As I contemplate the re-union of Charlie Gaddy, Bobbi Batista, Bob DeBardeleben, and Tom Suiter --legends all-- I can't help but reflect on the 24 years since the last show they anchored together. So much has changed. And yet, in some ways, so little has changed.
Since this column is supposed to be about sports, I won't digress long about the technological and human changes in the period running from 1982 to 2006. Typewriters have given way to computers. Pay phones have been replaced by cell phones. The quality of the television picture has improved markedly, thanks to high definition. Our children now have children. And the sports landscape is so much different now than in 1982.
Tom of course, is still a mainstay at TV Five, but it may be shocking to the others to see what we now cover in sports. We still do high school football of course, now as much as ever. But now in North Carolina, we have three professional sports teams. The Charlotte Hornets (now Bobcats), the Carolina Panthers and the Carolina Hurricanes were nowhere on the horizon when our famous quartet last sat on the set together. Now these teams consume at least some of our attention every day.
Women's sports have exploded in the past quarter century. Carolina and Duke, which just began giving women's basketball scholarships in the mid-seventies, are now among the top ranked teams in the country. N.C. State, whose coach Kay Yow brought big-time women's basketball to the Triangle, has also set the stanrdard in track and cross country. Triangle schools have begun to produce Olympians in ths sport. We should also note that Duke actually began to endow its scholarships for women athletes a few years ago. And Carolina's program in women's soccer under Anson Dorrance has become the greatest dynasty in the history of college sports.
The landscape has changed among the smaller schools. Shaw and St. Augustine's have added football. North Carolina Central, which has always played football, now plays it better than virtually any division II school in the country. Campbell and UNC-Pembroke are in the process of adding football.
The places where the games are played have undergone some revisions. Both Carter-Finley Stadium and Kenan Stadium have undergone major expansions. The Dean Smith Center, which was still in its formative stages in 1982 is now considered a venerable old place.Cameron Indoor Stadium is a place our 1982 anchor team would recognize, but it has been renovated in the interim. The RBC Center wasn't even a pipe dream in the early 80's.
NASCAR has grown incredibly since 1982. The Charlotte Motor Speedway is now the Lowe's Motor Speedway. Those crowds of 40,000 have grown four and five fold. The sport's television ratings nationally run second only to the NFL. The Nextel Cup Series has abandoned two North Carolina tracks-North Wilkesboro and Rockingham. Yet much of the sport's infra-structure is still based here, and that generates millions for this state's economy.
The Triangle has made 17 trips to basketball's Final Four since 1982 and won 5 national championships.
Football is another matter. Since our group anchored its last show together, we have seen nothing approaching a national championship in Divison One football. In fact, only Duke has claimed even a piece of the Atlantic Coast Conference title-that in 1989. Carolina's last ACC Championship came in 1980. NC State's in 1979. From that standpoint, Charlie, Bobbi, Bob and Tom can look around and see that not much has changed.
