Catching up

Since the last post here, I've attended an interesting presentation on multicultural PR initiatves that deserves a more full treatment later on. Right now, it's still about basketball here at the end of the day.

But I'll connect these two disparate topics this way -- at the PR presentation, the importance of understanding cultural differences was emphasized as a key to success in public relations involving international publics. I thought about that yesterday with the announcement of the firing of Billy Gillispie as men's basketball coach by the Unversity of Kentucky.

Gillispie, as I mentioned in the last post, was hired by UK two years ago after a successful stint in resuscitating the basketball program at Texas A&M, where I earned my doctorate a couple of decades ago. Gillispie, a native Texan, was the perfect fit at College Station, where football has historically been king. But Billy Clyde understood the culture and knew how to sell basketball to Texans.

The Aggies, who hadn't played a game in the NCAA tournament in more than 15 years, were soon back in the Big Dance under Gillispie's leadership. And just as important to the athletic department, they were fillling up a brand new arena which had been hosting half-capacity crowds, even against archrival Texas and Big 12 powerhouses Oklahoma and Kansas.

(Gillispie's predecessor, Melvin Watkins, was a North Carolinian who seemed surprised when he couldn't generate much interest in basketball at a school with as large a fan/alumni base as A&M. Again, coming from a culture where basketball was a big deal, he didn't get it. It was good to see him having some success on the bench again in this year's tournament, as associate head coach at Missouri.)

Anyway, in addition to not winning enough games at Kentucky (40-27 record), Gillispie alienated fans and media with his prickly personality and didn't seem to UK folks to be nearly appreciative enough of the great opportunity he had been handed. A little respect and reverence for tradition would've gone a long way.

Some other thoughts:

• For the second time in three years the Division II men's championship game went down to the final second. Findlay (Ohio) University finished just the fourth undefeated season (36-0) in Division II history with a 56-53 overtime victory over Cal Poly-Pomona this afternoon. We referenced a little while back the last-second layup by Barton's Anthony Atkinson to beat Mankato State in 2007.
  
  Atkinson, by the way, is now a member of the Harlem Globetrotters and he's quoted in a good story about the Globetrotters in the latest Sports Illustrated.



• Finally a great game this weekend in the Division I men's tournament. I'm not a huge fan of Villanova, but I enjoyed their 78-76 victory over Pittsburgh on Scottie Reynolds' layup with a half-second left, sending the Wildcats to the Final Four for the first time since 1985. I really didn't want another all-No. 1 seed Final Four like last year.



• The women's tournament, which generally features fewer upsets than the men's, has had some welcome unpredictability. Perennial power Tennessee, a No. 5 seed this year, lost to No. 12 Ball State in the first round. In the second round, No. 7 Rutgers routed No. 2 seed Auburn, 80-52 and No. 6 Purdue ousted No. 3 seed North Carolina.
  
  One No. 1 seed, Duke, was sent home in the first weekend. Good storyline there actually, as Duke coach Joanne P, McCallie, who came to Durham from Michigan State two years ago, was beaten by her fomer players. The No. 9-seed Spartans put a scare into fourth-seeded Iowa State tonight before the Cyclones came back in the final two minutes.
  
  I like the fact that the scheduling puts as few of the women's tournament games head-to-head with the men's events. I've heard that that may change next year, but I don't think it's a good idea.

Public opinion, perception and hoops justice

The Syracuse-Arizona State NCAA basketball tournament game was on earlier this afternoon, and I watched most of the second half -- all the while thinking about the power of perception in forming public opinion.

Say what?

Among the topics I discuss with my public relations classes is how public opinion is formed and the importance of that for the PR practitioner. And I tell them that I've always strongly believed that "perception is reality." It's not what the truth is, but what people perceive to be the truth -- that really matters. If the public thinks you have a problem, you have a problem, and you must deal with it.

And in the last few years, I've connected this -- in my own mind, though I've never shared this with a class -- with the case of Arizona State coach Herb Sendek. Basketball fans who read this blog will probably remember him as the former coach of the North Carolina State Wolfpack. He left Raleigh to go out west three seasons ago.

The reasons he left had everything to do with perception and very little to do with reality. I'll walk you through it.

