One’s Carolina-crazy. The other, a Duke die-hard. Will the relationship survive the game?
Much (so very, very much) has been said this week about the almost unfathomable enormity of what will be taking place under the roof of the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans beginning at 8:49 p.m. on Saturday.
But what about equally unprecedented showdowns that will be taking place — before, during and after the most eagerly anticipated Final Four game in the history of the Final Four? The ones under the roofs of homes shared by college basketball fans who fall on opposite sides of the Duke-Carolina spectrum?
We talked to five sets of couples in the Charlotte area whose weekend is shaping up to be ... well, interesting might be one way to put it. Awkward might be another.
‘You’re much more mature than I am’
The Duke fan: April Whitlock, a 1991 graduate who was a cheerleader for three years — including at Final Fours in 1989, in 1990 and in 1991, when the Blue Devils won their first national championship.
The Carolina fan: Thomas Whitlock, a 1995 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.
How they ended up under the same roof: They met as relative newcomers to Charlotte, at the old Dixie’s Tavern bar in uptown, during the 1999 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Both were out with friends watching the games. Carolina had already been eliminated, but Duke was still in it — and Thomas and all of his pals were cheering against the Blue Devils. Thomas and April hit it off, and by the end of the night, they’d made a bet: If Duke won the tournament, he’d have to take her out to dinner; if Duke didn’t, she’d have to take him out. Duke lost to Connecticut in the championship game, and she made good on her end of the bet. The rest of their relationship is history.
A peek inside their relationship: If Carolina winds up beating Duke on Saturday, April concedes that she’ll probably have no choice but to root for the Tar Heels in the title game. But not only because of her husband.
“I would have to follow my money on Monday night,” April says, “and my money right now goes to Carolina, for my oldest.”
Their daughter, Camden, is a freshman at Chapel Hill.
“And for the ACC,” she continues. “I mean, the ACC was much-maligned this year, and we’ve done pretty well in the tournament, for all the things that the sportswriters were saying about our conference. But yeah, I would have to have a moment to get over myself on Sunday, and then I think — I think — I would be able to root for them. I don’t know if Thomas could say the same thing.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Thomas says, without missing a beat. They both laugh.
“Yeah, that’s about right,” April says.
“You’re much more mature than I am,” he admits, and they both laugh some more.
Adds April: “We have a running joke about lots of this. Like, our youngest daughter loves to play soccer, and I’ve asked him, ‘So, what if she ended up playing for Duke? What would you do?’ And he goes, ‘I’d root for her, and that’s it.’”
‘Don’t make excuses. We earned this.’
The Duke fan: Avion Edgeworth, who attended Stanly Community College in Albemarle, but ... chose to back the Blue Devils after moving to the Charlotte area from New Orleans in 1988 because she liked the nickname. Why? Because Dillard University, which is in her hometown, has a similar nickname: the Bleu Devils.
The Carolina fan: Mario Edgeworth, a West Charlotte High School graduate whose love for UNC dates back to before Michael Jordan’s time there in the early ’80s.
How they ended up under the same roof: The couple met in 1991, around the time Duke won its first national championship, through mutual friends. They married in 1998. They have three adult children, none of whom caught college basketball fever. “They can really care less about it,” Avion says. “They just like to see Mama and Daddy running around the house acting a fool when somebody wins.”
A peek inside their relationship: Of all the couples we talked to for this story, this one seems to be the most harmonious.
“I must say,” Avion admits, “we enjoy watching the games together.” Not one other couple could say the same thing.
But all bets are off this Saturday.
Says Avion: “His thing now with this game coming up is that, ‘Oh well, we beat y’all last time, so I think it’s rigged. They’re gonna give it to Duke, and Duke is gonna go ahead and win the championship.’ I’m like, ‘No, we’re gonna come up there, and we’re gonna play, and we’re gonna give it all that we got, and we’re gonna beat you. Don’t make excuses for it. We earned this. We deserve it. We’re gonna get it.’”
‘They’ll figure out who’s the right team’
The Carolina fan: Kristin Dixon, a Providence High School alum and 2008 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill who swam for the Tar Heels. In 2012, while working a sales job in Atlanta, she had a big poster of the university’s Old Well hanging in her cubicle.
The Duke fan: Freddy Dixon, a Kings Mountain native who graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, but ... who has been a Blue Devils fan since the age of 6. “Growing up in North Carolina,” he explains, “you pretty much have to choose at a young age” — and he latched on to Duke in 1990, thanks to Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner. “It was a no-brainer,” he says.
How they ended up under the same roof: Freddy wound up at the same Atlanta company as Kristin a few months after she was hired; she wound up being responsible for some of his training; he wound up at her cubicle; he recognized the Old Well; she got excited; then he told her he was a Duke fan.
Nevertheless, they started dating, almost immediately. Five years later, he proposed to her on UNC’s campus, right beside the Old Well. She said yes. She said if he’d taken her to Durham to pop the question, she would have said no.
A peek inside their relationship: Today, the couple has a 3-year-old son named Wyatt and a 1-year-old daughter, Sage — and that the struggle to determine the kids’ allegiances is real.
Asked which colors their children tend to wear, the banter begins.
“I do the shopping,” Kristin says, “so obviously they don’t have any Duke clothes.”
