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ACC was formed in a smoky Greensboro inn. Now the city fights to keep its last relic

The consultants were in town and Skip Alston knew just where to take them. It had to be somewhere that would make an impression, somewhere that represented the best of Greensboro — both its growth and its potential as a destination for business and entertainment. And so on a Thursday in early September, the group made its way downtown.

It was, in a way, a tour of the city, and Alston understood the magnitude. The consultants had arrived to help the Atlantic Coast Conference evaluate whether it should keep its headquarters in Greensboro, where they’ve been located for almost 70 years, or whether the time had come to leave the past behind. It was Alston’s job, in part, to make the case for staying.

Few people were in a position to make a stronger argument. Alston grew up in Durham before becoming a Greensboro lifer, a resident for 42 years. He’d built a successful real estate business and broken through racial barriers in local politics. Twenty years ago, he became the first African-American chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.

Now he was chairman again, for the sixth time, and fighting for his city. He was hardly alone.

These are anxious times in Greensboro, and have been since the revelation that the ACC is considering a move. David Teel, a journalist who has covered the league for decades, broke the news last month in a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Soon after, The News & Observer obtained a letter that Jim Phillips, in his first months as the ACC Commissioner, sent to the league’s 15 schools and Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan.

Phillips buried the part about a potential move in the seventh paragraph, in a maze of corporate jargon and consultant-speak about the need for a “comprehensive, external, holistic review” of the ACC. The consultants were charged, Phillips wrote, with “benchmarking our conference organization,” among other things. They were also charged with hiring another consultant “to integrate the evaluation of the Conference Office headquarters within this process.”

The ACC, Phillips wrote, is “incredibly proud and honored” to call Greensboro home.

“With that said,” his letter continued, “we also have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that remaining headquartered in Greensboro is what is in the best long-term interests of the Conference and of our 15 member institutions.”

To Alston and other leaders around Greensboro, the formal news came as a surprise, though some had heard rumblings. Speculation about the ACC’s future in Greensboro has persisted for years, and in the mid-1990s the league considered relocating to Charlotte before moving into the offices it now occupies near the Grandover Resort, just southwest of downtown Greensboro. There, the conference headquarters are about a 10-minute drive from Sedgefield Country Club, site of the ACC’s founding in 1953.

The conference has been here ever since, 68 years. It has grown from a two-person operation out of the King Cotton Hotel to a corporate entity with more than 40 employees and almost $500 million in revenue during the 2019-20 fiscal year. College sports have changed considerably, morphing from big business to bigger business to even bigger business, one characterized at the highest levels by an insatiable kind of gluttony.

Facilities at the wealthiest schools long ago became palatial and college football or basketball coaches are now often the highest-paid state employees in any given state. For the ACC, the one thing that hasn’t changed is that it has always been here. It is perhaps the most recognizable brand of any in Greensboro. It is part of the city’s identity.

“A fixture,” Alston said, and that is why some in the city are now on edge. Greensboro without the ACC wouldn’t exactly be as unrecognizable as Las Vegas without slot machines, or New York without the Yankees, but on a smaller scale, it’d be something like that. It’d be an economic loss, yes, but also a spiritual loss. It’d be a crisis of identity. Which is why Alston’s voice grew more resolute when he spoke of the work ahead.

“We want to keep the ACC here, by any means necessary,” he said. “And we’ve told them that. There’s nothing that they can ask for that we cannot give them in order to convince them to stay. There’s nothing that any other city or state can offer them that we can’t offer them.

“What we have going for us, and for them, is number one, this is home.”

The question now is whether that’s enough.

**

If his memory is correct, and it has been 68 years, the meeting happened in room 230 of the old Sedgefield Inn, on the grounds of the Sedgefield Country Club. It was May 8, 1953. Leaders of the Southern Conference gathered, with seven schools — Clemson, Duke, Maryland, N.C. State, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wake Forest — deciding to break away to form a new league.

The “Seceding Seven,” some of the newspapers of the day came to call them.

“The founding of the thing was right out of something Hollywood would write, I guess,” Irwin Smallwood said by phone this week. Smallwood back then was a young reporter for the Greensboro Daily News. Now he’s 95, his mind still sharp, and he’s the only person still living who covered or attended the meeting that led to the formation of the ACC.

“It was the quintessential smoke-filled room,” he said. “My recollections are the door opened about 1:15 in the morning and out came all the leaders of those seven schools saying the deed is done, knowing damn well we’d already gone to press.”

