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The long-overdue recognition finally arrived.
When I showed up at UNC in the late 1960s, the name Curry Kirkpatrick was already legendary to most journalism students. And he was only 25 at the time.
Kirkpatrick, one of six inductees into the North Carolina Media Hall of Fame Friday night, was at the right place at the right time of his burgeoning sports writing career. His flashy-but-honest prose in the Daily Tar Heel attracted then 10-year-old Sports Illustrated when Kirkpatrick was still a senior at Carolina.
They offered him a job as an entry-level reporter, and Curry turned it down because he loved Chapel Hill and wanted to finish his degree. After graduation in the summer of 1965, the magazine came calling again, and this time Kirkpatrick “couldn’t get up there soon enough.” He became the human baseline and living goal for J-school students at UNC – “SI right out of college.”
When we met several years later, Curry didn’t act like a living legend. He was funny, self-effacing and curious to know what all of us still on the Tar Heel beat thought about Dean Smith’s young and climbing basketball program.
He also wanted to party before and after games at home and on the road. And he fit in there perfectly because he still looked like he was 18. In the Time-Warner building in New York, Kirkpatrick worshipped at the altar, or at least the office doors, of Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins, two of the profession’s greats.
Deford, a Princeton grad who took a fancy to UNC, branched out as a sports author, NPR commentator and HBO reporter. Jenkins, a revered sportswriter in Dallas, went on to become a best-selling novelist.
They cleared the path for Kirkpatrick’s 27 years at SI, which grew into the wildly popular sports weekly that we waited for at newsstands or in the mail. During college basketball season, Curry’s stories were the first read.
Humorous and irreverent, he was still deeply knowledgeable about the sport and humanized the games and those who played and coached them. He was worldly in a way we all understood, working analogies and one-liners from contemporary movies, TV shows and best-selling novels into his entertaining pieces.
Eventually, he went “multi-media,” doing features for CBS, HBO and ESPN TV. His home on Hilton Head Island is a mesmerizing museum of clippings and photos from various assignments across the globe far beyond hoops, his favorite.
How it took UNC this long to honor the soon-to-be-80 legend who was birthed from its own womb is beyond me. But his fourth hall of fame, the one closest to his heart, finally happened and is way more than well-deserved.
Featured image via Sports Illustrated
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