Lucas: Seen It All

By Adam Lucas

BROOKLYN—As Carolina clanked shot after shot on Friday evening against Virginia Tech, Charles Brown leaned back in his seat in section 26 of the Barclays Center with a look that said he had seen it all.

No, really. He's seen it all. Literally every minute of every game the University of North Carolina has ever played in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. Starting in 1954, he's been there in Raleigh and Greensboro and Charlotte and Tampa and Atlanta and Landover and Washington, D.C., and, yes, Brooklyn. So, sure, the Tar Heels shot a meager 3-for-26 from the three-point line against a highly motivated Hokie squad. But it wasn't as disappointing as 1973 or 1987 or 1996 or, well, you get the idea.

"I'm one of the luckiest fellows in the world," Brown said on Friday in Brooklyn.

No one knows exactly how many people are out there who have the same ACC Tournament attendance record as Brown. He heard a secondhand report that a lady from Shelby might have attended every single one, but he's never actually met one of them in person.

And, quite honestly, he doesn't really seem to be seeking them out. It's not about that for the Brown family. They go where the Tar Heels go. The ACC sends the event to Brooklyn, well, then that's where you'll find Charles in mid-March, even if in his heart he'd rather be in Greensboro (this is a not uncommon refrain around the Barclays Center). Carolina basketball is an integral part of his life, and ACC Tournaments have been a spark for dozens of family trips and family stories over the last nearly 70 years.

It all started back in 1954, when Charles' parents took him from his hometown of Albemarle to Raleigh for the first ACC Tournament. Back then, as an 11-year-old, he had no intention of starting an attendance streak. But he loved college basketball and of course loved the Tar Heels—"I remember every bounce of the ball from that 1957 season," he says of Carolina's undefeated national championship—so he kept finding a way into the building.

He was a year apart from Woody Durham, another Albemarle native, in school. And when it came time to choose a college, Carolina was the only choice he considered. It was while in Chapel Hill that he had his closest near miss for missing a Tar Heel ACC Tournament game.

"I had surgery for a cyst while I was an undergrad," he says. "I was at the infirmary the weekend of the ACC Tournament. I decided it was more important to be at the games than it was to lie in the bed in the infirmary. So I self-diagnosed my situation and developed an exit strategy."

Many years later, Brown had another close call when he earned a speeding ticket on the way to the games. "I was delayed leaving the office and was trying to make up some time," he says sheepishly.

Other than those incidents, and the occasional stinker like Friday night for the Tar Heels, Brown's ACC Tournament streak has been largely blissful. Just as his parents had taken him to the first tournament, he took his sons, Courtney and Palmer, to the event as soon as they were old enough to understand what was happening. And yes, he might have occasionally stretched the truth to get them those highly sought-after excused absence notes on the Fridays of ACC Tournament weekend.

As an attorney, it was almost like Brown wasn't even missing a workday when he attended the Tournament. "For years, especially in Greensboro, it felt like a reunion," he says. "I saw fellow attorneys who I would see every year. One year, I ran into a judge at the afternoon games. He said he had so much trouble getting attorneys to come to court on the Friday of the ACC Tournament that he decided to just come himself."

That's very much the ACC Tournament fervor that Hubert Davis described this week, the teachers rolling in the televisions on carts and fans joining booster clubs from other schools just to have a shot as the prestigious tickets.

It's different in Brooklyn. Virginia Tech brought plenty of energy on Friday night, clearly thrilled to have potentially punched their ticket to the NCAA Tournament. But otherwise, this wasn't even the biggest college basketball game in the city tonight. UConn and Villanova took that honor across town at Madison Square Garden.

As it turned out, the Tar Heels didn't especially deserve the spotlight on this evening anyway. Their stay in Brooklyn is over, and so too is Charles Brown's. He doesn't hang around once the Tar Heels are eliminated. And in a few years, the details of the outcome might be fuzzy—Was that the year Carolina struggled shooting and Virginia Tech played so well? Yes, yes it was.—but the highlights will not be.

"There's nothing better," Charles Brown says, "than making memories at the games with my family. And I hope my kids will perpetuate that with their own children."

But he's not ready to pass the torch just yet. The Tournament returns to Greensboro next year. No one knows exactly which coaches and players will be on hand; hirings and firings happen without warning and the transfer portal has changed the game. But there is one absolute certainty for someone who will be in Greensboro: Charles Brown.

"God willing and health willing," he says, "I'll be there next year."

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