Month: January 2022

By Ed Southern

If you can call it a game, my buddies and I have begun to play: no points or score, no goals or winners, no final horn, no written rules.

Our field of play is a text thread. Our game time is whenever the spirit moves one of us, trusting each other not to be the guy who texts in the middle of the night.

How do we play? Simple: Name an Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball player who played between 1982 and 1998.

Why do we play? That might be simple, too.

Malcolm Mackey. John Crotty.
Elden Campbell. Tom Sheehey.

The player can’t be too obscure — no checking the internet for walk-ons and benchwarmers — but they can’t be too well-known, either. There’s no fun in naming the first players everyone thinks of when they think of that era of ACC basketball: Michael Jordan, Ralph Sampson, Len Bias, Christian Laettner, Tim Duncan, Vince Carter. Those guys entered the consciousness enough to stick around long after their last March Madness. Their highlights still show up on TV, whenever the ACC or their school or some other advertiser wants to weaponize nostalgia and the idea of tradition. Remember them? Remember that dunk, that shot, that One Shining Moment? Remember how long and how much you have enjoyed this sport, this product?

Our game’s goal is to trigger memories, too. Our point is to call up a name that spent three to four years at or near the forefront of our minds, and then left. To play our game, we name a player whose name and face and number and motion we once thought about a lot, and since haven’t thought of once.

Walt Williams. Kelsey Weems.
Pete Chilcutt. Bruce Dalrymple.

Why 1982 to 1998? Those aren’t strict limits, but for us they mark an era. In 1982, UNC won the national title, its first since 1957 and the ACC’s first since NC State’s in 1974, when some of us were toddlers and some of us weren’t yet born. By 1982, we were old enough to remember not just the championship game — Patrick Ewing’s goaltending, Michael Jordan’s jumper, poor Fred Brown’s errant pass to James Worthy — and where we were when we watched it, but that season. We were old enough to be aware of basketball as more than bright, fast colors; the carnival sounds of cheering fans and pep bands; and “Sail with the Pilot,” the ubiquitous jingle of the Jefferson Pilot Corporation, lead sponsor of regional ACC telecasts. We were old enough to know something about how to play basketball. We were old enough to be aware of ACC basketball as a thing unto itself, to begin to absorb something of its weight and meaning in the suburbanizing Sun-Belt North Carolina where we all were born and were growing up.

I was old enough to have had a friend come home with me from school on Quarterfinal Friday of the ACC Tournament, when the teachers fought over the big TV carts from the A/V room, so they and we could watch the games in class. As we waited in our kitchen for his mom to pick him up, he mentioned that his dad was at the Tournament, and had invited him to come, too, but he’d said he’d rather come hang out with me.

“You did!?” my mother, my father and I all exclaimed, shocked, even a little appalled.

Jeremy Hyatt. Timo Makkonen.
Olden Polynice. Anthony Teachey.

In 1998, the youngest among us graduated from college, from Wake Forest, from the ACC. UNC made the Final Four; Duke, the Elite Eight. By 1998, their rivalry had established its hegemony over the conference, in results but more so in media coverage. A new or casual fan could watch an entire season on ESPN, and be forgiven for failing to realize that Tobacco Road was far longer than the 10 miles of U.S. 15-501 between Chapel Hill and Durham. In 1998 Antawn Jamison, who years before had been a Charlotte summer league teammate of my brother’s, won the Naismith, Wooden, and practically every other Player of the Year award. Between Wake’s 1996 ACC title, and Florida State’s in 2012, either UNC or Duke won the Tournament every single year but one. Between 1982 and 2019, ACC teams won 13 national titles, but only 3 of those were won by a team other than the Tar Heels or the Blue Devils. Those famous miles between the Dean Dome and Cameron Indoor sucked all the oxygen out of ACC basketball.

