2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Dimon Kendrick-Holmes)
A couple of weeks ago, my wife Bess suggested going to Piano Friday with friends on March 21. Piano Friday is a recurring (and free) event at UNC School of the Arts, and this month's guest performer will be Mikhail Voskresensky, a Russian master who's been performing the works of Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich all over the world for more than six decades. Last month, we caught the Piano Friday concert featuring Antonio Pompa-Baldi, and it was about as thrilling as a piano concert can get.
In fact, it was so thrilling that while I was standing in the men's room during the intermission, the guy at the urinal next to mine actually turned to me and said, "What a night!" I kept looking straight ahead and didn't say anything. I didn't mean to be rude, but usually when I'm standing in a crowded men's room it's during a sporting event, and you don't just turn to the guy next to you and say, "Hey, great game!" People are also reading..
. Anyway, when Pompa-Baldi finished his program that night, the audience gave him a raucous standing ovation, which was led by Mr. What A.
Night, who was sitting in front of us, and we all kept whooping and applauding until the pianist returned to the stage for an encore, and then we gave him another ovation, and he left and we kept cheering until he returned for another encore. This went on and on, during which I remembered reading that Pompa-Baldi had mastered more than 60 long classical works, and then I realized that it was now nearly 9 p.m.
and I hadn't eaten anything since lunch. At that point, I felt like a basketball fan rooting for his team to go ahead and win the game in regulation instead of stretching it out for six overtimes. I mean, we'd already seen a great concert, and we were already winners, right? So when Bess suggested a couple of weeks ago that we go to this month's Piano Friday, I thought that was a great idea, as long as we went to dinner beforehand.
But then I checked my calendar. And then I looked at Bess and shook my head sadly and said two words. "March Madness.
" Instead of watching a piano concert at UNC School of the Arts on Friday night, I will be spending the entire weekend on the couch observing the men's basketball teams from UNC Wilmington and hopefully UNC Chapel Hill and most definitely Duke and High Point all dancing in the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. Sorry, honey. My only regret as we enter the next three weeks of basketball nirvana is that D.
J. Burns won't be there. His team, N.
C. State, wasn't anywhere near the bubble last year when the ACC tournament began, and his coach, Kevin Keatts, was on the hot seat, having as many NCAA tournament appearances in his six years in Raleigh as he'd had in three seasons at UNCW, with no wins in any of those games. That's when the Wolfpack's D.
J. Burns, an enormous human being with a huge smile and surprising basketball skill, burst onto the scene. He wasn't fleet of foot, but he had the footwork of a ballet dancer.
He couldn't soar above his opponents, but he could back them out of the paint like a garbage truck, and you could almost hear the beeping when he did it. He wasn't a flashy ball handler, but he knew where his teammates were going before they went there, and he somehow got them the ball. And those bank shots? They were like the shots a little kid unleashes toward his driveway hoop, except this kid was 6-foot-9 and way heavier than his listed weight of 275, and those crazy shots were almost always good during the team's improbable run to the Final Four.
As you may recall, the Wolfpack won five games in five days to take the ACC tournament and get an automatic bid to March Madness, the most memorable being a dispatching of Duke, a miraculous overtime victory over Virginia, and then an 8-point win over UNC, the nation's No. 4 team. In the Big Dance, the Pack would thump Texas Tech, squeak past Cinderella Oakland in overtime, throttle highly ranked Marquette and then, again, whip the Blue Devils and their prized collection of blue chippers.
The magical run ended in the Final Four against Purdue, with Burns hitting some rainmakers over the Boilermakers' 7-foot-4 Zach Edey, the national player of the year, and exchanging jokes with him while they jockeyed for position against each other. Today, Edey is in the NBA and Purdue is once again a high seed in the NCAA tournament. Meanwhile, D.
J. Burns is in Korea playing for the Goyang Sono Skygunners, and his coach, Kevin Keatts, recently lost his job for failing to make the ACC tournament, let alone the Big Dance. To me, that makes last season all the more miraculous and all the more unforgettable.
And it makes me miss D.J. Burns.
Sure, we'll have new heroes in this year's tournament, and maybe some new underdogs that shock the world, but can it top last year? I doubt it, but I'll be taking a break from piano concerts to find out. Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly! Editor, North Carolina {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items..
