Andrew Curliss and Dane Kane have this time tag teamed the Tarheels and the result is something akin to a “rasslin'” match I watched as a boy on WRAL at 11:30pm on a hot Saturday summer night much like tonight. In case you had better things to do in your youth, you can catch up with me by watching the Road Warriors vs. Mulkey Brothers below. There’s more to this analogy than just the Road Warriors kicking the living holy hell out of an over-matched foe, so please watch the link below and humor me.
Watch the Road Warriors v. Mulkeys from 1987.
Man alive I miss the naivety of redneck youth. After reading the newest story from the N&O I noticed that the Curliss and Kane duo strikes again like a flying body block from the top turnbuckle. I chuckled as I thought about how these two guys have together thrown around UNC and the Carolina Way like the Road Warriors tossed around a couple of fat clorox-haired maybe-brothers as I jumped on the couch and laughed uncontrollably. Without trying to compare Curliss to Animal and Kane to Hawk, the point of the analogy is this: I actually found a taping of that match on Youtube! Amazing is this thing they call the internet.
It’s the internet that the UNC administration has yet to get their pointed little heads around. Everything they have said or typed, bragged or complained about, and done or even thought about doing over the last about 30 years is likely somewhere on the internet for all to see. Ultimately, it’s the resulting “foundation” of information that has led to their unraveling in a such a public way.
The information age has made a comfortable culture of cheating in Chapel Hill exposable. Simply put, while the transcripts of Peppers and Austin show at least a “A Decade of Questions, they also show two very real truths:
1) The first truth that is evidenced by these two transcripts is that UNC was gradually perfecting their “eligibility cheating machine” as they learned from mistakes such as the Peppers situation. Is that why his transcipt was shared with administrators as a “test transcript?” Hey athletic academic advisers: here’s a transcript of a “student” (*wink*) who almost didn’t remain eligible for his entire tenure at UNC. We can fix this by putting suspect student-athletes in upper-level faux summer classes before they even start their first full regular semester of college! (*wink*) These two transcripts show not only systematic cheating, but an ever-evolving system that learned from its mistakes. It’s that sort of evidence that throws the NCAA statute of limitations straight out the window.
However, and this is the huge “however”…
2) The second absolute truth is that UNC engaged in cheating for such a long period of time that it failed to adjust and evolve its craft of cheating on all fronts. Primarily, the systematic cheating engine failed to evolve as needed in the information age so that UNC could avoid getting caught by its own trail of documents, transcripts, media guides, and other bread crumbs of information that seem to be surfacing as a trail of betrayal and fraud to the darkest corners of the internet.
Like with most crimes, it’s usually hard to cover up all the evidence. And like with most secrets, knowledge of it by more than two people make it hardly a secret for long. In this day of information those two old cliches ring even more true.
If a non-technically-savvy fellow like me can find a copy of an absolutely terrible professional wrestling match from 1987 that lasted less than a small handful of minutes, then a group of crafty investigative reporters are about to beat UNC over the head with the proverbial folding chair each time the University, its administration, and its associates continue to spin easily verifiable webs of lies and deceit.
Eventually UNC and its Mulkey-Brother-like people are simply going to have to stop climbing back into that ring. Seriously. Even us State fans are starting to cringe watching you guys get body slammed repeatedly. Learn a little something from the Mulkeys above. Just lay there already. Play dead. Stop talking. Stop trying to fight obviously losing battles. It’s getting nasty. You’re a Mulkey Brother. The evidence you face of your wrongdoings and the people digging through it are the Road Warriors.