The exact physical location of the ACC’s founding has been lost to history, and to the renovations at Sedgefield that removed the inn in the early 1990s. The space where the rooms used to be are now second-floor offices in the clubhouse, though on the first floor two plaques on the wall commemorate the moment. The ACC provided one of them in 2003, on its 50th anniversary, and the progression of the conference can be seen through the old circular logos on display.

The first logo contained outlines of four states and the second one five before the seal expanded again to include Florida. The ACC retired the seal logo in 2013 after it became an oval that depicted the entire east coast, and after the additions of Notre Dame (in all sports except for football) and Louisville strained the geographic credibility of the conference’s name.

The ACC is now more than twice as big as it was at the time of its creation. South Carolina left. Georgia Tech arrived. The league expanded into Florida, then the northeast, then into Indiana and Kentucky, after Maryland departed in 2014. In many ways, the conference today is unrecognizable from the one Smallwood covered from its inception and yet he feels a connection to it, the way a lot of people around Greensboro do. It goes deeper than his work as a journalist who chronicled the ACC for decades.

“Pride,” he said. “The pride that it’s ours. It was born and raised here. It was not like a company that just came in here from Saskatchewan or something. We birthed it and nursed it, and we bred it and when it needed help, we were here to do it.

“... The heart of it is here. And they can move the headquarters to Inner Mongolia, and the heart of the ACC will remain here. We sort of feel like it belongs to us, I guess.”

Without intending to, Smallwood described a dynamic that has long been at the foundation of tension between the ACC’s founding members — and particularly its four North Carolina schools — and the rest of the conference. Even in the relative old days of the 1990s and early 2000s, back when the ACC had nine members, former Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams bristled at how often Greensboro hosted the ACC tournament. In an infamous moment, Williams once said Maryland might as well be in Alaska, based on slights he perceived from the conference.

Nowadays that conflict simmers in a different way. It’s the conflict of old vs. new; of the conference’s basketball roots and the reality that football has long become the sport that matters most, both for the perception of the ACC and the conference’s bottom line. It’s the conflict between the league’s original members, what’s left of them, anyway, and ones that have joined since 2004 — all seven of them refugees from the old Big East.

It’s easy to see how those outside Greensboro, and North Carolina, could interpret the conference’s headquarters as a relic of a bygone era, a sign of a resistance to change. And yet the obvious question is if not Greensboro, then where? If a Vegas oddsmaker were setting betting lines, Charlotte would unquestionably be the favorite. North Carolina’s largest city has become the unofficial home of the ACC’s football championship game and the conference’s annual media days in football and men’s basketball. ESPN, the ACC’s television partner, has a studio there.

But, as Smallwood asked, “What would they gain by moving to Charlotte? More money?”

It’s a question for the consultants to answer, and the most important one. On the other side, what would it lose?

**

If the Sedgefield clubhouse represents the metaphorical center of the ACC’s roots, then they extend five miles northeast, to the building that has hosted some of the conference’s most indelible moments. The Greensboro Coliseum has been home to the ACC men’s basketball tournament 28 times — more than twice as often as the next-closest venue (N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum, with 13).

If the ACC were to relocate, the Coliseum would undoubtedly remain a part of the tournament rotation. Yet it’s fair to wonder how often the conference would come back, given its desire to take the tournament to larger cities, particularly those closer to the league’s newest members. The tournament is headed next March to Brooklyn, which hosted it in 2017 and ‘18. Washington, D.C., which hosted it in 2016, is back on the schedule for 2024.

While many people in Greensboro can speak to the emotional ties between the city and the ACC, few understand their symbiotic business relationship more than Matt Brown, the Managing Director of the Greensboro Coliseum Complex. Around town, he said, the thought of the ACC’s potential departure is “an extremely emotional subject.”

The ACC is arguably the Coliseum’s most important client, and when the conference’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are held in Greensboro, the events generate millions of dollars in local economic impact. In Greensboro, the men’s tournament, especially, fills hotel rooms and restaurants and the city in some ways shuts down and pays attention in a way that’s different than when it’s anywhere else.

“The appeal of the ACC was one of the reasons that drew me to Greensboro,” said Brown, who has been the Coliseum’s director for almost 27 years. “I knew of the history of the Greensboro Coliseum’s association in hosting the tournament, and the ACC’s presence in the marketplace. My goal was that I hoped that my two teenage kids would go to an ACC school so that they could have lifelong affinity and association with their sports programs.”

That came to fruition, with Brown’s daughter attending N.C. State, and his son UNC. Throughout his tenure with the Coliseum, Brown said, he has viewed himself as something of a steward of the city’s relationship with the ACC. It originated before him, and extends well beyond the building he runs, but more than anywhere else the Coliseum is the physical embodiment of the conference’s ties here.

