One of the things I enjoy most in sports is the NCAA basketball tournament. At its very best to me, it has a team like Davidson last year.
A small school, from a lesser conference, with little publicity, rises up to compete with the best teams in the land. They pull off a couple of David-and-Goliath upsets and quickly have thousands of new fans.
The tournament takes on great, new excitement.
I was disappointed when the Davidson Wildcats failed to make this year's 64-team shootout, but that disappointment changed quickly when our boy, Clay Henson, from Freedom High, and his Guilford College teammates, made the NCAA Division III Final Four.
It was Clay who put them in that elite group. He hit a three-pointer in the very last second that gave Guilford their quarterfinal win over the University of Texas at Dallas.
The Quakers were behind by 12 points with 5:29 remaining, but the team caught fire to pull out the big game. They won the regular-season crown in the Old Dominion Conference but lost in the league tournament.
Given another chance in the national event, they made the most of it.
You may remember the first column I wrote about Clay several years ago when he was just coming into his own at Freedom. My grandson, Joey, had just left for Iraq with his National Guard unit and Clay reminded me so much of him that it was great therapy to go watch him play.
I have followed him closely since that time and have gotten to know him and his family.
His grandfather, Jimmy, and I were friends for years. I have made two trips to Greensboro to see him play.
Guilford's first game was set for 5 p.m. on Friday and a new wave of excitement hit me when I found out it was to be shown on the college's Web site.
I watched the game in The News Herald newsroom and was so grateful for the opportunity as Clay had one of his better games ever before a national audience.
Guilford lost to the defending national champions, Washington University of St. Louis, but Clay's great play made it one of my best Final Four's ever.
A lot of you won't like this next part but I feel compelled to point it out as a great example of our hypocrisy.
University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams has twice used expletives on national television that were nothing short of disgusting.
It's one thing to say a "less-than-nice" word during the heat of a game when mics should not be around anyway, but it's an all-together different thing in a post-game interview to use absolutely filthy language.
If the university or Atlantic Coast Conference has issued a statement concerning this, I've missed it. If this had been one of our young players, we know exactly what would have happened. But no, it's one of the most prominent coaches in the country. A former national championship coach, a coach that brings the university a lot of money.
Sadly, it's a coach with more clout than the school's president or athletic director and maybe even the ACC commissioner.
I've loved sports and followed them for 63 years. They have brought great excitement and many wonderful, wonderful people like you into my life.
But folks, they are not our God and they do not define our family or friends.
Lets get them back to a place in our lives they belong. This would be a good place for school officials to start.
By the way, I went to school at Carolina and have pulled for them in more games than I could ever count, so this is not a shot at them, but it's something that we need to take a stand on.
Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-1966, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.
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