Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook is presented by The Casual Pint. YOUR place for delicious pub food paired with local beer. Choose among 35 rotating taps and 200+ beers in the cooler.

For national radio day, here is my best of many WCHL moments.

Despite doing work here for a part of five decades, I have never been an actual employee of WCHL. Just a part timer as a student to a contractor like today. But what a ride it’s been.

Coming out of UNC, I wanted to work for both the old Chapel Hill Weekly and WCHL, but the owner of the Wednesday-Sunday newspaper Orville Campbell would have none of it. He apparently didn’t get along with Jim Heavner, the younger and smarter owner of the local radio station.

But upon returning from a year with the Journal Constitution in Atlanta, I got the sports notebook gig after grad student Jim Lampley went from making $80 a month to $80,000 a year as ABC’s first college football sideline reporter.

I came up with the “See ya” outro on a whim, but Heavner liked it and told me to keep it in. So as Sports Editor of the old Durham Morning Herald, I was officially a multi-media man, and boy was it fun and remains so today.

Dean Smith was notorious for going to bed late and waking up around 10 am, so he rarely caught my Notebook live. But on occasion, someone would tell him that he probably wouldn’t like what Chansky had to say that day. Betsy Terrell or Linda Woods would call me up and say, “Coach Smith would like to see your script from today’s commentary.”

And I was happy to run the sheet of yellow paper over to the basketball office in Carmichael. Only, the Monday after St. Patrick’s Day of 1977, I could not oblige. After the NCAA Sweet 16 game in College Park on Thursday night, I went out to party with Washington Bullets’ rookie Mitch Kupchak and a few friends.

About midnight, I realized I had not called in my Friday notebook to be recorded on the other end. I was excited about doing it because Phil Ford had made two late free throws with a hyperextended elbow to edge Notre Dame and obnoxious coach Digger Phelps, who had no love for the Tar Heels.

So when Linda called that Monday morning, I had to tell her that I didn’t have the script because I had left it on the phone booth floor after the call. She wanted to know what it said, and I said I couldn’t really remember. “I know how it started, Linda,” I offered, and she said to tell her. I recounted my opening line: “It was St. Patrick’s Day, but Carolina had the luck of the Irish.” Smith said you had to be lucky and good, but less lucky.

She said that was okay and agreed that Coach Smith wouldn’t like the way it started and probably would not have read the rest of it.

More than 6,000 sports notebooks later, this is Art Chansky . . . See ya.

 

Featured image via Associated Press/Kathy Willens

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