Sendek spent 10 reasonably successful seasons as coach of the Wolfpack. The resume: 191-132 record, and in nine out of 10 of those seasons, State got post-season bids. Sendek took his team to the NCAA tournament each of the last five seasons and Wolfpack teams won 20 games or more in four of the last five.

Not too shabby, right? Well, a significant number of State fans would have disagreed with you and some die-hards may still. Sendek became the target of increasingly virulent criticism in his final years as State's coach. He finally packed it in and took another job in a more hospitable environment, which at that point would have described just about anywhere.

He went to Tempe, Ariz., to coach the Sun Devils, a program with a negligible basketball tradtition.

How could this happen? Again, power of perception. N.C. State, of course, is a founding member of the ACC with longtime natural rivalries with what many ACC fans perceive as the conference's two evil empires, North Carolina and Duke.

And Sendek's State teams didn't do very well against them, with a record of something like 9-38 (couldn't find the exact figure in a little cursory research but I think this is in the ballpark) against the Blue Devils and Tar Heels in his tenure.

But what was worse was that many State fans perceived that these failures -- which meant a lot to them -- didn't matter to Sendek, who didn't grow up in ACC country (he was born in Pittsburgh). Sendek -- who has a fiery bench manner but a rather bland public/media persona -- didn't appear to believe that a game against UNC or Duke mattered any more than one against Virginia or Georgia Tech.

The inability to respond to that perception, I've always thought, was Sendek's biggest problem. And I've been quite amused to watch the aftermath of all this in the years since he left.

State fans' perceptions changed soon after his departure as the school hired Sidney Lowe, a key player on N.C. State's second national championship squad in 1983, as head coach. And joining his staff as an assistant was another of the Wolfpack's most beloved players of all time, Monte Towe, a guard on State's first national championship squad in 1974.

These guys knew how important beating the neighbors was, and they went out and did it. In the first season after Sendek, the Wolfpack beat both the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels. No matter that State ended up 17-14 and in the NIT, snapping the streak of NCAA invites at five. The season was a success. There was finally something to look forward to.

Unfortunately for Wolfpack fans, the team hasn't repeated that feat in the last two seasons, with a few pretty one-sided losses among the meetings with UNC and Duke. And the team has finished near the bottom of the ACC standings. Will Lowe survive, even with his State pedigree?

Meanwhile, in three seasons Sendek's teams have gradually improved from an 8-20 record to a return to the NCAA tournament for the first time in five years.

And maybe he's learned something about this rivalry business. The Sun Devils, who had beaten archrival Arizona only once in 11 seasons before Sendek's arrival, have now beaten them five times in three years. He's the toast of the town, today's 78-67 second round loss to Syracuse notwithstanding.

A similar situation has played out at Kentucky, where fan expectations make State supporters look benign and infinitely patient by comparison. Coach Tubby Smith averaged 26 wins a game in his 10 seasons in Lexington and took the Wildcats to the Final Four in his first season. Unfortunately, he never got them back there -- the longest absence from college basketball's last weekend in school history.

Fans planted "For Sale" signs on his front lawn, vilified him on talk radio and Internet sites, and Smith left two seasons ago for Minnesota. Kentucky lured Texas A&M coach Billy Gillispie away from College Station. The 'Cats lasted one round in the 2008 NCAA tournament and didn't make the field this year for the first time since 1991. And they've had embarrassing losses to the likes of Gardner-Webb and VMI along the way.

I call it hoops justice. Be careful what you ask for, basketball fans, because you might get it.

Meditations on the madness

I haven't been bowled over so far by the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The first block of four Friday evening first-round games is going on as I write -- no teams from the Carolinas playing right now so I've got Florida's NIT game against Miami on the Internet. Must support the alma mater.

If you're into the tournament there are plenty of places to find analysis -- I keep going back to Sports Illustrated's website -- but I'll limit my commentary to a couple of things that I find personally interesting. So here's my take on March Madness so far.

The first two days haven't had a lot of moments of high drama, with the possible exception of the final seconds of the Oklahoma State-Tennessee and VCU-UCLA games, buzzer-beaters both. But I do think it would be interesting to be in Greensboro for the second-round games tomorrow. North Carolina-LSU and Duke-Texas will be challenging games for the local favorites, playing teams that seem to be tailor-made to give them trouble.