In 1998, Wake Forest’s back-to-back Tournament titles were fresh in our minds, and the Heels/Devils dominance didn’t seem so assured. The ACC hadn’t expanded beyond nine teams, in a fairly cohesive regional spread between College Park and Tallahassee, and so every team still played every other team twice, home and away, each regular season. The Tournament was still only four days, Quarterfinal Friday still intact. Maryland hadn’t left for the Big Ten’s football-driven TV money. Our corner of college basketball still felt like a community, the season like a ritual, a reminder, an assurance through the winters, which still were cold.

Sam Ivy. Keith Gatlin. Mark West. Cal Boyd.

The goal is that spark of recognition, yes, and the quick trip down Memory Lane (which in this case is a spur off Tobacco Road). This little game of ours, though, also serves to strengthen bonds, sustain connections, and — sure — show off a bit. We started playing the week before the 2020-2021 college basketball season began, nine months after the pandemic had shut down the ACC Tournament and cancelled March Madness. We’d seen each other some, at a distance and outdoors, but for the first time in more than a decade none of us had tailgated together, sat in the stands together, watched any games together. We didn’t expect to do so again any time soon, certainly not that basketball season, a season that might not play out to the end, a season they might should not play at all.

We’re a homogenous group of seven, with two pairs of brothers who all went to Wake Forest, plus three Tar Heels. We all are North Carolinians, with roots going back generations. Four have known each other since their teens, when they were counselors together at a Baptist summer camp. Two of those roomed together during graduate school at Duke, and were looking for a third. One of them had a younger brother who knew my younger brother at Wake, and knew he was going to Duke for graduate school, and connected them. I’d hang out when I came to the Triangle for work, and crash on a sofa they still can’t believe I was brave or foolish enough to sleep on.

Four of us now live in Winston-Salem, one in Raleigh, one in Tryon, one outside Goldsboro. All of us are white, straight, cis, middle class, professional.

All of us are sports fans. We have other interests, even passions, and often have long and deep conversations about books, music, movies, whatever: Part of what I value about these friends is their taste, their intellect, their ability to talk about Walker Percy, Ron Rash, Rhiannon Giddens, Superchunk, Terrence Malick, and Mike Krzyzewski, over multiple beers in a single gathering, or over the miles of a day hike.

Most of us, in fact, hardly follow ACC basketball anymore. The four Deacons have suffered through a decade of dreadfulness, Wake fielding teams who played with so little balance or spacing that they looked like pickup players who’d ended up together at random, not even knowing one another’s names. Conference expansion has made college basketball feel reduced, ditched the home-and-away ritual of the season, made Tobacco Road feel like a cul-de-sac. The one-and-done rule has stolen any sense of connection to the biggest stars: I sometimes forget that Zion Williamson and Kyrie Irving spent a season at Duke.

The other five, in fact, follow European football, particularly the English Premier League, as avidly as any sport now, and spend the winter watching more NBA than ACC. (Four of us grew up playing soccer; one went to a Division II school on a soccer scholarship.)

Still and always, though, ACC basketball conjures up our childhoods, calls back to where we came from. We all still live in North Carolina, each an easy drive from the place where we grew up. Where we grew up, though, is as gone from us as if we had come from overseas.

Craig Neal. Alaa Abdelnaby. Delaney Rudd.

You probably think I’m thinking of where we cheered on The Dukes of Hazzard, tearing around the backroads in a souped-up Dodge they called the “General Lee,” the Confederate battle flag painted on the roof, the opening bars of “Dixie” blaring when they blew the horn. You might think I’m thinking of where Dad went to work while Mom stayed home and had dinner ready by 6.

But I, speaking only for myself, am thinking of the place where we cheered on The Dukes of Hazzard, each of them “just a good ol’ boy . . . fightin’ the system like a true modern-day Robin Hood.” I’m thinking of the woods and fields and creeks that that friend and I played in after school, in between games on Quarterfinal Friday, and how they’re long since cleared and leveled and culverted for McMansions.

I don’t blame you. Lots of people have confused the one for the other, the loss of the one for the loss of the other. Most of the North Carolina we grew up in should be gone — but it’s not. Some of that North Carolina we should have kept — but it’s gone.

