Note: This piece ran a year ago this week after AJ returned from the cancelled ACC Tournament. We are running it again today so our readers can revisit just how incredible the time was as we were all first going through it. The uncertainty, the fear, the bewilderment, and the sheer bizarreness of the time. One year has passed and we've made some progress, but times are still very strange.
I used to think I would never experience anything professionally like the fear and swift and dramatic change adopted following the attacks on September 11, 2001.
But I was wrong.
Media check-ins have never been the same in the 19 years since that horrible day when our nation lost 2,977 lives. The following weekend without college football was positively weird, but games were made up and the season went on.
That’s not happening now.
Instead of planes flown into skyscrapers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, the perpetrator of our current hysteria that has shut down virtually every sport in this country for at least the next month and brought a premature end to college athletics until the fall, is a virus that must be contained. Say what you want about the decisions that were made, agree or disagree, my story isn’t about that. The intent here is to take you guys behind the scenes and share how things played out from my unique vantage point.
Surreal? Yeah. Bizarre? Yep. Confusing? No doubt. Organized? Not exactly, but with an asterisk. Scary? Kind of.
When THI staff writer Jacob Turner and I arrived at the Greensboro Coliseum for North Carolina’s practice Monday, we quickly learned the Tar Heels’ locker room would not be open afterward for interviews. Instead, the Heels would field questions on the court.
Note: This piece originally appeared March 13, 2020. It is being reposted one year after COVID-19 forced the cancellation of the ACC Tournament.
That was actually a bit disappointing as one of my favorite things about covering the postseason is the locker room access because we find so many stories in there. We see things we don’t in more sterile settings, which is what we got following Carolina’s win over Virginia Tech on Tuesday night.
Asking Brandon Robinson and Cole Anthony questions separated by about five feet with a rope in between us was just weird. It made the job a tad bit more challenging, but you adapt and move on. No biggie, though it kinda was.
Many of my colleagues complained. I bellyached some, as I sometimes do. It didn’t seem right. What we’ve been used to for so long was disrupted, our norm was no longer. If we only knew what was to come.
Wednesday was the single strangest day of my professional life. I woke up thinking having a small barrier between myself and the players I’d covered every day for five months was off putting, but within 27 hours the ACC Tournament was done. Finished. Cancelled.
A victim of a virus that may or may not have found itself within the confines of this fabled ACC venue, the ACC Tournament was no more for 2020. No champion. Nothing. They didn’t even play the quarterfinals. Duke, FSU, Louisville and UVA never took the court. So weird.
In a very strange conclusion to one of UNC’s most perplexing seasons ever, the Tar Heels played on the last night of the college basketball season. Go figure.
After staying back in my hotel during the day getting some advance work for the offseason done and watching the other two games on TV, I arrived at the arena at around 6 pm Wednesday evening.
The NCAA had already announced March Madness would go on but without fans, and as you can imagine, that's all anyone in the media work area was discussing.
Not a peep about Clemson and N.C. State winning earlier in the day. Nothing about Carolina’s game with Syracuse coming up later.
The effects of Coronavirus dominated the discourse. And I’m not talking about how the virus can cause serious illness or even death in people or who the most vulnerable are to contracting it. With the NCAA having planted its flag in the soil, everyone figured the ACC would soon ban fans, too.
That eventually happened Wednesday evening, and if one could juxtapose the scene in the media room at around that time with the day before when that wasn't on anyone's radar, the chatter would have shared no similarities.
Shock? Sort of, only because it actually happened. Confusion? Yep. Anger? You betcha.
Emanating from the press room:
“Stupid,” “silly,” “ridiculous,” “pathetic,” “weak,” “thoughtless,” “unfair,” “moronic,” “sensible,” “wise,” “smart,” “strong,” “PC,” “sheep,” “scared,” and “they caved.”
It ran the gamut.
Opinions varied and just about everyone had one and many shared them. All of us were simply trying to make sense of what was happening or just come to terms with it. Even those who strongly agreed with the decision.
Then came Carolina’s game.