I've seen comments on the Web today and heard assertions on talk radio that a No. 16-seed will, one of these days, topple a No. 1 seed in the tournament. As I'm writing the last of those four matchups is going on. And if Louisville holds on to beat Morehead State, it will give the No. 1 seeds a 100-0 record against the No. 16's since the 64-team tournament format started in 1985.

I don't see that changing anytime soon, to tell you the truth. Only one of the three No. 16s this year gave the No. 1 a battle, with feisty East Tennessee State giving sleepwalking Pitt all it could handle before the Panthers took a 10-point victory.

Radford was competitive with the Tar Heels for about 10 minutes, losing by 43. And I couldn't help but wonder whether Davidson coach Bob McKillop and College of Charleston coach Bobby Cremins were watching Chattanooga's 103-47 loss to Connecticut with disgust. The Mocs were a surprising Southern Conference tournament champion, beating Cremins' College of Charleston team in the finals after CoC beat regular season champ Davidson in the semis. Either could've given UConn a much better game.

Anyway, Chattanooga's loss was the second-worst any NCAA tournament team has suffered in the shot-clock era, which I think dates back to 1987.

Princeton has come the closest to pulling off the ultimate upset, taking No. 1 Georgetown to the final seconds before losing 50-49 in 1989. I don't think there's any way a Princeton would be seeded No. 16 these days, which is the paradox of this -- if you're good enough to have a shot at beating No. 1, you're probably not going to be seeded last. So I think that gap is widening, not getting closer.

(It's worth noting that this has happened once in the women's tournament, in 1998 when No. 16 Harvard, led by former Chester, S.C., prep star Allison Feaster's 35 points, defeated an injury-depleted No. 1-seeded Stanford 71-67 in the first round. Here's a good look back at this in the Boston Globe.)

On the other hand, I agree with Mark Packer's assertion on his WFNZ radio show this afternoon that there's not a lot of difference in the teams seeded from 5 to 12. Makes sense, because that's where most of the at-large teams from the BCS conference usually reside in the bracket. And the first two days' results bear that out.

Even the biggest upsets so far, No. 12 seeds Arizona and Western Kentucky over Utah and Illinois respectively, weren't unexpected. No. 11 Virginia Commonwealth's loss to No. 6 UCLA could easily have turned out the other way. And three of the four No. 10s defeated No. 7s, including Clemson's unwatchable loss to Michigan last night.

As I've been writing this, Florida has wrapped up a fairly easy victory over Miami. Of course the Gators are NIT (as in Not In the Tournament), which is an easy and I think unfair joke. Florida made some unwanted history last weekend, becoming the first former NCAA men's basketball champion to miss the Big Dance two straight years after winning the title since the Magic Johnson-less Michigan State teams of the early 1980s.

And in this day and time the NIT doesn't get much respect -- win it and you're the 66th best team, another joke goes. But this year's NIT has some pretty darn good teams and good story lines in it. The NCAA tournament would do well to have a few games like Virginia Tech's 116-108 double overtime win over Duquesne earlier this week. And even though he's on a smaller stage this spring, it will still be interesting to see how many power conference teams Stephen Curry and Davidson can beat as they try to make it to Madison Square Garden. Their matchup with St. Mary's -- which has also had an injured star in Patty Mills this season -- should be very watchable.

And now No. 4-seed Wake Forest is losing to No. 13 Cleveland State by 11 early in the second half. Will another ACC team lose, and can a mid-major get what's turning out to be a rare win in this tournament? The madness continues.

Almost forgot. My Final Four: North Carolina, Memphis, Michigan State, Pittsburgh.

Nobody asked me but...

Jayne and I have both been sick at various times during the past six or seven days, so there hasn't been much opportunity to blog in the last little while.

So today, I'm catching up in the style of one of the great old New York newspaper sports columnists, Jimmy Cannon (1910-1973). Cannon -- no relation -- had a signature phrase with which he would start what is sometimes called an "item column," usually his random observations about matters both inside and outside the sports world. I've used it in the headline to this post.

