If they don't win, it's a shame

As an East Carolina University graduate, I’ve admired Hicks since I learned just how great of a football player he was, which happened to be before my time. One of the best-ever Pirate running backs, the former Vance Senior High star is enshrined in the ECU Athletics Hall of Fame and played professionally for the New York Giants.

The speakers that shared words about Hicks Friday all spoke eloquently about Hicks, the man. But the pride the memories of his football exploits elicited caught my ear.

His pastor Lawrence White and Hicks’ high school teammate Ricky Thompson both recalled his long touchdown run as a freshman against North Carolina in 1975. Mayor Eddie Ellington remembered what it felt like to see Hicks on TV and know they shared the same hometown. And City Manager Terrell Blackmon reminded the audience how exceedingly rare it is for a football player to make it onto an NFL field as Hicks did.

More than four decades after his playing career ended, the people of Vance County are still proud of Hicks. So are ECU fans, who shower him with adoration at pregame tailgates on his regular return visits to Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium.

Plunging into the culture of sports often has a way of all but erasing the boundaries of race, class and politics. In American sports, those divisions seem trivial when your team’s or hometown’s reputation is on the line.

The irony arrives when we become so invested in sporting outcomes that we develop disdain for other teams and schools, and their players and fanbases.

Just for example, how incredibly peculiar is it that UNC Chapel Hill Democrats and Republicans can unite as one when the Tar Heels take the Smith Center floor, becoming the fiercest of allies, joining forces only to fuel separate and scornful rivalries with their Tobacco Road neighbors.

Stranger yet is that Mississippi’s flagship university, having long called its athletic teams the Rebels, stopped waving Confederate flags at its football games only by the late 1990s.

On that note, I wonder how many white college sports fans that had been opposed to integration, particularly in the football-crazed Deep South sectors of the Southeastern Conference, eventually cheered on Black players if it meant beating a rival school.

Sports can teach us to love and sports can teach us to hate. At worst, fans trade one bias for another. But at best, we can learn that some of the margins we’ve created for ourselves in everyday society are hollow and redeemable.

Will I feel as harmonious around noon of Sept. 3 when ECU and N.C. State kick off college football season in Greenville?

Doubtful.

Extra point: In Saturday’s story about Hicks, I incorrectly reported the yardage of the “long” touchdown run against North Carolina. And in Tuesday's paper, I incorrectly reported it again. It was 53, according to the News and Observer.