PUT ACC HOOPS HALL OF FAME ON SOUTH ELM

Edward Cone
News & Record
2-02-03

OK, Greensboro, here's the plan: Let's build an ACC basketball hall of fame at the intersection of South Elm and Lee streets.

By now it is widely agreed that the blighted blocks at the southern entrance to downtown must be cleaned up and that the City of Greensboro can help make that happen by channeling federal funds toward the effort.

We learned all this while blowing the chance to put a baseball stadium on the site. Now it's time to make something positive come from that frustrating experience.

Why an Atlantic Coast Conference hoops hall of fame? ACC basketball is popular enough to bring traffic off the interstates to a downtown museum, year after year. The attraction would complement both the coliseum to its west and the civil rights museum to the north.

And Greensboro is the logical place to put it, in terms of geography and tradition. Located in the heart of ACC country but home to no member school, we house the conference headquarters and have been the most frequent site of the conference tournament, which returns to the Greensboro Coliseum this March for its 50th anniversary. (Not incidentally, a first-class facility might help us hang on to both the conference offices and the tourney, which are heavily courted by other cities.)

Filling the building with memorabilia and exhibits will be easy, especially when the various alumni networks start competing to make their alma mater look best. With nine schools and 50 years of history, this should be a large and well-stocked museum.

Finding a private company to build and run the hall of fame should not be difficult - not with the influence and money of the powerful coalition behind the project. What coalition? Glad you asked. We are going to need some leadership from several key players, including:

-- the City of Greensboro, which must make good on its promises to revitalize this brownfield acreage.

-- the ACC, which can give the museum official status and facilitate relations with member universities.

-- Jefferson-Pilot, a local company with significant broadcasting and advertising ties to the league, which can provide funds for the project and influence with the ACC. This is JP's chance to do for Greensboro what Krispy Kreme is doing for Winston-Salem - providing critical corporate leadership for its hometown - while leveraging its own well-established marketing strategy.

-- Action Greensboro, which could help coordinate things and bring in foundation money as well.

But how do we keep the project from being poisoned by the dreaded Greensboro Disease, the reflexive negativity toward almost any change that has afflicted this city for more than a decade? (As the person who coined the phrase "Greensboro Disease," by the way, I regret seeing it applied to the FedEx hub, opposition to which is pretty well thought out in terms of cost and benefit. Fighting the disease doesn't necessarily mean believing everything said by the Chamber of Commerce.)

The answer to overcoming our civic inertia has to be that we work on building consensus and getting widespread buy-in before we get started. This is going to mean that some people who don't play well together are going to have to get along. So invite Bill Burckley to the organizational meeting, and sit him next to Jim Melvin. Ask John Hammer for public relations advice. Everyone checks his ego at the door.

My only worry is that this plan is not ambitious enough. Maybe we should build an ACC football hall of fame, too - it would be a much smaller facility than the one for basketball - or just put up an all-sports museum. The on-site cafe, the memorabilia store and T-shirt shop across Lee on South Elm Street - these are all details for the committee to worry about, just as soon as we have a committee.

If you want to make this happen, get involved. If Greensboro wants to make this happen, it will.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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