Growth spurt

Former Virginia coach Terry Holland was asked what he remembered from the 1987 ACC men’s basketball tournament, the last one played in the Washington area before this year.

“We lost,” he said.

To the same question, North Carolina coach Roy Williams replied, “My hair was black.” His boss back then, Dean Smith, immediately thought of a charging foul that was not called on N.C. State’s Vinny Del Negro down the stretch in the championship game. And Bobby Cremins, the ex-Georgia Tech coach whose hair never has been black, or so it seems, recalled, “There weren’t a lot of places outside the arena where you could walk around. It seemed so isolated.”

It was. The tournament site was Capital Centre, surrounded by parking lots in suburban Landover. Cremins’ team lost by one point in the first round to Holland’s Cavaliers, who then suffered a painful double-overtime loss to North Carolina the next day.

Williams was an assistant to Smith, the legendary Tar Heels coach. Unbeaten during the ACC season, North Carolina lost 68-67 in the final to N.C. State and Del Negro, the tournament MVP. The coach of the Wolfpack was Jim Valvano.

A few things have changed since then.

Capital Centre is gone, replaced by a shopping center. This year’s tournament starts tomorrow at MCI Center in downtown Washington, affording Cremins, who does some television work, ample opportunity to stretch his legs.

Williams, now nearly as silver up top as Cremins, left Chapel Hill in 1988 for the head coaching job at Kansas. He returned to his alma mater two years ago. Valvano died of cancer in 1993. Smith, Cremins and Holland all have since left college coaching for other pursuits, as has Clemson’s Cliff Ellis, Wake Forest’s Bob Staak and Maryland’s Bob Wade. Only Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski holds the same job.

Do the math and you come up with the biggest change of all in the last 18 years. There were eight coaches, eight teams then. The ACC was a cozy enclave extending from Maryland to South Carolina and then Georgia. Florida State made it nine teams in 1991, and the addition of Miami and Virginia Tech this year swelled the total to 11. With a 12th school, Boston College, warmed up and ready to come aboard next year after a final season in the Big East, the map on the new ACC logo stretches from Florida to almost Canada.

When football power Florida State joined the conference, “I thought we’d add two more teams in the next couple of years,” Cremins said. “Then it stopped.”

But not for good. In 2003, another football giant, Miami, agreed to bolt the Big East for the ACC. The maneuver was orchestrated in part by university president Donna Shalala, a former cabinet member in the Clinton administration whose love of a good scrap had earned her the nickname, “Boom Boom.”

“Boom” is also the sound a cannon makes, and the move was a direct hit on the Big East. Following Miami’s lead, Virginia Tech and Boston College also eventually jumped into the waiting arms of the ACC, although Syracuse, not Virginia Tech, originally was targeted. As when any relationship ends badly, things got nasty. Words and lawsuits flew. A $100million suit filed by the remaining Big East teams against the ACC is still pending.

“This will trigger the most disastrous blow to intercollegiate athletics in my lifetime,” Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said at the time, reflecting the depth of emotion.

“It’s too bad there was so much animosity,” Cremins said. “Too bad it couldn’t have been handled a little better.”

How?

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