Fine. Here's the Cliche That Everyone References During The ACC Tournament

Hey, did you know that teachers used to wheel a TV on cart into classrooms every March so kids could watch basketball? Have you shared that fact online? Well then go ahead and share this story too.

Folks, the Atlantic Coast Conference has become self-aware on at least one front:

accsports

A post shared by @accsports

Part of me wants to scream “stolen valor!” at this post because the ACC itself was never the one that rolled televisions into classrooms across North Carolina every March. Teachers did that! But then again, this is the internet, and the only (alleged) rule out here is that you have to shout “I’m covered under international meme law!” or “Who did this?!” before ripping off someone else’s cleverly-crafted image.

Besides, the whole “post a picture of a TV on a cart during the ACC tournement” horse has left the stable. This week, all of my social media feeds have been flooded with pictures of tube televisions strapped to metal shelving on casters. I know you all want your North Carolina street cred. I see you out here saying stuff like “if you know, you know” or “my teacher did this!” But! This can’t be insider information if you encounter it fifteen times in a single doomscrolling session.

In fact, if there’s anyone who’s out here stealing TV cart valor, it’s me, a native Ohioan who never himself had this experience. You know what we watched in class every March? Me neither. Probably Big Chuck & Lil’ John or something.

In any event, I’m creating a guide to help you become a smarter purveyor of cliche. Behold, service journalism that I will immediately submit to the Pulitzer committee:

Where Did The TV Cart Come From?

Behold. (Photo via Sean Hackbarth/Flickr)

This particular product was born in the Chicago-area in the late 1950s, thanks to a man named Russell E. Petrick who patented what he called a “Detachable Outlet For a Utility Table.” According to Ernie Smith, who wrote what I consider to be the definitive history of these things for tedium.co, Petrick was the founder of Bretford Manufacturing, which saw a real need for some sort of portable audio-visual cart that could be wheeled between rooms. The real innovation wasn’t the cart but the outlet mounted to the side that could extend the range of the power cord. In 1963, Petrick patented the idea.

Nobody really strapped TVs to the top at first, since they were mostly intended for film and overhead projectors. But when VCRs came along, the TV/tape player combo led a lot of schools to buy them. That became a safety problem, since a tube television big enough to be seen from the back row of a classroom is also very heavy and could topple off. Strapping the whole thing to a cart solves that problem, but then could lead to the entire cart tipping over. Several children were seriously hurt, and a few died. That led to lawsuits agains Bretford and eventually, in 1987, a warning from the Consumer Product Safety Commission that said children should not move them TV carts around. Hence, in a lot of the ACC tournament stories, it’s the teacher who’s going down to the library to fetch the cart, not the student.

Anyhow, you can still buy these things on, like, Wayfair.

Giant television not incuded.

Back In My Day, We Had Antennas

Here’s something I discovered recently: You can’t play the original NES version of Duck Hunt on a flatscreen television. Sure, you can plug the Nintendo into the AV jack and it works just fine, provided you blow on the cartridge a few times. But there’s an issue with the way that images are displayed on modern TV that means the original Zapper won’t work and you’ll never actually hit the duck (unless you buy some sort of modified zapper to make it work). Hence, TV literally doesn’t work like it used to.

That very much applies to the ACC Tournament, which was broadcast over-the-air for a very long time. The reason was obvious: Cable television wasn’t around in the early days, and it took a while for it to catch on across the country. Hence, Jefferson-Pilot and, later, Raycom Sports produced all sorts of sports programming, including the ACC Tournament, which they then syndicated out to local television stations. Later, those TVs on carts were connected to cable, but for a long time, you could tune them into the games with rabbit ears.

For one thing, the ACC Tournament isn’t broadcast over the air anymore. Raycom still handles production, but stopped local broadcasts after 2019 when ESPN fully took over the rights. But! Now you can just sneakily stream the whole thing on your phone. Which, um, sort of brings the whole thing full circle. Early on, there are several stories about how kids would sneak transistor radios and headphones into class to listen to the tournament on the sly. Some teachers decided to lean into the distraction, and wheeled carts into the classroom as a compromise.

Unlike A Lot of Fondly Remembered Nostalgia, This Stuff Actually Happened To A Lot Of People

You know how a friend of yours once told you about a famous celebrity who once came into a hospital with an unfortunate living thing stuck into an unfortunate part of that celebrity’s body? The sourcing on stories like that is always pretty vague. You never hear directly from the person who witnessed it. It’s always a friend of a friend who knew someone who was working a late-night nursing shift at some medical center far away.

But! The TV cart thing is A Thing that often comes with specific dates and locations for people. Adam Rhew, back in his journalismin’ days, wrote about how teachers in the mid-1990s would roll the cart into his cafeteria during lunch at Carmel Middle School in Charlotte. ESPN’s Ryan McGee even has an exact date: March 11, 1983. That’s when his English teacher at West Millbrook Middle in Raleigh, Mrs. Cone, checked out a cart from the library so Ryan and his classmates could watch North Carolina and Clemson. Adam Lucas, who’s covered the Tar Heels for more than 20 years, not only remembered what his fourth grade teacher in Cary did during tournament time in the 1980s, but called her up three decades later and asked her why. “Math is not always the favorite subject of a lot of kids,” Cecelia Chapman told him for an Our State story in 2016. “So as a teacher, who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to get kids excited to see how math can be utilized in the real world through watching the ACC Tournament?”

The story also presciently notes that the 1980s were a time “before Duke fans had been invented.” It also gave us the image behind this particular meme:

Credit where due, prolific painter James Bennett is the illustrator behind that picture. As for the text, you have to read it in Jeff Foxworthy’s voice. Them’s the rules.

No rules, just wrong.

Speaking of rules: You can’t tell the internet what to do. But! That doesn’t keep everyone from trying. And in that vein, Hayes Permar is fighting the good, pointless fight. Hayes runs The Rialto Theater in Raleigh and, for a long time, has been a fill-in radio host and one of the guys who runs SportsChannel 8 (that’s a whole ‘nother story). He’s also really cranky about the TV cart thing:

Basically I wanted to know: Who hurt you, Hayes? So, I asked him to elaborate, which he did via text message:

I love the ACC and have wonderful memories of cajoling teachers into putting the games on Friday afternoon. But the ritual posting of (or writing columns about, or making memes of, or writing Rabbit Holes about) the A/V cart has become the equivalent of yelling "Play Freebird!" at the band. Somewhere along the way it became very tired and unoriginal. And just like some numbnut will yell "Freebird!" as soon as the band comes out, we have people posting cart pictures on Tuesdays for Pitt vs Georgia Tech. Freebird is a great song. Yelling it at a show is super lame. Likewise, the A/V cart is a warm memory, but the incessant posting of pics ACC Tournament week (usually for purposes of--sigh--engagement) should be forever retired.

I get it. So, I think, for one last time, we should retire the images of the TV cart with a proper farewell. Here’s what one AI program came up with I asked it for an image of a “tube television on a metal AV cart being saluted by basketball players as it’s pushed off the side of a ship”:

This is the best we can do.

Fare thee well, ACC Tournament cliche. You had a good run. But it’s time for you to go because next year, Cal, Stanford, and SMU fans will have no idea what you’re talking about.