It was the hardest one of the season to cover. It was actually the hardest game I’ve covered in a long time. Everyone on press row was looking at their phones texting people, reading texts, checking out Twitter looking for more information as the world was changing before our eyes.
“The SEC is banning fans,” one scribe said aloud.
“Holy crap, Tom Hanks has it,” another said.
“Whoa, Rudy Gobert tested positive,” said another.
“Holy (expletive), the NBA just suspended the season. Holy (expletive), this is crazy,” blurted a stunned scribe.
Meanwhile on the court, the Tar Heels were pulling a no-show. Syracuse ran them out of the building in what was Carolina’s worst performance of the season. But there was more.
At halftime, I wanted to know the ACC’s timeline on how it made the decision to ban fans, so I sought out some people who work for the conference. The ACC put out a release at 5:16 pm acknowledging the NCAA’s decision and that it was monitoring the situation, at 7:38 pm the league announced fans were banned from the rest of the event beginning with Thursday’s games.
It took two hours and 22 minutes to make the same move regarding its tournament, exactly why did it take so long? What was the process?
And if it’s too dangerous to keep fans from the games Thursday, why didn’t they jump on it and keep people out Wednesday night instead of announcing it with 1:39 left in the first half of the Boston College-Notre Dame game? The building cleared after the first session, so the opportunity was there.
Someone needed to get a record of how things went down, so I set out to gather some intel. Except I didn’t get many answers because I’m not sure there really were any. ACC personnel and media relations professionals don’t train for stuff like this, neither do sportswriters.
The second half started, so it was back to press row and UNC’s ugliness.
“Fred Hoiberg has it,” a guy behind me said, though we later learned the Nebraska coach only had the flu, thankfully.
“The Big East…”
You get the drift.
Following UNC’s 81-53 loss, Robinson and Armando Bacot were available “behind the rope” and at the dais were Garrison Brooks, Leaky Black and Carolina Coach Roy Williams.
Jacob and I shot our video on the court following the interviews and finished some work before catching the final media shuttle at 2 am. I finished putting postgame content together in my hotel room, posting the final piece at 5:28 am. It was already Thursday morning.
It took a while to fall asleep, as I was trying to process how the sports landscape had just swiftly changed as dramatically as any of us will ever experience. It turned more into a nap than actual sleep.
On Monday, not getting to interivew players in the locker room seemed like the extent of the coronavirus effect on this wonderful event. Less than three days later, as I was getting ready to head back to the Coliseum, the ACC canceled the tournament.
Done.
So, I drove home spending most of my time on the phone. First, I spoke with a THI subscriber, then my brother, my wife, Virginia sportswriter Tucker McLaughlin, our Deana King and eventually my dad.
Before going home, I stopped at a BJ’s to get a few things and saw people loading up shopping carts with toilet paper, paper towels and water. My wife sent me a text letting me know we didn’t need any of that stuff. So, I was the guy with pitas, a bag of baby spinach, tomatoes, sausage, and a few other items in my cart, none of which were cleaning solutions or anything like that.
People raced through the store rarely looking at one another. It was almost as if anyone made eye contact they’d be zapped into eternity or something. Bad SciFi movies would have been impressed.
I got home, unloaded the car, sat on the couch and told my wife a scaled-down version of this story. Her appetite for AJ’s musings can be pretty low at times, especially when it comes to my job.
“It’s 24/7” she often says. But she won’t now. The season is over. There won’t be any spring football, we’re not sure what will happen with recruiting and my Baltimore Orioles won’t begin their quest to another 100-loss season in two weeks because baseball is postponed as well.
These words probably didn’t do my experience proper justice, and I apologize for that. But hopefully it offered a glimpse of how this incredible turn of events went down from the perspective of a sportswriter who was on hand for the most bizarre ACC Tournament and sports day in our nation’s history.
Pearl Harbor, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald – both on NFL Sundays - and the week of 9/11 were more momentous, but March 11 and somewhat March 12 were easily the most extraordinarily unusual professional days any of us that were on hand will ever experience.
At least I hope so.
