Football in a Forest The Life and Times of Kenan Memorial Stadium
Lee Pace
Foreword by James Dodson
CONTENTS
Foreword by James Dodson..............................................................................................................................15 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................20 Circle of Life....................................................................................................................................................... 29 Roaring Twenties................................................................................................................................................51 Mister Kenan...................................................................................................................................................... 67 A Natural Ravine................................................................................................................................................ 83 Kick Off...............................................................................................................................................................101 Through the Ages............................................................................................................................................. 119 Mythology ..........................................................................................................................................................137 Eastward Ho.......................................................................................................................................................153 Football in a Forest...........................................................................................................................................175
KENAN JOURNAL
MAGIC MOMENTS
If Kenan Could Talk / Erskine Bowles...............61 The Sound of Music / Ron Green Jr................. 77 Strange Magic / Larry Keith.............................. 95 A Place to Linger / Tony Barnhart...................113 A Visit from the Boss / David Mencino............131 Party Time / Jill McCorkle.................................149 The Roar Beckons / Will Blythe......................169 Just a Game? / Ted Keith ...................................189 Good Taste / Debbie Moose............................... 215
Texas 1948............................................................44 Navy 1957.............................................................. 56 Georgia 1963......................................................... 72 Duke 1970.............................................................90 Duke 1978........................................................... 108 Clemson 1996......................................................126 Miami 2004........................................................ 144 Notre Dame 2008..............................................164 N.C. State 2012................................................... 184 Duke 2015............................................................210
ETCETERA Sidelines.............................................................192 Kenan Social..................................................... 220 Lettermen Year by Year..................................227 Index................................................................... 234 Honored Jerseys............................................... 238
Giovani Bernard motors home on seventy-four-yard punt return for the winning touchdown against N.C. State in 2012, certainly one of the most famous and revered moments in Kenan Stadium history.
The Kenan Stadium story spans much farther than football. Many in the UNC community, including senior Rayna Yvers of Cary, pound the steps for exercise.
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I
Circle of Life
t’s early on a Sunday morning, very early if it happens to be summer. Kenan Memorial Stadium on the Chapel Hill campus is empty. I stand at the top of Section 100 in the northeast corner of the stadium, stretch my calves, my glutes and my thighs, set my watch and take off down the first aisle of concrete steps, going one step at a time at first, then two at a time as I gain my rhythm. I reach the bottom, turn right, go to the next aisle, then bound my way up, two steps at a time, the higher I go the more strain and acid in my legs; the architect at Atwood and Nash who drew the plans in 1926 curved the grandstand so that the risers would be three and a half inches at the bottom and six inches up at row NN.
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CIRCLE OF LIFE turned-safety for the football team during the 1970-71 permanent seat-backs—a rather hilarious recruiting pitch academic year and often between treks from class on north today but one Dooley was dead serious about then. “When the game ended, I decided to walk down and see campus to his room in Ehringhaus Dormitory would escape what it felt like to stand in the middle of the field,” says Miller, to the upper deck on the north side of Kenan Stadium. the quarterback for the 1971 ACC championship squad. There he’d wrestle internally over life issues—mostly at the “When I turned and looked up into the stadium with its time the question of whether to graduate in May or return upper deck, it was magical. for his fourth season of I couldn’t imagine ever eligibility after having been being able to play in such a red-shirted one year with beautiful place. By the grace mononucleosis. “If I needed somewhere of God, a dream came true.” to retreat to reflect or calm Author Jon Meacham writes of an eighteen-yeardown or think a little, I’d old George H.W. Bush sit there by myself,” says arriving in Chapel Hill in Swofford, the commissioner the summer of 1942 for Naval of the Atlantic Coast ConPreflight training, bunking ference since 1997. “I always in Lewis Dormitory Room found it really peaceful and 317 and one day entertaining extraordinarily different his girlfriend, Barbara, who from game day. For whatever Kenan’s not just for football players. Holden, a year-old Golden Retriever (R), reason, when I needed a enjoys a frolic with a friend one spring morning in 2016; Kenan is one of the was visiting from college in Charleston, S.C. “The two comfort place to go hide, favorite destinations for Holden’s master, 2016 UNC grad Caroline Bowers. were in their own world,” that’s where I would go.” Meacham writes in Destiny and Power. “They had a sandwich Quarterback Paul Miller was from tiny Ayden in the and walked the campus, winding up at the university’s Kenan northeast corner of the state when he came to Chapel Hill Memorial Stadium in a grove of pine trees about a mile away on a recruiting trip in the fall of 1967. He stood on the balcony from the Carolina Inn. A sudden storm drove them into the outside Coach Bill Dooley’s office in total awe—“Coach canvas-covered press box. ‘We laughed at everything,’ Bush Dooley was like Methuselah to a kid like me,” Miller says— wrote to his mother.” and Dooley looked at the expanse of seats and told him Former Tar Heel receiver Danny Davis held his wedding to imagine a stadium where the metal bleachers all had
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CIRCLE OF LIFE
Since the west end zone was bowled-in prior to the 1997 season, “The Tar Pit” has become the domain of Carolina students. Plenty of Carolina Blue body paint is doled out throughout the fall among the “Carolina Fever” spirit group.