So, nobody asked me, but:

-- I'm more intrigued than sad about the demise of the printed version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The P-I publishes its last print edition tomorrow, then becomes an online-only publication. It will be the largest daily newspaper in the U.S. to go entirely digital. The publisher's statement about the reasons behind the move and what the new "paper" will look like may give us a window on the future of this segment of the news business.

-- I think the selection committee for the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament got it about right in their 65-team field. For every team that's in, the seeding seems appropriate, and for most of the teams that didn't make it, there seems to be a good reason for the omission. And they pass the partisan fan test with me. I thought my three schools Clemson (a No. 7 seed in Kansas City), Texas A&M (a little surprising at No. 9 in Philadelphia) and Florida (in the NIT) got pretty much what they deserved.

-- I'm glad this phase of "bracketology" is over. As big a basketball fan as I am, I was at the point where I no longer cared who was "on the bubble." And the phrase "body of work" should be used in discussions of Faulkner and Madame Curie, not, say, the Auburn Tigers.

-- I thought the "showdown" between Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, and Jim Cramer, the CNBC pundit/infotainer, lacked the expected sparks, mostly because Cramer couldn't put up much of a defense. There was a lot of truth in Stewart's critique of CNBC's coverage -- or lack of it -- in the runup to the financial crisis. But he's not the first to point out the myriad of conflicts of interests between these TV business commentators and the people they "cover" -- if indeed they're really journalists. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote a book about this in 2000 called "The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media and Manipulation."

-- I think the World Baseball Classic is a great idea staged at the worst possible time. I've caught bits and pieces of this event between bouts of watching basketball, and there are some great stories in it. Among the best is the suprising national baseball team from The Netherlands, which advanced to the second round after eliminating the Dominican Republic in the first round, a huge upset. How big? ESPN used the measuring stick of major league baseball salaries paid to each roster. One Netherlands player is a big-leaguer making the MLB minimum of $400,000, compared to the Dominicans' 23 major league players with a combined payroll of $80 million.

Round and round....

In college sports, what's often referred to as the "coaching carousel" starts soon after teams' seasons start ending. It's so called because often a coaching change at one college leads to one at another college, which leads to....well, you get the idea.

It's especially active in Division I college basketball, and the 2009 version started today with a couple of announcements in North Carolina.

Bart Lundy was fired as men's basketball at High Point, the university announced today. Lundy coached Queens to two trips to NCAA Division II's Elite Eight (in 2000 and 2003), including a Final Four appearance in his last season with the Royals. He was 96-87 at High Point. His first High Point team went to the Big South Championship game in 2004, but the Panthers finished last in the conference and 9-21 overall this season.

And Elon coach Ernie Nestor announced his resignation today after six seasons as the coach of the Phoenix. (I really liked their former nickname, the unintentionally ironic Fightin' Christians, a lot better.) A former long-time assistant to Dave Odom at Wake Forest, Nestor was 67-117 in six seasons at Elon. The move comes almost one year exactly after Elon lost to Davidson in the 2008 Southern Conference championship game. But the Phoenix were 11-20 this season.

The carousel usually picks up speed as March advances, so there will be more to come.

It's tournament time, Part 3

I just finished looking at the brackets for the NCAA Division II men's and women's basketball tournaments -- it's the traditional last act of basketball for me during this week every year.

(I was on the way back from the South Atlantic Conference tournament in Hickory when the event was live online, so I missed the "selection show," patterned after the one you'll see next Sunday when the invitees to Division I's "Big Dance" are unveiled.)

Anyway, the results were interesting. I look first at what is called the South Atlantic region, where the three conferences I follow -- the SAC, Conference Carolinas and the Peach Belt -- have been combined starting this year into a pretty formidable grouping. Conference Carolinas got only its tournament champions into the field of 64 -- Barton for the men and Anderson for the women. Some conference tournament upsets took their toll on a team or two that might have had a chance to get in. Also interesting to see that the Peach Belt claimed the first four seeds in the men's eight-team region.

I covered the men's finals of the SAC, a pretty engaging game between No. 3-seed Tusculum and No. 4 Catawba that actually was able to draw distracted media types like me into watching it instead of following Duke-North Carolina online. Catawba won the tournament for the second straight year, regrouping after nearly blowing an eight-point lead late in the game for a 63-61 win.

