Carolina has another national Hall of Famer of note.
Curry Kirkpatrick, UNC Class of 1965, was inducted into the National Sports Media Hall of Fame Monday at the same ceremony in which Hubert Davis received the Clarence “Big House” Gaines Coach of the Year award. While Hubert has gotten plenty of props since turning the 2022 Tar Heels into a Final Four team, Curry’s story is longer, deeper and very deserving.
After arriving at UNC from St. Louis, he got famous on campus with his writing in the Daily Tar Heel that, upon graduation, led him to the then-attainable dream job of working at Sports Illustrated, which had launched only 12 years earlier. He steadily rose to being the best-known and most dapperly dressed sportswriter in the country.
He eventually covered everything, including tennis and golf and the NBA, but Kirkpatrick helped college basketball jump from a regional sport to a national past-time with his colorful writings in SI, and he selflessly mentored numerous Carolina J-school grads who followed him.
The Sports Illustrated Vault is filled with 40 years of Kirkpatrick brilliance from reporting of regular-season college games to the Final Four with contemporary analogies to long-piece stories on superstar athletes, celebrities and legends in music (his second favorite subject).
The best example of the first was when he covered Maryland’s ill-fated attempt to become UCLA of the East, after the Terrapins got blown out at UNC in the sophomore years of Tom McMillen and Len Elmore. Paraphrasing his lead from the blockbuster movie Love Story, Curry began by simply writing, “What can you say about a basketball team that died?”
Over the years, he remained immensely respected while not hiding his affinity for Carolina teams and his university, although it did make his job harder in his later seasons. He wrote a controversial story for ESPN Magazine about Duke recruiting that angered Coach K and got him banned from press credentials to Cameron Indoor Stadium, where he used relationships with opposing coaches to get in.
Kirkpatrick was the first national sportswriter to cross over and report for CBS Sports and later on ESPN. He is still as clever and funny as ever, but now entertains only friends on-line from his home on Hilton Head Island.
He remains a private Duke baiter, staying off social media and sharing his creative rodent nicknames for his nemesis through private texts and emails. It will take all of his guile to keep that up now that the coach he loves to hate is gone.
“What can you say about a coach who might have rather died than retired like he did?”
With love, from one Hall of Famer to another.
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