PHOTOS BY PAUL SANCYA/AP
try to never talk to them about basketball. I
figure they get enough of that everywhere
else they go. So we talk about grades and
girlfriends, their courses, summer school
and summer jobs, their ambitions — and
turning the music down at 2 a.m. in the
off-season.”
Nevertheless, basketball does dribble
into the conversation sometimes, Neal
admits. “Before the Final Four I broke fast
and spoke with Bobby in the backyard
about his below-the-fold contributions and
leadership this year and told him how
proud I was of him.”
ONLINE: See an e-mail stream from Final
Four week and a bit of the UNC pedigrees of
the participants at alumni.unc.edu/finalfour.
As my son, Ted ’02, is quick to remind
me, our group is hardly unique. However, it
is representative, illustrating the notion of
devotion, not only to a team, but also
among like-minded pals, even if we haven’t
all met. Our group didn’t “start” so much as
evolve. It began with friendships forged
among Stump, Kirk and Neal, and basketball
was the Krazy Glue that held them together.
“Kirk and I were roommates one year in
the Beta Theta Pi house,” Stump recalls,
”and had a habit of being crazy for the
Heels. We even swore off dating to pursue
drinking and watching Carolina one season,
but that lasted about a week until Kirk met
somebody. Well, enough said. Anyway, Neal
was a friend too, and we used to go to the
ACC tournament in Greensboro. Jim had a
neck brace, so we could park up front in a
handicap space and walk right in.”
The collegiality and love of basketball
continued after graduation, Stump says. “In
the early 1990s, perhaps the championship
run in ’ 93, Kirk, Neal and I started e-mailing. We also had several pre-game conference calls, but that became expensive for me
as the host, so we shifted entirely to e-mail.”
Stump calls himself “the connector in
the crowd” and considers Kirk the “
sustainer and expander.” So let Kirk pick up
the story from here.
“While Tim was sending stuff to me
and a few others,” he says, “I was also sending my rambles to some other poor souls,
and they would sometimes pass it on to
people they knew. So a few years ago, I
incorporated both groups, and created the
master list we have now.”
Today’s technology has eased the
process. Except for me, the old Luddite in
the group. A BlackBerry for most people is
PoisonIvy to me, and I’m hereby begging
the others not to open Twitter accounts. I
watch games in my den and rush two
floors to my desktop Mac during commercial breaks to catch up, chime in and
study the stats. Most everyone else in our
extended foul line huddle watches and taps