This conference's tournament nearly always holds a surprise, especially on the men's side, and this year's event was true to form as Catawba came from the middle of the pack to win again.

"It just takes us till the end of the year to come together," said Antonio Houston, Catawba forward who was the tournament's men's MVP. "We can win games when it counts."

Tusculum and No. 1-seed Lenoir-Rhyne, a loser to Catawba in the semifinals, also made the tournament field.

The women's bracket went much more predictably, with No. 1-seed Lenoir-Rhyne defeating Tusculum in the final game. Tusculum and Carson-Newman also made the tournament field from the confererence.

A couple of random thoughts:

-- The big crowd for the women's final, boosted by the presence of the hometown L-R Bears, thinned out some for the men's game. But overall, it wasn't a bad day for folks wearing orange and supporting the Tusculum Pioneers -- they lost both games, but their teams will still be playing next week. It marked the first time a conference school got both teams to championship day since Catawba swept the men's and women's titles in 2004. (I must also note that Lenoir-Rhyne, of course, also sent both its teams on to the NCAA tournament.)

-- I noted before that it was odd to be in Hickory and not be covering Wingate in at least one game. I looked it up and the last time that the Bulldogs didn't send either the men's or women's team to the semifinals was -- never. The SAC started a post-season basketball tournament in 1991 after expanding from a football-only conference to an all-sports league and until this year, at least one of our hoops teams had made the conference Final Four. I hope to see our student-athletes back there next year.

So after three days of steady consumption of basketball games and hospitality room food -- I'm not one to complain, it was all good -- it's back to school tomorrow. Soon Jayne will be home from her weekend trip and all will be right with the world.

It's tournament time, Part 2

I enjoyed the limited amount of time I spent out in the sunshine today, but the lure of basketball -- as noted in the previous entry -- was stronger. Like I said last time, it's March, the best month to be a hoops fan.

I'll start from the end of my day and work backwards.

For the last four years, I've covered the semifinals and finals of the South Atlantic Conference basketball tournament in Hickory. The games are played at the Multi-Purpose Center (love that colorful name) at Catawba Valley Community College. It's a nice arena with more than enough room to accommodate the fans of the schools involved. And the hospitality and media facilities are top-notch.

But it's the only time of the season that any of the SAC teams plays their games there, and that unfamiliarity can lead to some unsightly shooting and ugly games. Retired Wingate women's coach Johnny Jacumin, not a man given to whining, was not a fan of the place.

"I don't like this building, and it doesn't like us," I recall him saying after one particularly tough tournament loss by the Bulldogs. Players I've talked to cite tight rims and a tough background for shooters -- the "end zone" seats are set back from the court a good distance, creating some difficulties with perspective.

"You just have to concentrate and block out the crowd and everything else," said Antonio Houston, a plesant young man who's a former Charlotte high school star (East Mecklenburg). He did a pretty good job at that tonight, scoring 23 points to lead his Catawba team to a 79-68 victory over top-seeded Lenoir-Rhyne in the first semifinal game.

(The venue also apparently didn't bother a young lady named Nikki Van Dine, who hit 8 three pointers -- all in the first half -- for Tusculum in its victory over Carson-Newman on the women's side of the tournament. But I didn't see that one.)

Catawba advanced to tomorrow's title game for the third straight year, the second straight as the No. 4 seed, and they've seemed to emerge from the pack on a regular basis in recent years.

I noticed during the game that the Lenoir-Rhyne team includes a player I followed when he was a freshman at Clemson a few years ago. Julius Powell, a 6-7 forward from nearby Newton, had a promising first year with the Tigers in 2005-6, starting 11 games. But injuries slowed his development in his sophomore season and he played only one game last year before deciding to sit out the rest of the season and transfer. He's averaged about four points a game in a backup role for the Bears this year.

My other stop today was the second day of the Atlantic 10 women's basketball tournament at UNC Charlotte, or Charlotte, as they call themselves athletically.

