A timeline worthy of 100 years of basketball

In The Daily Tar Heel’s editor’s meeting before the start of the school year, I made a huge mistake.

When my bosses asked the desk editors for our desk’s major issues for the year, I spoke up.

“It’s the 100th season of basketball at UNC,” I said.

Everybody in the room agreed that was, in fact, a pretty big deal.

Unfortunately, that meant that the next question was “What are you gonna do for it?”

I blacked out for the next part and don’t remember my exact response, but two weeks later the bosses came to me and said we were going to do a timeline documenting all 100 years of UNC basketball.

You know, since we’re journalists and stuff, we like to occasionally document important histories and take a look at the big picture.

Most of the time reporting is remarkably dull — stories that looked juicy turn to naught, and the ones that do turn out don’t ever really come together the way a writer’s mind envisions it.

Endless hours of research and looking through old records feels like wading through molasses. You never seem to actually get anywhere, just more bogged down.

But not so with the history of basketball at UNC.

Imagine the same history that epic movies like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” or “Forrest Gump” encompass — except with basketball.

There’s two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, racism, equality, guys in shinguards, guys with short shorts, guys with baggy shorts and a series of coaches with decreasing amounts of hair product as the years pass.

There’s UNC’s only major NCAA sanction, national titles, moments of triumph and heartbreak, great teams, crappy teams.

It’s reflective of our national history, and even more so, the history of this University — and as a result, completely fascinating.

That type of history makes reporting easy. Every page is something cool and exciting. In this case, we stumbled onto a never-ending gold mine of old images, great moments, fantastic stories and legendary players.

It started in 1910, when a student named Marvin Rich lobbied for an official team in this new sport, a fad that was sweeping the nation called “Basket-ball.” And now, Roy Williams is coaching the 100th men’s basketball team in the history of the University of North Carolina.

By 3 a.m. last Friday when the timeline launched, it had ballooned to contain more than 200 photos from a wide variety of sources and about 13,000 words of text. When we finished the print version it was between 350 to 400 column inches. To give you a rough idea, this column is just more than 15 inches.

And yeah, this whole column is, on some level, a giant pat-on-the-back to us. But it’s also more than that, it’s a perspective that you can have as you explore a program that arguably has had a more important role at North Carolina than anything else. It certainly is more enduring than anything save the University itself.

So take some time to look through the DTH’s timeline (dailytarheel.com/100years) and get a dose of the history of a program that shaped the face of your University.



Contact Powell Latimer at powell.latimer@gmail.com