Long ago, this stopped being merely a streak.Streaks are what happens when you defy the odds long enough to become noticeable. A NFL team wins seven in a row. That's a streak. You flip a coin and get heads half a dozen times consecutively. That's a streak. Alex Rodriguez dates a woman whose age is lower than a Tiger Woods golf score? Even once, that too is a streak.
But long ago, this became less skid and more law of nature, something Newton scribbled about between the bit about apples and equal and opposition reactions.
You could even call it downright biblical, but even the Israelites only had to wander the desert 40 years and they got a little bread for their trouble.
But when it comes to games in Chapel Hill, Clemson has never so much as won a Papa Johns pizza. In 83 years.
So call it what it is. The most ridiculous run in sports.
It's bad luck, bad timing, bad basketball or just the worst case of procrastination in college basketball history. It's another loss in a skid so long it makes the Cubs' 100-year World Series drought seem like a temporary slump.
After all, Chicago's lovable losers have at least won the Series twice and have won seven NL pennants since their last Series victory, but in a rivalry that dates back to a time when basketball jerseys had belt loops and Tyler Hansbrough was but a high school freshman, the Tigers haven't won once.
They're zero-for-53, just in case you're sadistically scoring at home. A few more losses and NASA, or whomever keeps track of Pacman Jones' arrests, might have to calculate the differential.
And there's nothing like it in sports.
Fifty-six consecutive games with a hit? Seven Tour de Frances? 2,632 games played? Please, the Tigers were stinking up the joint in North Carolina long before any of them started and have kept up that tradition. You went 0-16, Detroit? Boo hoo. Get back to us in 2011.
In the time that the Tar Heels first beat the Tigers in 1926 (a 30-point drubbing and a sign of things to come), we've put men on the moon, bravely survived a clear soda craze, and all added "Bootylicious" to our vocabulary. But Clemson hasn't once knocked off the Tar Heels.
How bad is it for the Tigers? Even Matt Doherty, the short lived Heels coach between Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams, who cratered the Tar Heel legacy with an 8-20 record in 2002, didn't lose to Clemson. During his four-win, couldn't-buy-a-victory-even-in-this-economy collapse in 2002, he hammered the Tigers by 18. With its 53rd straight loss in Chapel Hill in 2008, Clemson's woeful streak topped Brown's 52-game road losing streak to Princeton, a streak that mercifully ended in 2003.
There have been close calls, but before last year's double-overtime escape by the Tar Heels, there were so few that you can count them on two hands and still have a finger left to wag in disappointment at the Tigers. Nine times before last year, Clemson has come within 10 points of the Tar Heels and three times they've come within a bucket. In 2003, Doherty's last season, Clemson coughed up a late lead, missed a game-tying 3-pointer in the final seconds and lost 68-66. In 1982, they came within five points of the eventual national champion and then-No. 2 Tar Heels. Even Skip Wise, who would become the first freshman to lead the ACC in scoring, and Tree Rollins, who averaged a double-double at Clemson all four years before spending 18 seasons in the NBA, took Phil Ford's Tar Heels to the wire. The Tigers led by 14 and Wise scored 25 points, but Ford's team took home yet another win, 74-72.
Even when they're the favorite, the Tigers find a way to find defeat in spectacular fashion. In 1990, Clemson finished with the ACC's best regular-season record ... and lost to North Carolina by 23. In 1997, the Tigers were No. 2 in the nation ... and lost by 13 to a Tar Heels team that was 2-4 in the conference at the time.
Meanwhile, that monkey on Clemson's back has grown so large even King Kong couldn't box him out.
And last year was a heck of a growth spurt. The Tigers led by 11 points with three minutes left in regulation, but the Heels, who were playing without point guard Ty Lawson, rallied to force overtime after Clemson missed a layup with two seconds left. Hansbrough took it from there, scoring 13 of his 39 points in two overtimes to drop the Tigers 103-93.
So is this the year the losing ends?
The Tigers have a little momentum on their side, if not a chip on their shoulder the size of the Smith Center. Three times last year they extended the Tar Heels to the wire only to mix in a different sort of hurt into a cocktail of woulda-coulda-shoulda. In Littlejohn Coliseum, Clemson lost by a point in overtime when Wayne Ellington hit a 3-pointer in the final second. In Chapel Hill, they went to double overtime. And in the ACC tournament championships game, they again led at halftime, but lost by five.
And they have a slew of talented offensive weapons, including Trevor Booker, who also helped hold Hansbrough to 12 points a season ago at Clemson, K.C. Rivers and marksman Terrence Oglesby.
They've even got motivation, coming off a loss to Wake Forest and desperate to prove their early season start isn't yet another mirage before a late season slide.
Given North Carolina's vulnerability early this season, they have plenty on their side.
Plenty, that is, except history.
