An ode to the Hardee's ACC basketball

Scary as it might be, I’m going to let you into my mind for a few minutes.

I’m working on a cool piece on Carolina’s new television production studios and control rooms next to the Smith Center, which is going to be a truly awesome place for the students who get to work there and get valuable experience and the athletes — particularly in Olympic sports — that will now have more chances to be on television and tell their stories via the ACC Network.

That, of course, sent me down the road of exactly how we got here — hours from the launch of a television network that will generate billions of dollars all the way back to the first ACC basketball games I can remember watching as a kid in Durham.

The first memories are just images: blood streaming down the face of Eric Montross comes to mind, Christian Laettner’s shot and the parquet floor at Joel Coliseum with the Demon Deacon head logo. Carolina and Duke won titles when I was just falling in love with the game and playing in my first recreational league.

Next?

One of those cheap, bright orange rubber basketballs with the logo of every ACC team from Hardee’s.

That’s around the time my Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joes were permanently banished to the attic and I started watching SportsCenter on a continuous loop, imitating Stuart Scott and Craig Kilborn during our driveway games.

And for a while there, the official basketball of driveway games in North Carolina was that Hardee’s logo basketball.

Even if you don’t know the ball, you know the ball. Someone you know had the ball or still has the ball in their man cave.

Nice big old-school ACC logo in the middle, surrounded by the nine basketball programs I’d somehow grown to know better than math.

Strutting Rameses is there on the top row next to the Deacon and Virginia’s Cavalier is on the end. State’s hungry Tuffy is down next to the Blue Devil. Blasphemous as it might be to the Big Four, I always had a soft spot for Maryland’s Testudo logo.

(Maryland phasing him out of the logo is malpractice, but the Terps are no longer our problem.)

So, here I am thinking about this damn basketball in a Waffle House, Googling to find more about this damn basketball and generally letting it throw me completely off schedule when I should be writing.

Luckily, Google led me to find out the ball came out in 1994, it was $3.99 with the purchase of a combo or chicken dinner and they exist for several other conferences.

Check out the commercial here

The ball was more than just a ball though.

It’s everything that we love about the ACC and college sports.

It’s remembering those driveway games with your first friends, arguing about whether your team was better with no significant data beyond declaring someone “sucks.” It was watching a Raycom broadcast one night, then pretending Tim Brant and Billy Packer were calling your game-winner.

Now, 25 years later, that ball is some insignificant memory from a long-past game that requires a little more research.

Of course, someone had to have bought us that basketball.

I think about my dad, Bob, bringing it home for me and it instantly becoming my prized possession and getting jammed into my tiny bookbag for school.

Then, I think about Bob and the time we spent together sitting in his recliner in the den. My dad was born poor in rural Georgia, yet John Chaney was his favorite coach and he loved finding a Temple game to watch. From two different worlds, but a connection on the basketball court.

The same connections we all make when it comes to sports — fathers and sons or strangers in the stadium high-fiving after a touchdown.

That all brings me back to the ACC Network, where, sure: it’ll be great to watch the live games and all of the focused analysis. That’s great stuff for any sports fan.

But whether it’s tonight or sometime in the next year or two, when we’re watching the documentaries on Coach K’s first recruiting class, the big ACC Tournament retrospective or the inside-access shows on Carolina basketball or Clemson football, we’ll all look back on something or someone that made it more than just a game for us here in North Carolina.

That Hardee’s basketball was more than just a $3.99 piece of rubber when I was a kid, and now that I’m 33, it’s a symbol of the bond I built with the people I loved and the childlike wonder that sports can still inspire in all of us sometimes.

This isn’t what I was supposed to write today, but the ACC was never supposed to add five schools or lose Maryland.

Sometimes things happen, and sometimes, they work out even better than you expected.