MORGANTOWN — One would think, with their geographical proximity, the two campuses being situated just over 400 miles apart, and rich athletic histories, that West Virginia and North Carolina would have been able to develop a storied rivalry over the years, but the reverse is the truth.
Matching them in this year’s NCAA baseball Super Regional that begins on Friday at 6 p.m. in Chapel Hill’s Boshamer Stadium, is a rare confrontation between the two schools. The best-of-three series will have a 6 p.m. Saturday game and 3 p.m. Sunday affair, if necessary.
Go figure, in more than 150 years of baseball history, WVU and North Carolina have played just nine times, the first time being as far back at 1914 in the days that World War I was brewing in Europe. North Carolina owns a 7-2 edge in the competition but the last time they played a decade ago — WVU won, 5-1, over a No. 12-ranked Tar Heels team as John Means hurled a three-hitter.
Means, of course, now pitches with the Baltimore Orioles and owns a major league no-hitter.
There is, as we will see over the next few days as we look at similarities that you may have missed between the two schools, reason to hope that this, along with last December’s football meeting in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl — a 30-10 Mountaineer victory — that this may be the start of a new relationship between the two schools.
As hard as it is to realize, the two schools have never played a regularly scheduled football game. Despite the similarity in the schools, despite the fact that WVU has a large alumni population in North Carolina, there is this magnetism drawing the schools together.
From 1950 to 1952, the two schools played in the Southern Conference together and never met in football.
The football history is just three games deep, first with the 1997 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., won by the Tar Heels, 20-17, on a strong performance from backup quarterback Oscar Davenport. Then in 2008, Pat White and the Mountaineers won a Dec. 27, 2008, Meineke Car Care Bowl, 31-30, in Charlotte with White hitting Alric Arnett with a fourth-quarter touchdown pass of 20 yards that combined with Pat McAfee’s extra point provided the margin of victory.
Last year’s win in Charlotte gave WVU a 2-1 football edge.
But today we look, instead, at perhaps one of the most overlooked statistics in West Virginia basketball history. While North Carolina’s athletic reputation is built mostly upon its basketball history, the Tar Heels have never beaten the Mountaineers.
The teams, again reluctant to schedule one another, have played only five times and WVU has won all five, which included the Mountaineers first ever victory over a No. 1-ranked opponent. That came on Dec. 27, 1957, at Carolina’s Memorial Coliseum.
WVU won that game, 74-65, and I know what you’re thinking, that Jerry West led them to that victory.
But you would be wrong. True, West was a sophom*ore in that game, but he got himself into foul trouble, played only 22 minutes, took only 7 shots and finished with just 14 points, eight of them from the free throw line.
He hadn’t yet gotten his college basketball game together and wasn’t yet the greatest player ever at the school. In West’s first 10 games as a Mountaineer, he scored more than 20 points only once and that was 28 points against Washington & Lee. His breakout game would came a few games after the Carolina victory as he scored 37 against Villanova.
But think about West Virginia and North Carolina basketball and how those two schools produced maybe the two top players ever to play the game — West and Michael Jordan.
Certainly, an argument can made as such and there is no denying that the two wound up becoming the two greatest marketing logos the sport has ever seen.
West, of course, modestly is the NBA logo. It isn’t something he campaigned for or even knew was coming.
And, a couple of years ago when there was a push to have Kobe Bryant replace him as an updated logo the movement soon died away.
Jordan’s logo — a silhouette soaring through the air, legs spread about to dunk the basketball — turned the Air Jordan brand from Nike into one of the great marketing successes in the history of any business.
No one puts together a Top 10 list of NBA players without West and Jordan on it, the two having become close friends over the years.
“Probably my favorite player of all time was Michael Jordan,” West has said. “There’s a lot of other incredible players I know and frankly been involved with, but to me, he epitomizes what I think is great in a basketball player. Someone who can play both ends of the court. His teams win and in the last quarter he’s going to be there.”
West, who is now 86, says that he and Jordan get together at least once a year at a three-day Hall of Fame event and spend a lot of time together. Both, of course, became avid golfers after their playing careers and have played together, but when asked who won, ever the gentleman, West refused to reveal the answer.
Here’s hoping that the two schools have a memorable NCAA Baseball Tournament playoff and decide to find a way to include each other in scheduling in the future, for it would be good for college sports, which has moved away from natural rivalries as it restructures the sports landscape.
If West and Jordan would give it a little push, it could happen.
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