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Panthers defensive end Charles Johnson bought the firehouse used in the Patrick Cannon sting

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Panthers defensive end Charles Johnson, who occasionally has to fly standby, is out for at least eight weeks with a hamstring injury. Which means he has a little extra time to devote to a new passion: opening a restaurant:

According to property records, Johnson bought what used to be Charlotte Fire House No. 4, near the corner of W. 5th and Graham streets, in March for $1.6 million. The property’s at the corner of W. 5th and Graham streets in uptown Charlotte’s Fourth Ward, and it’s actually registered to a holding company run by Johnson: Randy Watson Holdings, LLC. @randywattson just happens to be the name of Johnson’s Twitter handle, and Watson is also the lead singer of the band Sexual Chocolate in Coming to America. That boy’s good.

But wait! Johnson bought the property from the Alfred Pennyworth Company, another holding company run by comic book enthusiast and Carolina Panthers center Ryan Kalil. Pennyworth is Bruce Wayne’s butler in the Batman comics, movies, and TV shows. Kalil bought the property for $1.3 million in 2013 from Preferred Parking.

The firehouse was built in the 1920s, but the city of Charlotte stopped using it as an actual firehouse in 1972. It became an art gallery and later a firefighting museum until it was designated as a historic landmark in 2008.

Here’s where it gets good: This is the same firehouse used in an FBI sting to bring down former Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon. An undercover agent, posing as a developer, told  then-councilman Cannon that he wanted to open a nightclub in the same spot:

The property had problems. Most people who looked into this property stopped being interested in the property after they saw how complicated the issues were going to be… One of those issues was parking. There are spots all around the building, but the building itself only had four spots. The firehouse also had to be split away from property around it, and because then it was classified as historic, nearly any change would require a lot of permits and approval.

 According to court documents, Cannon agreed to help clear those issues up if the agent made a $12,500 investment into HERS, a company Cannon supposedly formed to sell feminine hygiene products. The actual delivering of the bribe by the agent (listed here as UCE1) led to one of the more vivid scenes from the case:

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Cannon is currently 10 months into a 44-month federal prison sentence.
But back to the restaurant. Apparently, if we were paying attention, we would have known about this back in June:

 

There’s no word, as of yet, what kind of restaurant this will be, when it will open, or how many other Carolina Panthers have holding companies named for fictional characters from their favorite movies.
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Things to read about Dean Smith

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It’s hard to find the right words to say about the legendary North Carolina basketball coach, who died Saturday night at age 83. But here are some people who came close:

Tommy Tomlinson, ESPN: “Precious Memories“:

The dogs start barking. The door opens. And there he is.

The caregiver wheels him in. Dean is back from his trip to the office. He is wearing a white UNC ball cap and a Carolina blue windbreaker. His chin rests on his chest, and his eyes are closed.

Linnea will turn on some music later, to see if it connects. But for now the house is quiet. The caregiver wheels him around the corner, out of sight.

Adam Lucas, GoHeels.com: “The Stories Are True“:

These stories are true. We know this because we sat in Carmichael in 1974 when his team came back from eight points in 17 seconds against Duke with no three-point line. I just told that story to my children on Saturday night when we drove home from the airport after returning from the win at Boston College. My nine-year-old son was talking about a crazy NBA comeback he’d read about. “Do you know,” I said, “that Carolina came back from eight points down in 17 seconds with no three-point line?” “Whoa,” said my daughter. “Is that true?” It is true.

Dean Smith’s recruiting letter to Michael Jordan:

Sports Illustrated: “The Trials of Dean Smith“:

As for Smith, he was largely an unknown quantity. He had been assistant coach to Frank McGuire for three seasons, but he was an outlander from Kansas, content to stay in the background juggling X’s and O’s. McGuire, the man who had hired Smith, was the hero who had guided the Tar Heels to their first NCAA title, in 1957. Now McGuire had gone off to coach Philadelphia in the NBA, and on this summer’s day Smith, 30, was introduced to Carolina and the world. “The successor to Frank McGuire, one of the most dynamic men in sports, is not overpowering in personality,” a local paper noted, gagging on understatement.

Alexander Wolff, writing about SI’s 1997 Sportsman of the Year:

Time, too, has drawn for us a portrait of someone far more complex than the usual sideline screamer. Smith is a privacy freak who thrived gracefully in an intensely public line of work. He’s a traditionalist who will rejigger anything if reason warrants. We marvel at how a man so stern summons such compassion, and a man so competitive summons such perspective; how he simultaneously tends to niggling detail and sees the big picture; and how he makes his wondrously jesuitical distinctions. (For the college hoops promotional ad currently airing on ESPN, he pulled a half-basketball over his head, but that’s a stand-in waving the foam finger that says we’re no. 1. Smith refused to shoot that scene.) Loyalty versus Integrity is the trade-off that college coaches have never gotten quite right (take Loyalty, give the points), but he has proved it’s possible to abide by both.