About 10 years ago, the ACC and the city opened a museum-like addition to the Coliseum called the ACC Hall of Champions. It has sat mostly empty during the past year and a half, closed to the public during the pandemic, and during a recent walk inside the mascot costumes belonging to the league’s 15 schools cast an eerie vibe next to the exhibits longing for an audience. It felt like the place had already been abandoned, like history left behind.

Brown, like other city leaders, is determined to do his part to keep that from becoming reality. He has been a part of the meetings with the consultants, but the challenge is contextualizing a relationship that can be difficult to measure — one that more than anything is based on emotion and history and a sense of place.

“We respect and appreciate that Commissioner Phillips has to look ahead to the future,” Brown said, laying out the questions facing the ACC’s new commissioner, who has been on the job since February. “What’s his structural organization going to be? What’s his talent pool of staffing he wants to put together? Where’s the best environment for that staff to be?”

Brown compared the ACC’s relationship with Greensboro to the Green Bay Packers’ relationship with its namesake city, which offers not the largest media market or deepest base of commercial sponsors but the most loyalty. The ACC could move its headquarters to any number of larger cities — Charlotte or Atlanta or even New York — but if the ACC tournaments outside of Greensboro are any indication, it’s fair to question to what degree any city would embrace the conference’s arrival.

“You go to an NBA big city, and you get lost,” Brown said, referencing the ACC tournament. “When the ACC went to Brooklyn, there were fewer media representatives at that tournament than they were the prior year in Greensboro, yet it’s the so-called media capital of the U.S. But we had more media come because of that historical setting at the Greensboro Coliseum.”

Brown, like many around Greensboro, feels a sense of pride in how the city and the conference have worked together. Among his proudest moments, he said, is when he told the ACC more than 20 years ago that if it moved its women’s basketball tournament to Greensboro it would always be held in the Coliseum, as opposed to “a second-class gender setting in Charlotte.”

More recently, the ACC turned to Greensboro last March to host the men’s tournament on short notice during the pandemic. The Coliseum doubled as a vaccination site and something of a tournament bubble and “that’s the only reason that they were able to salvage the 2021 men’s and women’s ACC tournaments,” Brown said.

“And it was John Swofford who felt a sense of obligation to reward us,” Brown said of the league’s former commissioner, who retired earlier this year, “and he went and got the 2023 tournament awarded to us. So that was a reflection, again, of another example of our relationship.”

Now the future of that relationship was unclear.

**

About three miles north of the Coliseum, Cindy Essa shared her own Swofford story in the Italian restaurant she owns off of Battleground Avenue. It was a recent Thursday around noon and Pastabilities was unusually quiet. The restaurant has long been a gathering place for ACC employees, and for years Essa volunteered at ACC tournaments, working the media entrance.

She grew up in Greensboro, the daughter of a Wake Forest University law professor, and Essa, 55, could tell stories of Wake games as a child, watching the scoreboard illuminate when the Demon Deacons scored. She remembered school on ACC tournament Fridays, teachers wheeling in the television on a cart. To her the ACC was family, and the thought of it moving had been “heartbreaking,” she said.

The Swofford story she shared was from early in the pandemic. As she remembered it, Swofford called her “and said, I want to do something to support you and support my staff.” He bought everyone at the ACC a gift card to her restaurant.

“If you’re in a big city, do they have those relationships?” Essa asked.

She rolled her eyes at the mention of the ACC’s consultants, the way a lot of people do at the word.

“I don’t know that there’s anything we can do,” she said. “Part of me thinks, is this already a done deal?”

Alston, the chairman of the county commissioners, spoke as if it’s not. He spoke of the city and county’s long-term plans for growth -- his hope for the passage of a $1.7 billion infrastructure plan for area schools, and how Greensboro is “on the rise” and “going aggressively for new businesses and new corporations to relocate here.”

“The last thing we want to do,” he said, “is have one of our major corporations leave while we’re trying to build and show the world that Greensboro, Guilford County, is the place to be.”

Alston recently spent time with the consultants over dinner, and he was part of a delegation of local officials who showed off the Steven Tanger Center for Performing Arts, which opened in downtown Greensboro earlier this year. Alston spoke with bravado about the facility, boasting that it’s “second to none,” and a sign of the city’s commitment to growth.

He believes it made an impression on the ACC’s consultants, too.

“If they were to give us the courtesy to let us know what those issues are” forcing the ACC to move, Alston said, “it’s nothing that can’t do when we pull together. If the ACC said they want this, that and another, then we’re going to give it to them. ...

“We want them to be here, and be a part of our growth.”