I covered St. Bonaventure's 73-65 victory over St. Joseph's in the first round of the tournament on Friday and hung around for the second evening game between Duquesne and Massachusetts. Conferences at the Division I level in recent years have morphed into pretty good-sized entities, leading to expanded tournament fields and lengthier tournaments.


(I'm interested to see how the Big East tournament works out this year, with all 16 teams in that massive conference included. The top four seeds won't play the first two days.)

I don't mind this because it's more basketball, but the event loses a little something. The A-10 tourney started with 12 teams (the bottom two in the 14-team league don't make the field), and there wasn't a lot of fan energy for much of the action involving the 5-12 seeds. I didn't see the day's best game, a 62-58 upset by No. 12 Rhode Island over No. 5 George Washington. And two of the games were decided by more than 20 points. But as an ex-Pittsburgher, I enjoyed hearing that accent again from the Duquesne fans sitting behind me.

Today's action had a little more buzz around it, as the top four seeds joined the field, with larger followings, cheerleaders, pep bands and this odd-looking critter who was the Xavier mascot.


I saw what could turn out to be the tournament's best game in the noon matchup between No. 1 seed Xavier, 22-5 and ranked No. 15 in the country going in, and No. 8 Dayton.

Dayton survived losing a six-point lead late in regulation to come back and get the upset in overtime, 63-60. The handful of Dayton faithful who made the trip celebrated, while a large contingent of Xavier folks sat in stunned silence. It was an example of what's good about these tournaments -- it's a last chance for every team to prove themselves.

"In the overtime it was all about heart," said Dayton forward Justine Raterman, the A-10 freshman of the year in women's basketball, who had 14 points and nine rebounds in the game.

A cliche? Sure. And in my reporter's heart, I know -- and I teach -- that you try to dig for the better quote beyond the practiced and well-worn platitudes that coaches and athletes often fall back on in their encounters with you.

But the thing about the cliche is that it usually contains a grain of truth. Sometimes "it was all about heart" is the only explanation there is. In this case, I thought it worked.

It's tournament time

The biggest sports story in the U.S. in March is the madness of NCAA college basketball tournament time. But that doesn't start for another two weeks.

I'm just as enthralled by the first couple of weeks in March, the prelude to the Big Dance provided by the conference tournaments. I generally spend the last part of the week of spring break from Wingate covering college basketball.

Starting with an assignment tonight at Belmont Abbey for the semifinals of the men's Conference Carolinas tournament, I'll see at least six basketball games between now and Sunday evening. (Jayne is headed out of town for a couple of days starting tomorrow morning and she says she couldn't have picked a better time to be gone, as I probably won't notice.)

Tomorrow I'll cover the St. Bonaventure-St. Joseph's game in the Atlantic 10 women's tournament at UNC-Charlotte for the Buffalo News, one of four first-round matchups. I'll probably take in at least one of them besides the one I'm covering.

And I'll wrap up the weekend with Saturday and Sunday coverage of the South Atlantic Conference tournament semfinals and finals in Hickory, an assignment I've had for the last four years running now. Unfortunately, for the first time since I started making that trip, there won't be teams from Wingate there. The Bulldog teams were eliminated in the quarterfinal round, played at campus sites, on Wednesday.

What's the appeal of tournament time? For me it's pretty simple -- multiple basketball games are that many times better than one basketball game. And it's an event. The tournaments I usually attend aren't on the scale of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament or even Charlotte's CIAA tournament, but there's a social aspect. It's fun to see a lot of the same people you encounter throughout the season all in one place.

Which, frankly, is why I haven't much cared for what Conference Carolinas has done with its tournament for the past couple of years. All games are played on campus sites, on the home court of the higher-seeded team.

I watched Erskine pull its second straight upset in the Conference Carolinas tournament tonight, routing the host Crusaders 69-44 in Belmont. Belmont Abbey, which entered the game with a 20-8 record and the No. 3 seed, got an unexpected home game instead of having to go on the road tonight when No. 7-seeded Erskine (12-18) pulled a huge upset at No. 2-seeded Mount Olive in Tuesday's quarterfinal round. The home court advantage didn't help the Crusaders, as it seemed like there were an almost equal number of Belmont Abbey and Erskine fans there.

And it wasn't a tournament atmosphere, with just the two teams there.

