reactionary. This one wasn't; this one wanted to help make defensive stops and wanted to force Boeheim to burn through his timeouts in an attempt to stem all the Tar Heel momentum. We are sorry, Coach Boeheim. But the winner of the last Raycom broadcast to originate from Chapel Hill simply could not be...Syracuse? What in the name of Jim Thacker and Bones McKinney are you talking about?

Close your eyes to block out those Orange uniforms, and it was easy to imagine Lefty Driesell making the choke sign on the sidelines, or a chant of "Hur-ley" booming through the student section, or even—how far back do you go?—that home crowd begging for "Ti-mo, Ti-mo, Ti-mo!"

Raycom was there for all of it, back when college basketball on television wasn't a given, back when there weren't four different ESPN channels. The ACC Network is going to be fantastic, and it's a necessity for the year 2019. But Jefferson Pilot, and then Raycom, were essentials for the era in which they thrived.

Let everyone else watch their 1980s prime time programming as scheduled. We were well aware that on Wednesday nights in the winter, "Magnum, P.I." will not be seen as scheduled, and would instead air in the middle of the night. But that was OK, because we needed to see what would happen when J.R. Reid faced off against Charles Shackleford.

When that Raycom/Jefferson Pilot instrumental theme song came on the television on Saturday afternoon, it could mean only one thing: it was time to stop shooting baskets in the driveway and go sit on the floor in the den. The game was on. And they did show the game. Not the sidelines or an injured player on the bench or the crowd. The game. Basketball. What we wanted to see.

Now, of course every game of the ACC Tournament is on television. If you take that for granted, that tells me that you have no memory of the cool teacher wheeling in the television on Friday afternoon of the greatest day in March, the ACC Tournament. Those days were brought to us by Piedmont Airlines, NCNB and—of course—Jefferson Pilot.

They could sometimes be a little strange. In the pre-"Shawty Get Loose" days, Raycom was the company that once televised the entire 1989 ACC basketball tournament, one of the most ferocious, competitive, intense three days in league history, when Reid and Danny Ferry almost came to a fistfight, Duke's Phil Henderson kicked over a chair on the bench, and Steve Bucknall nearly got in a brawl…and Raycom inexplicably set the post-tournament highlight montage to the dulcet tones of Louis Armstrong singing, "What a Wonderful World."

But it was a wonderful world. Maybe a little weird, but still wonderful. You always got the sense that it was at least possible that Raycom loved ACC basketball as much as we did, because they were all the places we needed them to be--from University Hall to the Greensboro Coliseum to anywhere Dean Smith might take his Tar Heels.

It's easier to watch the game on your phone or to stream it to your laptop, and we'll have all sorts of options with the ACC Network that we never had with Marty Brennaman, Dan Bonner (who, fittingly, was in the Smith Center on Tuesday night) or—yep, you knew this was coming—Billy Packer.

But it will never be more fun than it was to turn the dials until we saw that familiar flip scoreboard at Carmichael in the corner of our screen. When ACC basketball was on television, it was usually on Raycom, and when ACC basketball was on television, life at our house stopped. There were only a finite number of league games. You couldn't afford to miss it, even if it wasn't the Heels, even if it was only Lethal Weapon 3 going against Fire and Ice.

And if it was the Heels, well, go where you go. We might have turned down the sound, but we needed Raycom to take us inside Cole Field House or Reynolds Coliseum or the Thrillerdome. The double round-robin meant you knew every player on every opposing ACC team, and of course could list the heights because of the on-screen lineups graphic before every game.

We'll never see that again in Chapel Hill. Which can only mean one thing. Tonight Coby White scored 34 points and helped Carolina lock up a top-three seed in the ACC Tournament. Tonight Coby White solidified his case as one of the best freshmen to ever play basketball for North Carolina.

And tonight, Coby White, you get one of the biggest honors of your career. Tonight, and I think Dinah Shore would agree with me, I deem you the recipient of the Holly Farms Player of the Game.

University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Coby White

Related Videos