Robert Brickey. Billy King.
Cozell McQueen. Tony Massenburg.

If we wanted to remember the highlights, the indelible moments, we’d text each other those: Lorenzo’s put-back, Laettner’s turnaround, Randolph’s crossover 3. If we wanted to remember the highlights, we’d text each other YouTube links.

We already remember the highlights — the thrills, the shocks — and will until our memories fail, which is why they’re highlights in the first place. We want to remember more. We want to remember the shag carpet we sat on in front of the console TVs. We want to remember the urgent squeak of those lumbering A/V carts when our teachers wheeled them into the room at a trot, triumphant and eager and a little worried someone might hijack the TV in the hall. We want to remember our whole families gathered around, hanging on every bounce. We want to remember when ACC basketball seemed wondrous, and vital, and ours, belonging to our own backyards.

Scholars and artists recognize and revere this capacity for transportation in other means, food and music and visual representation and rituals of culture and religion. We accept and respect that some media can take us beyond nostalgia and into deep memory, where our animating narratives reside and sometimes re-arrange.

Sports, too, perform this function, serve as a vessel for memory, a comfort for the present, a hope for the future. If W. H. Auden was right that “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance,” then what else does a game-winning free throw do? If art is the beautiful expression of human creativity, with the power to stir deep feelings and thoughts, then how can a 360 dunk, a step-back 3, a no-look assist in traffic not be art?

Art demands creativity but also discipline, inspiration and dogged practice, perseverance and courage. So do sports: the courage of a 6-foot-tall guard driving the lane against a 7-foot center, of a player setting his feet to take a charge, of a young person who steps to the line with the game on the line and the eyes of millions upon them.

Maya Angelou once wrote, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”

Dr. Angelou also lived the last 32 years of her life in Winston-Salem, teaching at Wake Forest, and in a 2012 letter described herself as “a Tar Heel (but not a Tar Heel).”

Take that, Carolina. You got trash-talked by Maya Angelou.

Tom Hammonds. Joe Smith.
Buck Williams. Marc Blucas.

Here, now, I’m supposed to tell you What It Means, tie up all these threads I’ve unwound, make my closing argument that this is more than a flimsy anecdote I’ve overloaded, and our texts are more than a silly game of nostalgia, if we can call them a game at all.

I’m supposed to, but I don’t know that I can. Or, rather, I could, but I don’t know that I want to.

Maybe we started playing this game — if you can call it a game — not just to keep present what we missed and were missing in that year of pandemic, but to remember and even celebrate the courage, the perseverance, the grind of those players who wouldn’t go on to NBA stardom, to shoe deals and sponsorships. Maybe we’re reflecting our privilege. Maybe we just want the smiles of warm nostalgia, like the mid-life men we are. Maybe we want a break from the here, now, and its demands. Maybe we just need the distraction.

Brian Oliver. Bryant Stith.
Robert Siler. Chucky Brown.

I don’t know how long we’ll keep it going, this silly game of ours, if you can call it a game. Our lineup, so to speak, is large but not limitless. At some point our memories or the team rosters will run out, nothing left but the all-timers and the internet.

We might stop when the pandemic does, when we can expect to go to games again, or gather together to watch. We might stop when my buddies read this, and give me a hard time for taking something fun and overthinking it.

“Dammit, Ed,” the text will read, “if we wanted to think, we’d send each other the names of professors.”

Steve Hale. Serge Zwikker.
Todd Fuller. Junior Burrough.

Or we might keep going for as long as we can. We’re as close now to retirement age as we are to college age, which seems both yesterday and lifetimes ago. Before we know it, then, we might be old men, with canes and Depends, fumbling with our now-unimaginable communications devices, using the names of other men to keep alive our friendships and our memories. I hope those other men will be old, then, too. I hope that we’ll all have the chance to be old.  PS

Ed Southern is the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, as well as is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South. It’s available wherever good books are sold.

