This week, eight men will be inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. The deserving group includes Fred “Curly” Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters; football players Leo Hart of Duke and Ken Huff of UNC; coaches Jack Jenson of Guilford College and North Carolina’s Roy Williams; administrators Tom Butters of Duke and Bill Hensley of Wake and N.C. State; and NASCAR’s Richard Childress.

Honors go to “those persons or teams who by their excellence in the world of sport brought recognition and esteem to themselves and the state of North Carolina,” according to nominating guidelines posted by the Hall of Fame. No standard related to personal character is mentioned.

Plenty of attention has been paid, and rightly so, to Tyler Hansbrough’s uncommon decision to expend the full four years of his eligibility at North Carolina. Hansbrough apparently likes playing NCAA basketball, enjoys his Tar Heel teammates and coaches, and values attending a university.

Even more anomalous, despite a wealth of collegiate honors and acclaim, Hansbrough has deferred the opportunity to get rich quick as a professional athlete.

The UNC star is not alone in his attitude, achievement, or choices. Just down the road in Durham, another national player of the year and multiple All-America has taken a similar if less celebrated path.

Duke women’s golfer Amanda Blumenherst is every bit as accomplished in her sport as is Hansbrough in his, with a comparably promising pro career just over the horizon.

Starting today at Athens, Ga., Blumenherst leads Duke in its quest for a fourth consecutive NCAA championship. Blumenherst

Don’t give the minister credit for unduly influencing the presidential candidate. Rather, it was the high school basketball coach who molded the thinking of his former player.

That became evident in Chapel Hill last week, when Democrat Barack Obama played pickup basketball against players from the University of North Carolina.

Basketball has been Obama’s game since primary school. The scholarship student dribbled a ball daily to and from the 3,700-student Punahou School, among the largest private schools in the U.S., and kept dribbling as he moved around the Honolulu campus.

Basketball remained Obama’s game in high school, where he was a lanky reserve on a 1979 Punahou squad that won the state championship. Because great height is not a common attribute on the islands, Obama wound up at forward despite standing just 6-2.

“We were going through a period of like four years of really, really good basketball players,”

When last we saw Larry Brown, he was the living hub of a coaching wheel that touched every school competing in the 2008 NCAA men’s Final Four. Discussing those links, including his fondness for his former Kansas assistant, KU coach Bill Self, Brown admitted he longed to get back to the NBA sidelines, from which he had been absent for two years.

Wish granted.

Brown, the only coach in history to win titles in both the NBA (Detroit, 2004) and NCAA (Kansas, 1988), was introduced Wednesday as perhaps the savior of a Charlotte Bobcats franchise that has failed to captivate fans, make money or win games. The Hall of Famer was successful at most of his numerous coaching stops, earning 21 playoff berths and four coach of the year awards. He is known as a teacher of the game.

The Bobcats, meanwhile, have yet to post a winning record in four years of existence. They finished 32-50 in 2008, fourth among five teams in the Southeast division of the NBA’s

The surrounding auction houses have largely vanished, along with the sickly sweet smell of bright leaf tobacco that characteristically permeated the humid air for months on end.

Gone, too, are the national headquarters of Minor League Baseball, moved long ago from downtown Durham.

But Durham Athletic Park endures. The modest, 5,000-seat ballfield opened for business in 1938 and survived the ups and downs of the game's popularity. Then, in 1988 the “DAP” gained iconic status as a nostalgic, central presence in Ron Shelton’s much-admired film, “Bull Durham.”

The city celebrates the 20th anniversary of the movie’s release on Wednesday. The paean to bush league ball – starring Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, Susan Sarandon as Annie Savoy, and Tim Robbins as Nuke LaLoosh – is generally considered among the great sports films.

The success of the movie, and the reverence shown the DAP, currently celebrating