Extra Points: World Traveler

When Carolina's football team kicks off Saturday night in Winston-Salem against Wake Forest, it will be 12:30 a.m. on Sunday near Manchester, England. Kurt Green will log on to his ESPN Player account in his home office north of the city, plug his earphones in and live and die with each snap. On a shelf behind him are the home and away caps he wore for the Tar Heel baseball team during the 1990 season, when he started at centerfield.

"The Duke game was a killer," he says of Carolina's 38-35 win in Durham on Oct. 15. "That didn't start until 1 a.m. my time. By the time it was over, it was almost daybreak here. How can you possibly do that? I'm not really a night person, I'm more of a morning person. You say, 'Okay, I'm going to stay up and maybe see the first series or first quarter.' Then you go to bed and can't really sleep and you look at the score. Your mind is racing. Then you just get up, go get on the computer and watch it.

"It was a great win. But it was a groggy next morning for me."

Green has become an expert over three-plus decades following the Tar Heels from several time zones removed—time zones ahead and behind. The former Tar Heel receiver (he was a starter toward the end of the 1988 season) and holder of undergrad and Master's degrees in political science from Carolina and an MBA from Arizona State, has had at least 15 addresses since 1990, including ones in China, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and several cities in England as well as posts in New York City, Arizona, Utah and Nebraska in the United States.

Before the Internet in the early 1990s, he pored over the pages of an English language newspaper in China for college football scores. He's applauded every iteration of the World Wide Web, from more bandwidth to faster computers. He gnashed his teeth living in Italy, one of just a few countries with no ESPN access of any kind. He's found static-stricken audio broadcasts from Woody Durham back in the early 2000s and highlight snippets from YouTube. The TuneIn app allows him to listen to Tar Heel radio broadcasts.

"Kickoffs at 3:30 are my favorite," he says. "You have the whole Saturday for the family or yardwork or whatever, and then you sit down at 8:30 at night to watch football. I could watch an archived replay, but it's not as much fun if you know the outcome, and with social media today, it's impossible to not know a score the instant it happens."

Green, 58, had two dreams growing up as a young boy—he wanted to play football for Carolina and he wanted to see the world.

"As a kid, my heroes were guys like Amos Lawrence, Lawrence Taylor, Kelvin Bryant, Ethan Horton, Rod Elkins and Scott Stankavage," he says. "Going to Kenan Stadium was bigger than life, and that turf and the Bell Tower in the background became hallowed ground."

His father, John, was a high school coach at several towns in North Carolina, including Cameron, Jacksonville and Salisbury, and he settled at Lexington when Kurt was entering his high school years. While John coached Lexington, Kurt attended Pinecrest High in Southern Pines and lettered in football, basketball and baseball, making all-conference as a senior in football and being named team MVP.

Green was a good high school player but not a great one, and a baseball season knee injury further dimmed his prospects for playing for the Tar Heels—or even a smaller school like one in the Southern Conference. So after high school graduation, Green pursued his second dream—he spent 18 months in Italy on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"This was my first overseas experience and I learned Italian fluently," he says. "Moreover, it refined my character and my faith, and I learned how to handle adversity through hard work, persistence and patience."

While still on his mission in Italy, Green was admitted to Carolina and decided to try to walk-on the football or baseball teams. Since football fell first on the calendar, he approached Coach Dick Crum and was invited to join preseason camp in 1985, where he was a 21-year-old freshman playing defensive back.

"I had been away from sports and conditioning for two years, and the first few days of practice with the other freshmen were really tough," he says. "We practiced three times a day. I barely survived. At the end of the first week, I decided to leave the team."

He shared his misgivings with his mother but no one else. Then Saturday afternoon during the practice that was to be his last, he looked at the smattering of spectators and saw his father.

"What was I going to say to him? Could I give up now?" Green reflects. "We met after practice and he just gave me positive encouragement and never any pressure. In fact, the whole point of leaving the team never came up as I had only shared my feelings with my mother. From that point on, I found the will and the courage to stay, and I never looked back."