Stephen Hayes and the African American experience

By Jim Moriarty

Photo: Stephen Hayes in front of his sculpture Flying W by Samantha Everette

We’re sitting in a mostly empty museum gallery, face to face, almost kneecap to kneecap. He has his mask on. I have my mask on. His words echo off the walls and high ceiling, but not with the plain thunder of his work surrounding us.

To my right, his left, is Cash Crop! He made it 12 years ago on his way to his Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. It’s wood and cement and steel. Fifteen naked figures, pockmarked, burnt in places, arranged in a triangle, standing against 15 wooden pallets. On the back of the pallets is the drawing of the infamous Brookes slave ship plan, its cruelty accentuated by its simplicity, a barbaric commoditization of kidnapped humans laid end to end, elbow to elbow, head to toe, row by row, to endure the inhumanity of the middle passage. The figures — casts of friends, family, even one of himself — are linked together by rusted steel chain all gathering at a square wooden block.

“It took me five months to create everything, start to finish. I did all the castings, the blacksmithing, the forging. Did all the carvings,” Stephen Hayes says of Cash Crop! “Five months, day and night, not thinking about anything but making.” He calls it his “machine mode.” The figures are upright so you can look them in the eye, then walk around and imagine them as a mark on a diagram, an entry in a ledger, given barely enough room to survive, sometimes not even that. Walking between the figures “you might hit a chain,” says Hayes. “Always stumbling over the past.”

Two weeks after he first showed Cash Crop! in Atlanta, Hayes was interviewed by CNN. “I didn’t know the weight of what I had created. I had an apartment but I didn’t have heat. I had electricity but I didn’t have cable. I couldn’t watch it,” says Hayes. He went to an AT&T store to see himself on the news.

Making sculpture is a pricey endeavor for a student, even a gifted one. “I knew how to penny-pinch,” he says. “My mom helped me out with money here and there.” Hayes grew up in Durham, where his mother, Lender, worked at the Durham County Department of Social Services on Duke Street. At night she cleaned the building as a second job. “She was everything,” he says.

You might think that the line from CNN to a commercially successful career as an artist would be a more or less straight one, but you would be wrong. Hayes knew how to create, but he didn’t know how to market. When he was an undergrad student at North Carolina Central University, one of his teachers, Isabel Chicquor, went to his house, took photos of all his ceramic work, built him a portfolio and got him his first residency at Alfred University in upstate New York. He knew art — though he didn’t call it that — he just didn’t know how to navigate the system. When someone suggested he apply to SCAD, he “stayed on the porch of my house and built a bunch of stuff and took photos of it.” To his own surprise, he was accepted, left New York and went to Atlanta. That got him on TV but it didn’t get him a living.

While Cash Crop! spent the next decade-plus touring museums from Montgomery, Alabama, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hayes got teaching gigs here and there. He returned to Durham and, at one point, worked in a shipping container yard. He was on the precipice of giving up on the business of art altogether the night he got a residency at the Halcyon Arts Lab in Washington, D.C., leading indirectly to another highly acclaimed work, Voices of Future’s Past, exhibited at the National Cathedral and currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art along with another of his works, 5 lbs. In Voices, Hayes recorded young Black men talking about their lives, their feelings, their experiences, and placed their words inside the busts of older African American men. “When you walk by you have to get up close and kind of lean in to hear what the kid inside him is saying,” says Hayes.

After D.C., Hayes, who now teaches at Duke University, was named the 2020 recipient of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art.

