Tangled all up in blue

SAN ANTONIO | This one’s personal. Saturday night, as everyone knows, Kansas plays North Carolina in the Final Four, and there’s so much history between the two schools, a little bad blood, some brotherly love, a few memorable games, fascinating connections, a longstanding Roy Williams wrestling match and so on.

Here’s the thing: These are also the two programs that have had the biggest impact on my feelings about college basketball. I grew up in North Carolina. And I’ve been writing about Kansas basketball for a dozen years. The Tar Heels changed my life when I was young and still figuring out what I wanted to become. And as a writer, I have watched the Jayhawks get close again and again and then fall just short.

I can remember my shock in North Carolina when they let us out of school early so we could watch the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. I can remember the tears of Wilt Chamberlain when he returned to Allen Fieldhouse, and everyone stood for him, and he choked out a “Rock Chalk Jayhawk.” I can remember little kids on playgrounds wearing full Tar Heels uniforms, down to their Carolina Blue shoes, and shouting “Michael Jordan shoots!” just as they let go their own jump shots. And I get e-mails from soldiers in Iraq whose one connection to home and the Midwest is Kansas basketball.

“People in Kansas don’t really have any idea what we have here,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said this week. “And the people here have no idea what they have in Kansas. Everybody is in their own world, which is OK.”

I’m lucky. I’ve lived in both worlds. Like I say, this one’s personal.

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I didn’t fall in love with college basketball until high school. Up to then, I had lived in Cleveland, and that’s a professional sports town. Browns. Indians. Cavaliers. Nobody I knew in Cleveland cared about college anything except maybe for Ohio State football, which was like a separate category.

I fell in love with college basketball my sophomore year in high school, a few months after my father got a job in Charlotte, N.C. That October, a guy in my psychology class asked: “What’s your team?” He meant ACC basketball team — I knew nothing about it. He tried to sell me on North Carolina State, which had a brash young coach named Jim Valvano. He told me only Yankees rooted for Duke, and I didn’t want to be known as a Yankee. He said only rural kids chose Wake Forest.

“What about North Carolina?” I asked.

He grimaced and said, “Sure, if you want to be like everyone else.”

Well, I did. I was a new kid at a new high school, and all I wanted was to be like everyone else. I decided to root for North Carolina. It was the first sports decision of my life — all of my Cleveland teams had been bequeathed to me, like ugly furniture that you have to keep because they are supposedly family heirlooms.

I chose North Carolina. And, by pure coincidence, that year the Tar Heels had James Worthy, Sam Perkins and a freshman guard named Michael Jordan. They were virtually unbeatable. And that guy in psychology was right; I was like everyone else, wearing Carolina blue shirts, talking basketball in school every day, bragging to each other about how the Heels would beat Clemson by 30 or whatever. I remember this clearly: North Carolina fans like to talk. I fit right in.

In the national championship game, Jordan made the final jump shot, Georgetown’s Sleepy Floyd unwittingly threw the last pass to Worthy, and North Carolina won the national title. I jumped up and down over and over again while car horns outside our apartment blared in celebration.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.