Up in smoke
Demolition crews will blow up the old Charlotte Coliseum this week.
May it rest in pieces.
It's hard to be sentimental about the building, which had little character and played a distant second (third or fourth) fiddle to the Greensboro Coliseum as a basketball and entertainment arena.
I attended a pair of ACC tournaments there and was underwhelmed.
Two at least lukewarm memory about the building: It recalls the old Charlotte Hornets of Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues and Alonzo Mourning, who connected with fans in a way the Bobcats clearly have not.
And it recalls the big splash the News & Record did on the new Charlotte Coliseum for a Sunday features front. The spread, which included a prominent photo of the Charlotte scoreboard, was part of a section of the paper that is printed ahead of time, on Friday mornings.
Problem was, the scoreboard crashed to the floor that Friday, forcing us to run an editor's note explaining why the scorebard still appeared intact in Sunday's paper.