The exhibition hall where we’re sitting is in the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, where Hayes has a one-man show closing March 20. The exhibition of his work coincided with the unveiling of Boundless, his sculpture honoring the United States Colored Troops who fought in the Battle of Forks Road. The remnants of the old road and the vestiges of eroding Confederate revetments are a few yards from the museum’s parking lot. On that day, a section of the sculpture was being reinstalled after it was removed to add a plaque engraved with the names of 1,820 Black soldiers who fought there. Since 2006, the Cameron has hosted a re-enactment of the battle that took place on its property on Feb. 20-21, 1865, when a brigade of over 2,000 USCT soldiers assaulted well-entrenched Confederate infantry and artillery through a narrow gap between swampy Carolina bays. Re-enactors representing the Ohio 5th, a USCT regiment that included two recipients of the Medal of Honor and was known to have fought in the 34-hour engagement, are annual participants.

In his book Glory at Wilmington, The Battle of Forks Road, historian Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. writes, “The headlong assault by the bravest of the brave African American soldiers and their comrades at Forks Road was a ‘brilliant little charge,’ reported one journalist. But the concentrated Confederate rifle-musket and light artillery fire along the narrow front doomed the attack . . . The 5th U.S. Colored Troops at the head of the attacking column, suffered far more casualties than any other unit. The regiment’s 39 dead and wounded soldiers accounted for 74 percent of the total Union losses in the battle.”

In 2019, after the museum’s deputy director, Heather Wilson, successfully wrote a grant securing funding for the sculpture, the Cameron commissioned Hayes to create Boundless. The museum’s executive director, Anne Brennan, invited him to attend the re-enactment of the battle that February. “He was captivated by imagining the sound of their marching boots,” says Brennan of Hayes. “He’s hearing their boots coming up the road. They’re chanting. He’s a brilliant sculptor but it was the dimensionality of sound that first struck Stephen. Those boots. Those boots.”

The DNA of Boundless stretches in two directions, toward Cash Crop! inside the museum and toward Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ 19th century sculpture of Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th on the Boston Common, 800 miles away. The story of the 54th was most recently retold in the 1989 movie Glory.

“We took away the commanding general. Took away that beautiful horse and focused on the infantry,” says Brennan. “There had to be ranks marching. The drummer and the color bearer advancing in full three dimensions activates the work. It’s an homage. It’s an inspiration. Stephen brings that contemporaneity to it.”

For Boundless, Hayes did castings of the faces of seven USCT descendants and four USCT re-enactors for the 11 figures — a color bearer, a drummer and nine soldiers joined together in rows of three. “They’re moving forward. They’re in motion,” says Hayes. “Boundless is on the ground these soldiers actually marched on. I wanted it to be on the ground so people could walk through it and experience it — not be on a pedestal. They weren’t on horseback or anything. How did their footsteps sound? What did they sing? What’s going on in this man’s head?”

Hayes’ sculpture has more contemporary artistic roots than Saint-Gaudens, linking to the tradition of Black sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s and, in particular, to the work of William Ellisworth Artis, who was born in Washington, North Carolina. “Hayes is following that tradition of humanizing the Black experience and really bringing it out in this figurative way,” says Maya Brooks, the Mellon Foundation assistant curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art. “He’s using symbols from across African American history to really think about the themes that he wants to present in terms of how an identity is created, how an identity is formed within a community.”

Hayes says, “Everything I’ve done is thematically joined. Cash Crop! is talking about the transporting of people, but if you take the roof off you can look at it like a sweat shop in a third world country with just enough room to produce as much goods as possible to ship to America. Boundless talks about freeing people of being slaves and talks about how we’re still fighting for that kind of freedom.” Fighting for the freedom proffered by the slave owner who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”

The day after the Battle of Forks Road, the Confederate Army abandoned Wilmington, its last link to supplies from the outside world, and the Union troops marched into the city. “Come daybreak these men bury their dead and advance 3 miles to city hall,” says Brennan. “The USCT was on the front lines for Forks Road and then, come the victory march, they are in the back of the parade.”

Hayes’ next big commission is in Charleston, South Carolina, where he’ll help create a memorial for 36 bodies of the poor and enslaved found in a mass grave nine years ago. “Every project holds a place in my heart,” he says. “I’m still pushing along, trying to make a name for myself. I’ve got to move on to the next thing.”

Stumbling over the past, in machine mode.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.