I must be getting too old for this. It was hard to roll out of the rack this morning, much harder than I remember after the last four times the Tar Heels won the NCAA basketball championship. It's the toll of the years, no doubt, creaky joints and sore muscles from working in the yard, and staying up past bedtime again. And this time I didn't even spend much time celebrating. It's the memory of a game more than half a century ago that keeps me watching.
I keep remembering that night back in 1957 when I was 10, going on 11 years old and Carolina was playing Kansas in the first televised game I ever saw. Well, saw it through sleepy eyes, anyway. I kept falling asleep; Dad kept shaking me awake to catch the action, and telling me I'd be glad the rest of my life to stay up late and see a treat like this. I'd never forget it, he said.
He was right, though the picture sometimes was hard to make out. We hadn't had a television very long -- a Motorola, black and white, our course, and even on good nights our reception was awful, somewhere between a blizzard and a white out.
My father had rolled the set's rabbit-ear antenna with tin foil in hopes of improving the picture as we watched Tar Heel guard Tommy Kearns jump against Kansas' giant Wilt Chamberlain. The games that year were terrific, and the final featured a triple-overtime win by the Tar Heels and set off the Betts version of a wild celebration that must have lasted 10 minutes or so -- big doings in that staid household on Cornwallis Drive in Greensboro. We probably toasted the victory by splitting a 6 1/2 ounce Coke, or some such.
I wouldn't take anything for that memory now. My father watched two other UNC national championships -- 1982 and 1993 -- before he died, but we only saw the one together. In 2005 and again last night in the 2009 championship game I watched every move on a 32-inch TV my father would have been drop-jawed to see, these 52 years after that first snowy championship game, but today's screen doesn't even count as a big one today.
Last night's picture was clear as a bell and the only snow was some stuff swirling outside Ford Field, and as I watched the Tar Heels dominate Michigan State I was just a little sad to see a blowout instead of a closer contest that showed the best of both teams. But that's not a complaint. This is basketball country, and we like to win our games any way we can, especially when it means a fifth national championship -- and a chance to relive a special evening long ago watching the Heels work their magic and hooking a kid on ACC basketball forever.