I suppose spreading the burden of hosting among the conference is an equitable solution for Division II schools with more limited resources for athletics. (I think among Division I schools, the Big South Conference does it this way.) But it just doesn't seem like as much fun.

Still, it was a good way to get the long weekend started. We'll see what the next three days brings.

Love and basketball

It's Spring Break week at Wingate and accordingly I've taken a little break from the blog, but we'll try to have more as the week goes on. It's time for full-blown basketball addiction to set in and I'll be putting up some college hoops material in the next several days.

But today was a day for nostalgia, in which basketball played a role, but romance turned out to be the star. Twenty-five years ago today, my wife Jayne and I went on our first date.

A little background first. If you're reading this and you are in the news media or have ever been, you know how difficult having a social life can be in that line of work. The hours you work are strange and so are your days off and, especially when you're young -- and especially when you work in sports, I found -- you're often working when your non-journalist friends are playing.

So you end up hanging out with fellow reporters and -- sometimes -- your sources. That's how Jayne and I met. I was working with Laurens County School District 56 in my hometown of Clinton, S.C., as their PR guy. Jayne moved from her hometown of Winston-Salem to nearby Laurens at the end of 1983 to start a new career as a reporter for the Laurens County Advertiser.

We met at a school board meeting in the Clinton High School band room on Jan. 23, 1984 -- we're always been glad we never had to say we met in a bar -- and we consider that we've been together ever since.

But we didn't actually go out until March 3. (I've never been a fast worker at anything...) At another school board meeting I asked her if she wanted to go with me to a Clemson basketball game and she made me the happiest man in Laurens County by saying yes.

But the enterprise got off to a rocky start on that Saturday morning when my car, the legendary 1983 Oldsmobile Omega (a swinging bachelor car if there ever was one) wouldn't start, despite my best efforts. I called Jayne and told her this news.

A pause on the other end of the line. "What does this mean?" she said.

"It means that if you still want to go, you're going to have to drive," I said. Jayne's car was a manual transmission, which I've never learned to handle. Smooth, right? Jayne said later she thought I was trying to get out of the date.

Remarkably, she said that was OK with her and we headed on time for Clemson's game with Campbell, their last home game of the season at Littlejohn Coliseum. (We were talking earlier today about this. Back at this time, Clemson, like most schools did for the still-nascent custom of Senior Day, scheduled a highly-beatable opponent, rather than incorporating it into its conference schedule, as is the custom today. So Jayne got to see the mighty Camels of Buies Creek, N.C., instead of, say, Duke or Virginia. We would actually see Campbell play basketball again, this time as man and wife, in the 1992 NCAA first-round games in Greensboro, in their David-vs.-Goliath matchup against Duke.

I really don't recall much about the game itself, except that I enjoyed Jayne's company and conversation during it. (A little research reveals that the Tigers won the game, 62-52.)

And following the game we headed back to Laurens County, and for reasons that are lost to history but that may have had something to do with the odd noon start and 2 p.m. finish of the game, we didn't stop for dinner. I've never lived that one down, although let the record show that I redeemed myself on the next date -- driving my own car -- with a nice dinner at Greenville's best Italian restaurant at the time. But, to paraphrase the recently departed Paul Harvey, that gives away the rest of the story. Incredibly, I got another chance.

I helped my cause with something I did on that return trip as we traveled through the town of Mauldin on U.S. 276, a notorious speed trap at the time. We were so engrossed in conversation with each other that Jayne lost track of the speed limit and was pulled over by local law enforcement. The officer asked Jayne to step out of her car and I noticed in the rear view mirror that he was an old friend of mine from high school and church.

So I got out and greeted him (Jayne said she was totally humiliated and didn't want to be arrested in front of me.) We chatted for a minute and I said, "Steve, you aren't going to give this young lady a ticket, are you?" And he didn't. We have that warning citation somewhere in a scrapbook.

We re-lived all this earlier this evening as we celebrated with dinner at one of our favorite Charlotte restaurants, the wonderfully retro Ranch House out on Wilkinson Boulevard. I guess we're proof that sometimes great things happen from inauspicious beginnings. So all I can say is thanks for the ride, Honey. It's all been great.