FOUR CORNERS: HOW UNC, NC STATE, DUKE, AND WAKE FOREST MADE NORTH CAROLINA THE CROSSROADS OF THE BASKETBALL UNIVERSE [Paperback]

Deep in the heart of tobacco country, the Tar Heel State brings out the best of college basketball: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, and Dean Smith; Grant Hill, Christian Laettner, and Mike Krzyzewski; Billy Packer, Tim Duncan, and Bones McKinney; David Thompson, Lorenzo Charles, and Jim Valvano. What these men have in common -- besides being legends in the world of college hoops -- is that they are all part of Big Four basketball in the state of North Carolina. For the last fifty years the Big Four -- North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, and North Carolina State -- have defined greatness on the hardwood courts.
Nowhere else in America are there four schools with such rich basketball history and tradition located so close to one another. The four grew up within a thirty -- four -- mile radius of one another, and to this day, North Carolina, N.C. State, and Duke are only a half hour's drive apart. (Wake Forest, which had been located nineteen miles west of Duke University and sixteen miles north of North Carolina State, received a hefty gift from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1956 to move to Winston -- Salem, 110 miles due west.) InFour Corners, Winston-Salem Journalsportswriter Joe Menzer chronicles the storied histories, timeless traditions, and fierce rivalries that have placed these four basketball -- crazed schools among the best college programs in the nation.
In North Carolina, college basketball is not a matter of life and death; it's much more important than that. It isn't just that these teams are near one another geographically or that they're very good every year. It's the way the fans embrace their team and hate the other three schools that makes the rivalries so dynamic. Newcomers to the region find themselves forced to choose from among the four. You're either a Wolfpack fan, a Blue Devils fan, a Demon Deacons fan, or a Tar Heels fan -- and if you're not a Tar Heels fan, then you're an automatic member of one of the largest organizationslC+