Key players reflect on Final Four in Charlotte
Part of the road to the NCAA Men’s Final Four this year will run through Charlotte as the city hosts early-round games starting Thursday. Thirty years ago, in the spring of 1994, the road to the Final Four ended in Charlotte.
Thousands pack Uptown for March Madness
In a city always eager to say, “Look at me” while lobbying the rest of the nation that no “N.C.” is needed to identify it, hosting the national basketball championship was — to use a technical term — a really big deal.
For those who forgot — or may not have been born at the time — the Arkansas Razorbacks won that Final Four, beating Duke’s Blue Devils 76-72, on April 4, 1994.
One of the Razorbacks’ biggest fans happened to be in the Charlotte Coliseum that night: President Bill Clinton, then in his first term, roughly 20 years removed from his first job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Staging a Final Four or any major sporting event brings ample pressure, but adding POTUS to the mix complicates matters immeasurably. Organizers of that Final Four still remember the Secret Service and security headaches that accompanied Clinton’s visit.
They also recalled an overriding concern at the time: Where to send fans to have fun? Uptown and South Tryon Street consisted mostly of surface parking lots, a couple of car-repair places and scattered office buildings, many of them with empty ground floors or just empty altogether, so a plan was hatched for a pop-up entertainment district.
In recent weeks, the Charlotte Business Journal spoke with some of the principals who helped bid for and manage the Final Four, looking back 30 years later at what remains a signature sports moment in the city’s history. Read their reflections on CBJ’s website here.
VIDEO: Thousands pack Uptown for March Madness
