Everything you need to know about the state of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2015and how it has changed now that revenues trump all other concernswill be broadcast live this week from the Greensboro Coliseum. That’s where 14 teams will play the last ACC Tournament in North Carolina, the state where it began, for the […]
Barry Jacobs
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Ironies and echoes
Irony is an overused word and an oft-misunderstood concept. Still, what better term describes the juxtaposition found in local daily newspapers last week? Front pages touted the release of a report by Duke University’s Campus Culture Initiative steering committee, more fallout from the lacrosse fiasco of last year. Among 28 recommendations from a group of […]
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Outsider sport
Soccer skitters at the edge of the American athletic mainstream, too often dismissed as a foreign game lacking the offensive pyrotechnics to suit our taste. Professional soccer leagues struggle to draw interest in the United States. Soccer does occasionally break into our national sports consciousness, but usually as an oddity; the peculiar savagery of Zinedine […]
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2006-07 ACC Basketball Preview
Article navigation: Women | Men | Jacobs’ Ladder (predictions) Try as we might to live in the present, few of us avoid looking ahead to the upcoming weekend, our next vacation, or the end of an odious election campaign mounted by Vernon Robinson. This habit is well known among college sports fans in the Triangle, […]
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Coaching blues
James Moore Tatum, one of the premier college football coaches of his time, took a pay cut to return to his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. That, of course, made the signing even more of a coup. “Sunny Jim,” Class of 1935, was highly professional, charmingly charismatic and unusually successful. Tatum boasted the […]
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Blood work
There is no truth to allegations I cheated to win the competition for fastest column writer. A combination of innocent mistakes, inexact testing and professional jealousy has produced this outrageous blot on my hard-earned reputation as a competitor. I deserve the recognition and rewards I have received. I worked assiduously to hone my skills as […]
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Canes mutiny
So this is what it’s like for a non-fan during March, when talk of college basketball dominates local sports discourse, when calculation of Sweet Sixteens and Elite Eights and Final Fours is the only math that seems to matter, when a bystander can become an outsider even in their own hometown. Only this was worse, […]
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N.C. State, personality, uptempo play and beating UNC trump Xs, Os–and graduation
Sidney Lowe, newly named head men’s basketball coach at North Carolina State University, finished his formal press conference and circulated amiably among a milling multitude in the program’s expensive new practice gym. The honeymoon had just begun for the former Wolfpack point guard, best remembered as the on-court leader as N.C. State won an improbable […]
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Duke’s women athletes are victimized, too
The timing of the marches, protests and vigils was coincidental, yet cruelly ironic, as if the ACC’s unprecedented domination of the women’s basketball Final Four required a counterbalancing dose of ground truth. This was provided by members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, whose debauchery allegedly culminated in sexual and racial depredation. The story of […]
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You gotta have heart
Coaches have much in common with ancient Egyptians, who considered the heart the center of consciousness and took pains to preserve it for the afterlife. For coaches, afterlife is called retirement, and is often as involuntary as death. They therefore value heart in the present, less as an organ than as a descriptive. Coaches are […]