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A PLACE TO LINGER By Tony Barnhart
w
hen it comes to enjoying fall afternoons in some of the most beautiful stadiums in college football, I have been a very lucky guy. Seven and a half years with the Greensboro News & Record and twenty-five years with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave me the opportunity to visit every stadium in the ACC and SEC on multiple occasions. Love them all—from the Grove at Ole Miss to the view of Monticello Mountain from Mr. Jefferson’s University in Charlottesville. I’ve been to Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium in Austin and stood while the Longhorn Band passionately played The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You. I’ve been to Ohio Stadium and watched the Buckeye band perform Script Ohio. The hair stood up on my arms. I’ve been to State College, Pa., and felt—not heard, but felt—the energy as the Nittany Lions took the field. I’ve been in Michigan’s Big House, although the day I was there Florida State beat the Wolverines 51-31 in a game that wasn’t that close. It was the quietest 106,145 fans I’ve ever heard. I could go on, but you get the picture. When it comes to college football stadiums I’m like Johnny Cash. I’ve been (just about) everywhere. And whenever I’m asked about my favorite places to watch a college football game, North Carolina’s Kenan Stadium is always in the discussion. Pastoral is always the word that comes to mind when I think of Kenan. Where a lot of college football stadiums are places of unbridled energy and sounds and monster crowds and traffic and one big hassle after another, Kenan feels more like the football equivalent of Augusta National.
Kenan Jour na l Bear down: Four fingers from Rameses and The Tar Pit signify the start of the fourth quarter of the 2015 Duke game.
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A gorgeous sunset and a beautiful day in Chapel Hill as Carolina wraps up another home season in November 2015.
Football in a Forest
T
he strains of lyrics from Chapel Hill native James Taylor waft through the forest around
Kenan Stadium one spring afternoon in May 2015 as sound, stage and signage are prepped and tweaked inside the venue for that weekend’s commencement exercises. In my mind I’m gone to Carolina, can’t you just see the sunshine? Outside amidst the trees a man named Tom Bythell speaks with animation and energy about the process of regenerating the forest in the center of a kinetic campus busy with daily foot traffic from thousands of students and some 60,000 football fans on fall Saturdays.
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KENAN Sidelines 192 Kenan
S
ince 2004 I’ve watched Carolina football from the sidelines with a Tar Heel Sports Network microphone in my hand. In one sense, it’s a lousy view: Giovani Bernard was just a blur on the far side of the field when he glided to his touchdown against the team in red in 2012. In another, it’s terrific: Standing under the crossbar, I knew the instant the football rose above the mosh pit of the line that Connor Barth’s field goal was gold to beat Miami in 2004. You take the good with the bad. But it’s always energetic, alive, close at hand. And loud. They grunt and bellow and scream and by God you’d better know when to get the hell out of Dodge. The trick is to find something interesting and quick to pass along to the audience. In that spirit I offer the epilogue to Football in a Forest—a handful of short subjects that fit nowhere else but are worth telling nonetheless.
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SIDELINES neutral site that they first looked to Carolina and Kenan a 9-7 win over West Forsyth. That game came on a Sunday Stadium. Athletic Director John Swofford and Coach Mack afternoon after a hard snowstorm a few days earlier, and Brown embraced the idea while officials at N.C. State and others Strunk had to speak to Richmond County coaches pre-game were lukewarm. about players sliding down the snowy, icy aisles on the darker “One of the things Charlie liked to say was, ‘A memory south side in their football pants and shoulder pads. forever,’” says Rick Strunk, the association’s communications Three years later, Jason Peace threw for four touchdowns to lead Northern Durham to a 39-6 win over West Charlotte. director from 1986 through his retirement in 2015. “We The Knights were coached by Kenny Browning, and a key thought it could be a special experience, a lifetime memory, lineman was Peace’s cousin, Sherrod. Both Peaces and to have teams and communities from all across the state come Browning would soon be Tar to a college campus for the state Heels—Browning launching a twochampionship game.” So in 1989 Kenan Stadium decade career as an assistant coach became the home over one and the Peaces playing through the December weekend of the four late 1990s. Among standout performances championship games from the over the years have been T.A. smallest school Class 1A game to McLendon of Albemarle scoring the largest Class 4A—one game on seven touchdowns in 2001 (before Friday night and three on Saturday. moving on to play for N.C. State) The games were billed as “The and Chis Leak of Charlotte Road to Chapel Hill” around the Independence throwing for 359 state throughout the playoffs. “Memories for a lifetime” was the theme when the state “A few people were skeptical,” football championships began in Kenan in 1989; here yards and three TDs in 2000 (before Strunk says. “But it all worked like players from Shelby High celebrate their 2013 title. signing with the Florida Gators). a charm. It added a level of exciteKicker Snow Brenner of High Point ment we hadn’t had before. People were taking pictures in Central became the first female to score a point in a football this big stadium, a place many had never been before. We had game in Kenan Stadium in 1995 when she kicked extra points plenty of room, plenty of parking, plenty of support staff.” in High Point’s 38-34 loss. One of the early playoff games featured future Tar Heels As soon as other universities saw the positive buzz and Mike Thomas, Eric Thomas and Oscar Sturgis leading goodwill Carolina and the town of Chapel Hill were getting Richmond County High to the 1990 4A championship with from the state championship games, they reversed their earli-
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Chapel Hill during World War II was one of four sites for the physical conditioning of Navy cadets before they began flight training, and the operation continued on the Carolina campus from May 1942 until October 1945.
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The early days of Kenan Stadium are preserved on yellowed scrapbook pages throughout the attics of Carolina alumni, the files of the UNC Athletic Communications office and the deep recesses of the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library. In modern times, however, anyone with a smart phone and access to a social media app like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook can capture and preserve their special moments—on fall Saturdays or any other instant that captures their fancy. Following is a compendium of screen-shots of recent social media posts from Kenan Stadium.
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stadium in an instant A stadium in an instant.
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Nestled in the center of the Chapel Hill campus is Kenan Memorial Stadium, widely
considered the most aesthetically endowed college football venue in the nation. And, there’s been some pretty good football played beneath the pines for nearly a century. Here is the story of a special place in the minds and hearts of all Carolina alumni and fans.