Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 29, 1993 TAG: 9304290111
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Madelyn Rosenberg
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But on our campus in Raleigh, Jim Valvano was God, and to many of the students at NCSU, that was no joke.
While I was working as an editor for our student paper in the midst of allegations about wrongdoings in the basketball program, I sent a reporter to a meeting where Valvano was speaking to the students.
The reporter - whose name fails me - stood up during the meeting and told Coach V: "I work for the Technician and I want you to know that I don't care what our paper reports. I'm behind you."
So it was not that reporter who wrote about ethical questions in the basketball program or about how "48 Hours" television crews followed the players around as they went to - or skipped - classes. Or of numerous other accusations of wrongdoing.
For awhile, it was me.
"Coach V Kicks Aerobics Club Out of Gym." `
`Coach V Rents Coliseum to Hyundai for $75."
"Coach V Makes Oodles of Dollars from Endorsements."
"University Starts Internal Probe."
I graduated from N.C. State in 1989 before the biggest allegations came out about the basketball program, followed a few years later by another type of story: Coach V Gets Cancer.
I am glad I didn't have to write that one.
But I have read that story from afar, read of his fight, his threats: I will beat this.
Read the Sports Illustrated account that had me near tears, though I had never claimed a great affinity for the man.
This week, I read of his defeat. And, as a die-hard Wolfpack fan, it still caught me off-guard.
The Cardiac Pack always had eked it out in the last seconds. Valvano's coaching, in part, had given the team that name.
I thought, somehow, it would carry over to him.
A story Valvano told about showing up in the wrong state for a Wolfpack Club meeting, wearing a bright red blazer with wide lapels, seems funnier now than the third time I heard it.
Likewise, now I seem to make excuses for the fact that he frequently referred to me as "Melissa" though I talked to him a couple of times a month - after all, he talked to so many people.
When he was angry in the locker room and wouldn't want to give a comment, he would fill his sentences with expletives, resulting in so many ellipses in the copy that our paper couldn't print what he said.
After he announced his illness, I called his cussing "character."
Part of his character, too, was that he was a difficult man for an unseasoned reporter to interview. Ask him a question and he'd talk for half an hour on a different subject. Write something about him that he didn't like and you might get an invitation to lunch where he'd finally find time to tell you his side of the story.
Before his illness, I might have called him a jerk. Now, I have to thank him for teaching a greenhorn how to focus questions and be persistent.
I tell myself, time and time again, that illness shouldn't make heroes. That just because someone lies dying, he should not be exonerated for running a loose basketball program.
In the end, it was never proven that Valvano did much more than try to do too many things at once. I wonder now if the athletics committee feels guilty as I do: guilty for asking him to leave; guilty for never really liking the guy so much; heck, guilty for not loving the man, as so many people did.
It is a power that illness and death have over people - especially during a struggle as public as Valvano's. To dislike someone who is dying becomes a sin in itself.
So you admire his fight.
You overlook. You pretend to forget.
And, all the while, you wonder whether or not you should.
Or if, as during college, you have to take the unpopular stance but say you're sorry.
\ Madelyn Rosenberg is a staff writer who works out of this newspaper's New River Valley Bureau.
by CNB