Credit for love of the sport I’ve always given to my mother, who was a fierce competitor in any sport and a basketball standout on the Clinton Dark Horse team in the 1950s. I’ve heard the stories time and again from her friends over the years, stories I’ve never grown tired of listening to, helping me to envision my mother as a teenage athlete, shooting hoops to a cheering CHS fan base.
The accolades typically embarrassed my mom, but I loved every minute of it, realizing, with great pride, that she was, as the teenagers would say today, fierce on the basketball court.
At 5 feet 10 inches, my mother had a commanding presence on the court, those who remember her tell me often, including Dale Johnson, who always praises my mom’s athletic prowess whenever I’m around him.
It’s no wonder then, that basketball was in my blood. I had a basketball goal in my back yard, and I was out there nearly every day from the time I was 7 or 8, tossing that round ball toward the net, often pretending to be my mom, heading up the court for a layup or perhaps a jump shot.
There’s was only one problem, a major one quite frankly. I didn’t inherit my mother’s talent nor, more importantly, her height.
At just under 5 feet 2 inches, a basketball standout I wasn’t. Not at age 7, not at age 13 and not today at age ... well, any way, suffice it to say, I might have loved basketball at a young age, but chances were real good that I was never going to play it beyond the dirt court deep in the heart of the country.
But in my heart I was a star, just like my mom, and I’d dribble and shoot, dribble and shoot, scoring basket after basket, my loud cheers mimicking those I could hear in my head. I was good, I just knew it. Trouble was, I had nobody out there contesting my shots, except on the occasions when my mom or dad would show up to play with me
Of course, they’d let me win. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was easy enough to guess after I had my first and only basketball tryout in middle school. Needless to say, it didn’t go all that well. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was much taller than I was, and a whole lot more skilled, despite my thoughts to the contrary.
The coach was really nice, despite my poor showing, but once tryouts were over, she politely took me to the side and suggested I give cheerleading a try, hinting every so delicately that perhaps my height would be a hindrance to my basketball abilities.
But that experience didn’t dampen my passion for the game nor my spirit of competition, which remains very healthy to this day.
If anything, the tryout fiasco merely made me turn my attention to being a fan — and a back yard standout — rather than a player. My mother gets some credit for that, too, being the die-hard Carolina fan she always was.
Trouble was, in my teens, I loved the Wolfpack of N.C. State. Credit for that goes to the not-so-tall, but terribly cute Monte Towe who played for the National champions in 1974, when I was 14. He and David Thompson were quite the duo, and I was quite the fan.
It made for interesting nights in my house during the height of basketball season. My mother screaming – and I mean yelling to the top of her lungs - for her beloved Tar Heels, me yelling nearly as loud for the Pack.
It drove my daddy crazy.
As much as I loved my mother, I simply couldn’t pull for Dean Smith and his boys, and that remained true even after Towe graduated from State and my teenage crush turned to an infatuation of a deeper shade of blue as I reached my 20s. His name was Mike Gminski and he played for Duke. Boy did he, and I loved watching him, much to my mother’s dismay.
She had secretly hoped I would find a love for UNC, but that just never happened, in part, I think, because I loved the mother-daughter rivalry and the loving competition it brought into our house each and every time the teams played, whether each other or someone else.
I never lost that love for Duke, even after the G-Man moved on, being replaced by the likes of Christian Laettner, Chris Collins, Steve Wojohowski, Shane Battier, Jason Williams, JJ Reddick and now Nolan Smith, Brian Zoubek, John Scheyer, the Plumlee twins and that long-armed, long-legged Kyle Singler.
At this writing, they were in the semi-finals in this year’s ACC tournament, and I’m hoping they’ll make it into today’s final and, of course, win yet another ACC title, the first step in what I hope will be a journey to the Final Four.
But regardless my love for the Blue Devils is as strong as my love for basketball, and while my mother never quite understood why I favored them over her precious Heels, I hope deep down she did know that my love of the game came from her.
I may not have been able to carry on her athletic prowess on the court, but I sure did — and do — care a whole lot of pride in my heart for my first basketball hero.
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