Hurts So Good

If the Detroit Pistons’ talented forward Rasheed Wallace ‘97 is such a heel, why is he the basketball valentine of so many Carolina alumni? The fans, the sportswriters and one infamous list explain why love doesn’t always feel like it should.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, March/April 2005

You can have your Joe Namaths, if you want to be obvious, if you want some good old-fashioned, Brady-Bunch-approved chutzpah, the kind of boasting you can see coming from a mile away. If you want a drama queen, you can have the guy who promises a win in the Super Bowl. In the Olympic 100-meter dash. In Game 7 of the World Series. Go ahead. Pick your favorite glory hound.

Me? No thanks. I’ve got my eye on somebody else. Somebody less predictable. He’s standing over there in that corner of my brain that summons what I know I’m not supposed to love – like a boy with a fast car and a late curfew – with the kind of nasty attitude and inked skin that doesn’t exactly spell e-n-d-o-r-s-e-m-e-n-t-s, giving me that come-hither scowl. From the moment he reared back his head and roared into my life at Midnight Madness in the fall of 1993, he has promised me something different from all the rest: the Montrosses and the Lynches, the Jamisons, and yes, even Vince and Stack.

He promised that Carolina would never lose to Duke on the Blue Devils’ home court while he was a Tar Heel – for all two seasons that he was a Tar Heel before he left for the NBA draft in 1995.

I know this last assertion because of The List.

Desperation Shot

Time was running out on Nikki Teasley ‘01, and more than a game was at stake. With the help of her coach and her school, the basketball star beat the clock, won her life back – and opened some very heavy doors in college athletics.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, May/June 2003

The moment the end begins is the most important moment, of course. Nobody understands that better than Nikki Teasley.

She had missed her first four three-point attempts in this game, and her 11 assists – a record though they were for the WNBA Finals – would be little more than a footnote if her team, the defending champion Los Angeles Sparks, didn’t win the ending. It’s funny, really, how you can play 39 minutes of basketball and treat each of those minutes like it was the last and still find the score tied with a minute to play. The ending – that’s what really matters. That’s where the future is written.

Had this been any other time in her life, Nikki Teasley might have been distracted by thoughts of the doubts people had when her coach, former L.A. Laker Michael Cooper, traded a veteran point guard, a championship point guard, for her – a rookie who couldn’t keep her head on straight enough to play at the college level, much less with the Sparks.

Had this been any other time in Teasley’s life, she might have thrown the ball to the other team just to avoid the responsibility of losing. Or winning.

That was once true. All of that was true, not so very long ago.

Twelve, 11, 10 …

The score was tied at 66, and Teasley took an inbounds pass from her teammate. She dribbled in front of the Sparks bench at Staples Center and looked for MVP Lisa Leslie under the basket. But New York Liberty players had the 6-5 Leslie swarmed – and even Teasley’s defender, Liberty guard Teresa Witherspoon, had left her alone, figuring Teasley’s four earlier misses made her too cold to shoot, let alone score.

Nine, 8, 7, 6 – The seconds ticked away. Teasley clearly had no other options. But she’d known this feeling before in her life – being out of options, being the architect of an ending – and this was just a basketball game. This was nothing like planning the premature end to your life.

The Rarity of Rasheed

Published in Carolina, the UNC basketball gameday magazine, December 1994. (Sophomore year)

Questions, questions. There always have been questions for Rasheed Wallace. When Sports Illustrated came calling at 14 years old, Wallace probably had a pretty good indication it would be difficult to hide from all those questions for the next, oh, 20-30 years.

When The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News began a college-choice vigil on the lanky 6-10 center from the City of Brotherly Love when he was 15, he probably knew he could throw normalcy out the window.

And when the Inquirer magazine ran a Wilt-Chamberlain-sized article about his daily life at 16 — Who’s your Algebra teacher, Rasheed? What do you talk to your girlfriend about, Rasheed? How are your grades, Rasheed? — well, let’s just say it’s enough to drive a man to silence.

So if you have a question for media-tested Wallace these days, he will answer it for you on the court. Because that’s about the only place you can be sure to find him eventually.