Bladen Journal - Matchbin

Although fans,
foes, and
disinterested
observers may
differ about
the causes,
I suspect they would
all agree that Beverly
Perdue has had a rough
first term as governor of
North Carolina.
Unfortunately for her,
recent events have only
made things worse.
On Thanksgiving
weekend, the Republicanled
General Assembly
convened in Raleigh for a
brief special session. The
main item on the agenda
was a Senate vote on a
bill the House already
approved earlier this
year to roll back a 2009
law making it easier for
murderers to challenge
their death sentences.
The so-called Racial
Justice Act allows
inmates to go beyond the
facts of their own cases
to assert broader claims
of racial discrimination.
Perdue and other supporters
of the 2009 law
said their intention was
to address bias in sentencing.
Of course, the
real objective was to halt
North Carolina’s death
penalty through endless
litigation.
Objective achieved. Of
the 157 inmates on death
row, 154 have sought
hearings under the new
law. White, black, brown,
it doesn’t matter – all are
claiming to be victims
of discrimination. The
bill would have been
more accurately titled
the Racial Injustice Act,
given that it constitutes
a brazen attempt to use
racial demagoguery to
delay or deny the administration
of justice for
the families of murder
victims.
If you read the racialbias
claims carefully, you
will find that they do not
involve the race of the
killer. There is no evidence
that, all other factors
being equal, blacks
are more likely to be executed
than whites. The
real claim is that those
who kill white victims
are more likely to get the
death penalty than killers
of black victims are.
This is an odd claim
to make if you oppose
capital punishment,
December 6, 2011 n www.bladenjournal.com n Bladen Journal n Page 5A
The Atlantic Coast Conference’s first years
J
ust as the Atlantic Coast
Conference (ACC) is poised to
expand again, North Carolina’s
basketball victory over South
Carolina in Las Vegas last week
brought back memories.
They are memories of a time when
the ACC was young and South Carolina
was part of the small family. Well, sort
of.
That “sort of” story is just part of
“ACC Basketball: The Story of the
Rivalries, Traditions, and Scandals of
the First Two Decades of the Atlantic
Coast Conference,” a new book by Sam
Walker.
During most of those first 20 years,
South Carolina, a founding member
of the conference, was part of a family
that stayed together, even if not altogether
happily.
Those first years took the ACC to the
top as a basketball conference, a position
it still holds.
The book opens with a description
of the first ACC conference basketball
game. On December 2, 1953, Maryland
played South Carolina in Columbia
before about 3,000 fans. If you do
not remember who won, you are not
alone. The next day, the newspapers in
Washington and in Columbia gave only
because its implication
is that juries
fail to value
black victims as
much as white
ones – which
is why they
don’t apply the
death penalty
as much. Based
on this logic, as
the vestiges of
racism continue
to fade, the use
of capital punishment
should
increase. I’d
welcome that. Would its
opponents?
Of course not. They
simply oppose the death
penalty itself, either
on moral or efficiency
grounds. Fine. They
should make those arguments.
But they should
stop making disingenu-
short reports that few people noticed.
(Maryland won, 53-49.)
Not much attention. Not much
respect.
Walker compares that
debut game to a meeting
between the same two teams
in 1971, when 14,000 fans
crowded Maryland’s Cole
Field House to see Lefty
Driesell’s young Maryland
team upset Frank McGuire’s
second-in-the-nation-ranked
South Carolina team in over-
time, 31-30.
McGuire and Driesell turn
out to be major characters in
a major-character-filled book
about sports, higher education,
and American cultural change.
Earlier in the 1970-71 season, a game
between the two teams in Columbia
had to be ended with 4:52 remaining
on the clock. A brawl broke out,
and one of the South Carolina players
struck Driesell twice in the face.
McGuire and Driesell exchanged
unpleasant comments in the press,
Driesell accusing “McGuire of smiling
while ‘they were going wild out there,’”
adding “‘if I was Frank McGuire, I
would not bring my team to College
ous arguments about racism.
To get back
to Perdue’s
dilemma,
her problem
is that the
Senate voted
27-17 to
concur with
the House
rollback of
the Racial
Justice Act. It
is now on her
desk. If she
sticks to her
position and vetoes
the bill, she will once
again have taken a position
contrary to that of
most North Carolinians,
including many moderate
Democrats. But if
she allows the rollback,
the left-wing base of her
party will go ballistic.
D.G. Martin
Contributing Columnist
Park.’”
McGuire responded, “I don’t care
what Lefty has to say. There are a million
Lefty Driesells in the
world.…You won’t see the
day I’m afraid of him.”
McGuire might not have
been afraid, but he wore a
bulletproof vest to the game
in College Park.
By 1971, it did not take a
McGuire-Driesell rivalry for
ACC basketball games to be
the lead stories on the sports
pages. By then ACC basketball
games were big-time
sports stories all winter long.
The 1953 and 1971
Maryland-South Carolina
games are bookends for more than 300
pages of ACC history.
Coincidentally, two months after the
1971 game, on March 29, 1971, South
Carolina’s trustees voted to resign
from the ACC. Their reasons had more
to do with the conference’s academic
standards for football recruits than
McGuire’s various feuds with conference
officials.
Walker writes about other colorful
coaches, like Everett Case, Press
Maravich, and Bones McKinney. And
If that wasn’t bad
enough, the day after the
special legislative session
began, a Wake County
grand jury indicted her
campaign fundraiser
Peter Reichard and two
other people for a criminal
conspiracy to evade
campaign-finance laws
during her 2008 run for
governor.
The timing gave state
lawmakers of both parties
the opportunity
to weigh in for the TV
cameras. One who seized
the opportunity was Rep.
Bill Faison, an Orange
County Democrat who
has made no secret of
the fact that he’s interested
in running for
governor should Perdue
decide not to file for
reelection. “She doesn’t
seem to be acting like
somebody who should be
running for governor,”
Faison remarked.
Two other issues drew
discussion during the
special session. One was
the deal Gov. Perdue
just struck to allow the
Eastern Band of the
Cherokees to expand
their casino. The other
was a House bill to block
a scheduled rise in the
state gas tax.
Neither issue was
he writes about the not-so-colorful one
who probably made the greatest positive
impact on the ACC during that
time, Dean Smith.
Attendance and public attention were
not the only differences between the
1953 and 1971 games. In 1953, there
were no black players in the ACC. At
the game in 1971, Maryland had black
players and a black assistant coach.
Today, it is hard to believe it could be
any other way.
“How many more ACC basketball
books can there be?” my wife asked me.
“Think about Civil War books,” I told
her, trying to say that there would be
plenty more. But this “ACC Basketball”
book, written by a prize winning historian
and published by a university press
(UNC Press) sets it apart and makes it
a must-have reference for students of
the game and the times.
n D.G. Martin hosts UNC-TV’s
“North Carolina Bookwatch,” which
usually airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and
Sundays at 5 p.m. But this weekend’s
(December 2 and 4) programs will be
preempted by special UNC-TV fundraising
programming.
For more information or to view
prior programs visit the webpage at
www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/
Gov. Perdue has had a really bad holiday season
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concluded to Perdue’s
benefit. The legislature
left town without acting
on her gambling
compact. And the Senate
refused to go along with
a gas-tax cap, a popular
(though in my view
unwise) measure that
Perdue would probably
have signed and thus gotten
some credit for.
All in all, the governor
had a lousy week – and
her reelection prospects
just got a little dimmer.
n John Hood is president
of the John Locke
Foundation and publisher
of CarolinaJournal.
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