Wake Forest University is a college sports phenom

Wake Forest University is a lot like Switzerland – “a pretty place that no one hates.”

 

That’s the official assessment offered by sports commentator Mark Packer, who is the son of Wake’s hall of fame basketball star Billy Packer. 

It’s true – nobody hates Wake. The Demon Deacons are just sort of “neutral,” added Ed Southern, a Wake alumnus, author of a new book “Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South.”

 

The problem is: “We’re no one’s big rival, in football or basketball,” Southern said. “No one highlights the Wake game on the calendar.” 

Wake Forest is the smallest university among the NCAA’s “Power 5” conferences with 5,472 undergraduate students.

 

For the better part of four decades, Southern said he moved about wearing his Wake Forest ball cap and drove around in a car adorned with a Wake decal. Nobody cared. Nobody expressed any negativity. 

“Then I married an Alabama fan,” he said. (Apparently, a Crimson Tide decal was added to the family vehicle as well.) Since then, “I’ve been taunted…glared at in Waffle Houses…cut off and flipped off on the interstate.”

“Bama has become Death, Destroyer of World…and coach Nick Saban is the scowling face of doom.” 

Southern rationalizes: Alabama’s all about that other sport – football. 

For Southern, the Atlantic Coast Conference is “mostly about” basketball, but “the ACC has boxed itself out from any semblance” of its former unity and identity “thanks to the need for TV money.” 

He said that the league was once tight, with the loyal core institutions being Clemson, Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State, Virginia and Wake. Then came Georgia Tech, Florida State, Miami, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Syracuse and Louisville. 

What’s the likelihood of a Syracuse fan grabbing some Stamey’s barbecue on the way to catch a game at the Greensboro Coliseum? Would a Miami fan marvel at a stroll down Franklin Street in Chapel Hill? 

“I miss the unity, the community, of the old South-bound ACC,” Southern wrote. “ACC basketball just doesn’t feel the same.” 

“I know that an expanded ACC is far better than none at all,” he said. “Yet, expansion has made ACC basketball feel reduced, though, and has made Tobacco Road feel like a cul-de-sac.”

 

With college conference realignment looming, driven by the big media bucks associated with football, not basketball, more turmoil is expected. 

It’s sort of like the referee at tip-off lofting a ball filled with helium that won’t come down. The players, coaches and fans are all in a state of suspension. 

Looking ahead, Southern said he has a young daughter who is smart enough to know to wear a scarlet Roll Tide ball cap when her Alabama grandfather takes her fishing. 

Truth be told, he said, “I’d be just as happy for her to go to Alabama as Wake Forest. I’d even be happy for her to go to Carolina or Clemson. Duke on the other hand….” 

“How she’ll navigate…how she’ll draw her own borders…that’s all up to her, and I can’t wait to see what she chooses. Let her sing whatever fight song she wants, just as long as she gets to sing.”

 

Southern concluded: “I’d be happy for her not to go to college at all, so long as she’s happy and healthy and productive, self-sufficient and satisfied with her life.” 

In the end, he said, “the fight’s for what ought not to change – change over consumption, character over convenience, love over hate.” 

“Except for Duke, of course.”