Off the Rim Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood docx

[...]... tobacco and dairy farm in the northern part of the county, one of eight brothers and three sisters, and four of his brothers still grew tobacco Tobacco culture, in fact, dictated the rhythm of county life, from disking and harrowing the soil in late winter and planting in the spring to hoeing and weeding, topping and suckering, priming (i.e., picking) and curing in the summer, to selling in the Winston... Tuttle, my mother’s brother, had also played football at Duke but mainly had excelled as a track star, setting a number of Southern Conference cross country records And Cuddin McGruder Tuttle, on his way to becoming rear admiral, had captained the football team and made one or two All-American squads at the Naval Academy in 1931, before surviving Pearl Harbor in 1941 and commanding the ship—he later told... Mountain Spotted Fever after only three years in Chapel Hill, and Carolina s football fortunes died with him—along with my conviction that football was the most important thing in life But for a random tick bite, Carolina might have been a football school and Dean Smith a math teacher back in Kansas From what I have written you might think that my father was also an athlete and a sports fan In fact,... spectacular, were solid But it was the dunks that let me know I had made it I looked at other players in the layup line, and amazing as it might seem now—only three others could dunk: Cunningham and Respass and one other walk-on Given hoop stereotypes and historical realities, a question arises: were all these players white? In 1961 the answer, in the upper South, wasn’t automatic: Carolina had been integrated,... could have lasted; they were supposed to last After a slump in the early 1950s, Carolina hired as head coach an alumnus, Jim Tatum, who had just won a national championship at Maryland, and Tatum was going to take the Heels all the way to the top “I don’t think winning is the most important thing,” he said, Lombardi-like, in a newspaper interview “I think it is the only thing.” But Tatum died at age forty-five... have been football, and it could have been Duke, not their arch-rival eight miles away, the University of North Carolina And in fact it was football for me at first, but it was never Duke For patriarchy reigned in those days: while my mother’s family had all gone to Trinity and Duke, my father had gone to Carolina, and in my very earliest memories Carolina meant three-time All American Charlie Choo-Choo... wasn’t much of either, but he was a loyal Carolina alumnus, and he tuned in football and basketball games with the same calm sense of duty with which he paid his alumni dues Unlike my mother, who would have been called a city girl in the rural North Carolina of that time, he was a farm boy who had gone to Chapel Hill for an education, not for sports and frivolity, and had come away with a degree in. .. Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee, when Duke went to the Rose Bowl after hiring away Alabama’s famous coach, Wallace Wade My mother’s first cousin, Lee Tuttle—known in the family as Cuddin (i.e., Cousin) Lee—had also starred for Duke in the 1920s but was remembered largely (even in the late twentieth century) for once, in the face of an 7 8 Off the Rim oncoming rush, punting backward over his head Uncle... worked in Winston-Salem at R J Reynolds Tobacco Company 14 Off the Rim (“Reynoldses”), makers of Camels and Winstons and Salems Every fall the county had a tobacco festival, a tobacco queen In fact, the only industry Yadkin County had in my childhood was a small tobacco-basket manufacturing plant—billed as the world’s largest, though some said it was the only one in the south end of the county There was... mother, and I can’t believe she was as enthusiastic about moving to the tiny county-seat town of Yadkinville (population 750) as he was The Yadkin County they came to and where I was born and grew up—is located in North Carolina s northwestern piedmont, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains To its east is Winston-Salem, then with its tobacco and textile factories (and the chocolate-like aroma . 08 07 06 Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Hobson, Fred C., 1943– Off the rim : basketball and other religions in a Carolina childhood /. Egerton Off the Rim is a marvelous basketball memoir, sprightly and entertaining, and it will take a place on the shelf alongside great autobiographies of fandom