Beyond the ACCentric

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI___ Anyone harboring an ACCentric view of the world will be quickly reoriented at the College Basketball Hall of Fame, located downtown in this friendly city straddling Kansas and Missouri.

A visitor beginning a tour of what’s called “The College Basketball Experience" passes down an aisle lined by oversized images that aptly capture a sense of spirited, unvarnished enthusiasm. But it doesn’t take long to notice a trend, or rather a gap. Photographs that feature Michigan, Illinois, Pittsburgh, yes. Gonzaga, Arizona, Louisville, sure. UCLA, UConn, Florida, Kentucky, of course. But no team from the ACC.

Contemplation of that fact is temporarily overwhelmed by a deeper foray into the so-called “interactive museum.” A patron encounters a welter of small, mesh-enclosed courts designed so kids of all ages can try their basketball skills --engulfed all the while by a cacophony of flashing colored lights, rap music, game buzzers sounding, and canned PA pronouncements.

A visitor also soon realizes this creation of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) is an exclusive stage for men’s college basketball, some aspects more than others. Conferences earn scant mention. There is a distinct Midwestern flavor.

Coaches are celebrated as much as the game. Any and all major-college coaches are welcome, with testimonials and commentary from a range of modern cheaters, proven and implicated, liberally sprinkled among the straight shooters.

Yet, even with the emphasis on coaches of all stripes, you will at best find passing mention of former ACC greats such as N.C. State’s Everett Case or North and South Carolina’s Frank McGuire, Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins or Virginia’s Terry Holland, N.C. State’s Jim Valvano or Norm Sloan, or Duke’s Vic Bubas or Maryland’s Lefty Driesell. Plenty of contemporary ACC coaches do appear as you roam the 41,500-square-foot facility, included in push-button video presentations on topics such as defense and player relationships.

Images of ACC players are scarce. That theme extends to the Hall of Fame itself, three walls of commemorative plaques in a sober setting apart from all the hoopla.

When the facility opened in 2007, the original 173 honorees were college-related members of the older, more inclusive Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Only four ACC players made the cut – N.C. State’s David Thompson and UNC’s Billy Cunningham, Bob McAdoo and James Worthy. The ACC region is represented by almost as many black players who fled to northern schools during the era of segregation – New Bern’s Walt Bellamy, Atlanta’s Walt Frazier, and D.C.’s Dave Bing.

More recently, pre-ACC star Dick Groat of Duke was added to the Hall of Fame, as was Driesell, another Dukie noted for his coaching. Among the 2008 inductees is Wake Forest guard Billy Packer, going in as a broadcaster along with Dick Vitale. But there’s no Michael Jordan, no Ralph Sampson (a three-time national player of the year at UVa), no Christian Laettner from Duke.

The most noticeable image of an ACC player is a floor-to-ceiling Tyler Hansbrough beside a court with extra-low baskets to facilitate dunking for the vertically impaired. The UNC senior also appears in a display on “Reigning Champions” of 2008. Flattering photo, too. The returning national player of the year has the ball, his left leg is lifted like a crane toward the camera, and his face wears a lopsided grimace as if his jaw is working to expel something stuck in the right corner of his mouth.

There is a further ACC flavor at the ESPNU media desk. Videos of the final seconds of the 1982 and 1983 NCAA title games involving UNC and N.C. State, respectively, are rerun so visitors can try their hand at game commentary on live TV.

There’s also a small theater that continuously repeats videos dedicated to key aspects of the game’s history. One short film praises North Carolina’s Dean Smith as producing squads that embodied the virtues of team play. The narrators – ironically, given recent changes at CBS -- are Packer and Clark Kellogg, his on-air replacement.

Unfortunately for the cause of accuracy, the segment on racial integration written by Bob Ryan and Bob Field erroneously lists Tar Heel Charles Scott as the first African-American player in the ACC, a common misconception. Maryland’s Billy Jones preceded Scott by two years, Duke’s C.B. Claiborne and Maryland’s Pete Johnson by one.

Over in the section on coaching trees – find a name, push a button, see the connections -- Larry Brown is listed as working for one year at Clemson under Cliff Ellis. Never happened.

One of the museum/funhouse’s most celebrated coaching names may barely ripple the cords of memory in ACC circles, but here Forrest “Phog” Allen commands the status of demi-god. The man who learned basketball from James Naismith and taught it to Hall of Famers Adolph Rupp, Marv Harshman and Dean Smith is hailed with the fervor and respect reserved in our neck of the woods for Case and McGuire.

An entire informational panel on the history of the game is devoted to Allen, dubbed “America’s first great college basketball coach.” (Not incidentally, given the locale, Allen also founded the NABC.) The University of Kansas coach is pictured gazing solemnly into an indefinite distance with Allen Fieldhouse as the backdrop.

Back in 1955, students at KU were invited to vote on a name for a new, 17,000-seat Physical Education Building and Armory, at the time the largest campus arena in the nation. The tally was 924-10 for Allen over Naismith, the former Jayhawk coach who happened to invent basketball.

Drive 40 minutes west from Kansas City and, to this day, a visitor looking toward the north end of summer-steamy Allen Fieldhouse, a stone building ringed by windows at its highest reaches, confronts a banner that reads: “Pay Heed, All Who Enter, BEWARE of “THE PHOG.”

Now that there’s a new national championship banner to hang in the rafters, KU has raised $55 million in private funds to make improvements to a building that cost $2.5 million to construct. The arena area will remain untouched. Like Duke's similarly iconic Cameron Indoor Stadium, no one is eager to mess with both tradition and success.