By Tim Stevens
Athens Drive High School baseball star Josh Hamilton was once considered one of the best players in the country. GARY ALLEN — 1999 NEWS & OBSERVER FILE PHOTO
The definition of “most memorable” is pretty easy for me. Whatever I remember is most memorable.
But much of what I remember probably isn’t very noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. My first basketball game was at old Henderson Vance High in the spring of 1967. I remember returning the next year and getting lost. I ended up in Virginia, my first trip out of state. Those memories probably register on no one else’s memory chart.
The same is true of my first football game in the fall of ’67, when Clayton played Meadow. I remember former Clayton football coach Glenn Nixon saying after a win at Apex in a downpour that the last time he’d seen a game played under those conditions was in the leather helmet days. In hindsight, that might have been no exaggeration. I remember I couldn’t get in the announcer’s booth and my notes washed away.
I remember when Oxford Webb played in a basketball gym where spectators could beat on the ceiling and when Bunn played in a gym with all the bleachers on one side. Fuquay-Varina was a girls’ basketball power in the late 1960s behind the play of Sheila Cotton, but back then there was no state playoffs for girls.
I once was the only white guy in the gym.
Baseball was played on a red-clay infield, and the 100 referred to yards, not meters. Track athletes competed in the hop, skip and jump. A local athletics director said the school would add swimming if the kids were willing to practice in the Neuse River.
I also remember plenty of stories I wish I hadn’t written, or had written a different way. There have been times when I literally threw up because of printed mistake.
But those are my memories and not really the most memorable events in covering high school athletics for about 50 years. In honor of The N&O’s 120th birthday Tuesday, here are some of the more memorable things that have happened to high school athletics in North Carolina. Some are good. Some, I think, are bad. Some are just different.
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