Neither is exactly a hardship assignment

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Back at the race track Friday, but I have to admit my mind is elsewhere – at least to some degree.

If you grew up in the Carolinas, you’ve got a story about sneaking out of class to watch the ACC basketball tournament or sneaking a radio into class to keep up with the afternoon games.

It’s really odd for the tournament to be in Charlotte and for me not to be there, too, but it’s also unusual for us to be at Bristol on ACC tournament weekend. The way the calendar has worked for years, we’ve been in Las Vegas for the conference tournaments. Bristol has always been the week we go from 16 down to a Final Four.

It got me to thinking about one of those “what if” questions you sometimes ponder. What if I’d been given the choice to cover the NASCAR races at Bristol or the ACC tournament? Which would I have picked?

It’s a hard question.

I grew up pretending to be Dennis Wuycik, a North Carolina basketball player few non hard-core Tar Heels would likely even remember.

I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter the day after an ACC tournament final in which South Carolina upset North Carolina on a play that made me so mad I kicked the footrest on our recliner so hard I broke it.

The story in the next day’s paper was bad, I thought, and I decided I could do better (and I think I was 11 at the time). I had no idea about deadlines and things like that, of course, but it was the beginning of a career for me nonetheless.

I was so bad I infected my family. My mom was in the hospital once and was on one of those floors where they closely monitor the patients. Mom was watching a North Carolina game on the television and it was close when the nurses all scurried in with a “crash cart” thinking she had developed a major problem.

She did have a problem. The Tar Heels were behind.

I’ve watched a lot of great college basketball in my time. Before I started covering racing, I went to a couple of ACC tournaments and covered Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State and Wake Forest – North Carolina’s so-called “Big Four” – through some great years.

I was there, in fact, for the first official function at which two new coaches appeared. N.C. State had hired Jim Valvano and Duke had hired Mike Krzyzewski, and they were at “Operation Basketball” at the Greensboro Coliseum.

Valvano put on a show.

ZZ Top was doing a concert that night in the arena. We were set up in a lobby area and about the time Valvano got up to speak the band started in with a sound check.

Valvano milked that and really put on a show. He told a joke about how the NCAA had banned off-campus recruiting in August. “I told my wife, Pam, ‘That’s great, honey! Now I will get to have sex 31 times in August,’” Valvano said.

“She said, ‘Great, put me down for two.’ ”

Krzyzewski got up last and joked about how he had figured out how the ACC worked. “They stick the Italian and the Polish guy last,” he said.

When it started raining at Bristol just before 1 p.m. Friday, clearly Bobcats Arena in Charlotte was the preferable place to be. The forecast doesn’t look good until Sunday, and a race track in the rain might be one of the worst places in the world to be.

All things being equal, though, if I had to pick between the ACC tournament and Bristol, I think I’d come to Bristol. Twenty years ago I would never even dreamed I would ever say that, but this place is just something special.