The 1985 to '87 seasons brought a myriad of challenges, most notably a position switch to wide receiver and a torn rotator cuff his second year that set him back and affected his ability to be productive for the 1986 and '87 seasons. Green got many of the menial tasks that befell the younger players like playing on the scout team and picking up laundry bags from the locker room floor and carrying them to the chute that led to the washroom. And he was assigned the task of managing the phone cords for his position coach on the sidelines before the advent of wireless communications systems.

"The cords were long and players were walking all over the place, and it took a bit of skill to keep the cord from getting all tangled up," Green says. "It did put me at the heart of the action, but I thought many times that this is not what I've put all this hard work in to do."

Green was a hundred percent healthy for spring ball in 1988, Mack Brown's first as the Tar Heels' head coach.

"I was immediately struck with the positivity and optimism of Coach Brown, and he made it clear that everyone would be re-evaluated with a fresh start," Green says.

Sure enough, Brown liked what he saw in Green and on the first day of August training camp, announced to the team that Green was being awarded a full scholarship. One month later, Green was a key contributor at split end when the No. 4 Oklahoma Sooners came to Kenan Stadium. He caught a quick hitch early in the game from quarterback Deems May and picked up 18 yards.

"The hype and drama of pure college football was all present on national television," Green says. "Time stood still. The atmosphere was electric. The roar of the crowd was deafening. I was so thrilled. The rush of adrenaline was unbelievable. I was on top of the world. That instant, all the years of a being a walk-on, overcoming injuries and surgery, coaching changes, and earning a scholarship came together. Every other accomplishment I achieved on the football field was a bonus after that moment."

Sadly for Green, Brown and the Tar Heels, that 28-0 loss to Oklahoma in game two of the 1988 season was a portend of things to come. Carolina managed only a three-point win over Georgia Tech in the middle of the 1988 season and a 42-point route of VMI to open the 1989 campaign. Everything else was a loss.

"Historically, that period is known as 2-20, but within the team, we were never 2-20," Green says. "We were never 2-20 until after the last game the second year. We were 0-1 and 0-2 and 0-3. We always had the next game. With Coach Brown, we never felt defeated or beaten. An expression he used over and over was, 'You gotta compete.' I have repeated that to myself many times over the years. 'You gotta compete' is at the heart of so many worthwhile aims and what is needed to be a success in life."

Green's football eligibility was exhausted after that 1989 season, but he wasn't through as an athlete. He walked-on to the baseball team and was the starting centerfielder in 1990, leading the team in RBIs and hitting .260 as the Tar Heels won the ACC regular season title and ACC Tournament. After leaving Chapel Hill in 1990, Green set off on that world-travel odyssey he dreamed of a kid. He's worked in the call center and customer service industry as an executive and consultant for a variety of firms and today is vice president with Teleperformance, an international business process outsourcing customer services firm. He has six children and one grandchild and has seen just three Tar Heel football games in person in 30 years—one of them the Tar Heels' win over USC in Anaheim in 1993 when he was living in Arizona.

"I have traveled the world and experienced a lot of things," he says. "I can live other places and be absolutely happy. I have seen beautiful places and incredible cultures. But my geographic anchor is Carolina football and Kenan Stadium. I don't follow the NFL. After football season, I stop my ESPN subscription. It's football season I'm connected to.

"Whenever I have visited North Carolina, invariably I go by Chapel Hill and see the stadium, but all the trips have been in the offseason. I've been amazed at how the facilities have evolved. Kenan Stadium has changed some, but the look and dimensions are the same with the Bell Tower right outside. It's the coolest thing. It was when I was a kid, and it still is."

Green will power through his sleepiness into the wee hours in England Sunday morning, hoping for a Tar Heel win over the Demon Deacons that will allow him to play out his most sacred Tar Heel tradition—curling up in bed with his Carolina blue blanket sent from his sister in the United States years ago.

"I call it my 'Victory Blanket,'" he says. "My wife and kids think I'm a little nutty, but they've accepted it."

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace is in his 33rd year writing features on the Carolina football program under the "Extra Points" banner. He is the author of "Football in a Forest" and reports from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network broadcasts. Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

Players Mentioned

Deems May

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