“They did,” Freddy says, “just not recently. They grow so fast, you know?”
“I think I gave you a (Duke) onesie for him when he was a baby,” Kristin replies. “I did not do the same thing for Sage, though. So with Wyatt ... he likes to wear Carolina clothes. But we have video of him wearing Carolina, saying ‘Go Duke!’ Then if he’s mad at Freddy, he’ll say, ‘Go Tar Heels!’ He just doesn’t know what he’s doing yet. ... And Sage, she’ll just wear whatever we put her in.”
“They’re smart kids,” Freddy adds, “so they’ll figure out who’s the right team to pull for, when they get to that age.” It’s clear from his tone that he means Duke.
Before we got on the phone with them, they hadn’t wagered anything on Saturday’s game. But by the time they hung up, they had: Loser has to give the kids their baths for a month.
“We both hate bath time,” Kristin says, as Freddy laughs. “That’ll work.”
‘We want to maintain the friendship here’
The Carolina fan: Rob Harriss, who graduated from Ledford High School in the tiny town of Wallburg, about 75 miles west of Chapel Hill, then joined the Army and spent most of the ’90s stationed at Fort Bragg. But ... his father was an offensive lineman for the Tar Heels’ football team, so it “was pretty much ingrained in my life that I was gonna be a Carolina fan.”
The Duke fan: Ryan Walton, a native of Springfield, Missouri, who would go on to earn a computer information systems degree from what was known at the time as Southwest Missouri State University (now called, simply, Missouri State). But ... when he was growing in the ’90s, his college-hoops-loving father would let him skip school to watch first-round NCAA Tournament games, and Walton forged a lifelong relationship with Duke after becoming a huge fan of the Blue Devil squad that starred Hill, Hurley and Laettner.
How they ended up under the same roof: Walton and Harriss — longtime friends and former co-workers — became housemates just a few months ago when Harriss and his wife, LeAnn, moved in after selling their house in Gastonia in December. The idea was for the Harrisses to live with Walton and his wife, Andrea, in their Huntersville home at least until August, as they weighed whether to remain in Charlotte or move away.
A peek inside their relationship: “We’ve only seen one full game together to be honest with you,” Rob Harriss says, “because for the longest time, everybody was afraid to put us in the same room together during (UNC-Duke games).”
“That was more of a LeAnn thing,” Ryan Walton chimes in. “Then of course my wife’s decree of ‘You two will not be in the same room because we want to maintain the friendship here.’”
So this week, Walton says, “everybody’s been blowing our phones up saying the same thing: ‘Are you guys gonna be in the same house? Are you gonna put Rob on the third floor? Are you gonna be in the garage? Where are you gonna stash him in your house to watch the game?’ We haven’t quite gotten that far yet.”
And as if having two grown college-basketball junkies who pledge allegiance to opposing Final Four teams under one roof isn’t enough, how about this to make things even more interesting?
LeAnn Harriss is a very loud, very proud graduate of the University of Kansas.
Says her husband Rob, in summing up the unique atmosphere inside the Waltons’ home this week: “Well, all three of us are still alive — which is kind of, uh, unbelievable.”
‘One of the dumbest fights we’ve ever had’
The Duke fan: Emily Reeves, who went to East Gaston High School and Appalachian State University, but ... grew up cheering for Duke because her family was “the one that’s like, ‘Well, why does everybody hate them? I’m gonna pull for them because everybody hates them. I don’t want to be like everybody else.’ ... So it was an understood thing when I was growing up: ‘We’re Duke fans in here.’”
The Carolina fan: Brandon Reeves, who went to West Mecklenburg High School and Central Piedmont Community College, but ... grew up cheering for Tar Heel legends like Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison with his father and their neighbors.
How they ended up under the same roof: They met through mutual friends when they were in high school and grew closer over time — despite the fact that Brandon routinely would give her a hard time about being a Duke fan. They started dating in 2014 and were married in 2016. They have two sons: 6-year-old Colton and 4-year-old Rhett. Rhett hasn’t yet picked a side, they say, but Colton recently switched allegiances. Since birth, Emily says, their eldest was Duke all the way; but Brandon took him to a Carolina game earlier this season, and since then he’s preferred a lighter shade of blue.
A peek inside their relationship: “We literally cannot watch the rivalry together,” Emily reports. “We’ll end up fighting.”
Indeed, Emily says, they have tussled over Duke-Carolina matters before. They can laugh about it now — and they do, when it comes up. But eight or nine years ago, before they were married, things got a little ugly after one particular Carolina win.
He was excited, for obvious reasons. She wanted him to shut up about it. Then he decided it would be funny to post a photo on Facebook of Emily that he’d decorated with an electronic sticker that said “Go Heels!”
She was not amused. “Normally I really, honestly wouldn’t care about something like that. But it just like spewed this fight. I was like, ‘Oh, you never put pictures of me on Facebook, but the one time you do, you tie it to Carolina!’ We fought all weekend over that. And he was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re seriously getting mad at me.’ I was so mad.”
“That,” she continues, “is going down in the history books as one of the dumbest fights we’ve ever had. But nonetheless, it was a fight.”
Brandon laughs at the memory. Then says, “I’m actually gonna change to that picture right now.”
“No!” Emily replies. “Don’t you dare.”