(Picture: 1997: Coach Dean Smith during a playoff game – Bo Gordy-Stith (PBoBS) / Flickr/Creative Commons)

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Beyond Honored

photo (2)A couple years ago, someone gave me a strip from a fortune cookie, and I thought it was a cool thing to put on top of my computer monitor at work. It’s nice to look at when I get stuck, or don’t feel like I’m good enough, or don’t know what I’m doing with my life. It’s been reassuring, but I’ve wondered if the second part of the sentence would ever come true.

Which brings me to something I’ve known for a while but haven’t been able to share until now: My story, “Elegy of a Race Car Driver,” has been selected to appear in Best American Sports Writing 2014, a book that’ll be out in October. The table of contents is out now, and it’s an amazing feeling to look at the other big names on the list and see mine among them. I feel kind of tingly. I can’t thank enough people here. Mike Graff, my editor at Charlotte magazine, for introducing me to the fine folks at SB Nation. Glenn Stout, one of the best editors out there, took my hand and listened to me as I talked through the story, and is the shepherd for one of the best collections of sports writing out there on the web right now. Chris Mottram is responsible for the gorgeous layout. And, of course, everyone who took the time out to talk to me about Dick Trickle, an amazing man who hopefully gets his due. Thank you, all.

When my story went live last summer, I didn’t know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect this. I’m beyond honored. I hope you’ll pick up the book this fall.

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The story changes when you shoot with the iPhone


jeremy selfieDown in Ballantyne, there’s a standoff going on between the guy who used to own all of Ballantyne Village, and the company that now owns a large portion of it. After a foreclosure, Bob Bruner now only owns the parking garage and two lots, while MV Ballantyne Village owns the shops and the rest of the parking spaces. This week Bruner, who is suing MV Ballantyne Village and is trying to sell his parking spaces, went out and cemented metal poles into the ground and effectively blocked more than a hundred spaces, which has the people who use Ballantyne Village increasingly peeved. I went down there yesterday to shoot a story for NBC Charlotte, which you can see below:

I shot the entire thing with my iPhone. I asked for a photographer but didn’t get one, and that was actually for the best. While there are stories where having a photographer or even just a full sized camera will work better, in some cases an iPhone should be your first option. Here’s why:

1. Nobody tends to hassle you – We, as a society, are now conditioned to seeing people take pictures and video of anything with their smartphones, no matter how small or inconsequential. I needed pictures and video of parking spots and poles, which on their own are quite boring things. Mashed together, they make a story. But individually, I’m just a guy with a phone taking pictures. That’s quite different than rolling up somewhere with a big camera, a photographer and a microphone. People who own things like malls, shopping centers and whatnot will run you off when they see you show up with a camera in tow. But with an iPhone, you’re just another guy taking shots of random stuff. Yesterday, people left me alone.

2. People are closer to their true selves – I always identify myself before I ask people to talk to me. I say I work for a television station. I’ll show them ID if they ask for it. But in some way, I’m not sure if they believe it. Yeah, right, they think, I’ll believe it when I see the story at six. But people I interview with the iPhone always seem more genuine and relaxed. I think it has something to do with the fact that when people see a camera and a microphone and someone says we’re rolling, they stiffen up. It’s interview time, and I’m being interviewed, they think, so I need to say things that people on TV say. I’ve always found that people talk like people ACTUALLY talk when I’m talking to them for a print or online story. There’s less pretense and there aren’t the lights and the nervousness is gone. You’re just having a conversation. The iPhone’s about as close as I’ve ever gotten to that.

3. It’s portable – I’ve shot at least two other stories almost completely on the iPhone. During the snowstorm earlier this year, I went out and skied through my neighborhood with my dog. The resulting story was fairly simple, and I didn’t even need to go into the newsroom to edit. I put the whole thing together with iMovie and emailed it in:

Before the Democratic National Convention, I took a bike ride around uptown Charlotte. Here, I mounted a GoPro camera to my handlebars but used the iPhone to shoot other b-roll and interviews. I also just happened upon Panthers owner Jerry Richardson walking out of the Bank of America tower. I guarantee you, he wouldn’t have talked to me if I would have shoved a big camera in his face:
Of course, the drawbacks to using the iPhone are plenty. You have no zoom lens. The audio can be shaky (In the first story, I had to run some of my sound through a high pass filter so you could hear it). And when you’ve got time and access, a traditional video camera is always the better choice. But when you’ve only got a half hour, you don’t want to get run off the property and want people to be more honest with you, the solution is right there in your pocket.

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On the end of deftlyinane.com, and the beginning of this

Not that any of you asked, but a while back, deftlyinane.com went away. It was where I had been doing a lot of my writing through the years. There was some personal stuff in there. I vented about my crappy old clothes dryer. I wrote about the night I got engaged to my wife, who is now ready to have our first son. I wrote a lot of stupid stuff too. Once, I ate some tilapia cooked by Coolio and got sick. I wrote about it.

I’d founded that site as a place where I could write and have other people read it, because I didn’t really have any platform before. It attracted a small audience, but it was fun. If there was something on my mind, I could write it and publish it, and that’d be it. I felt like I had a lot to say, and so I said it often.

But by happy accident in 2009, I had a piece published in Charlotte magazine about a blind hiker who completed the Appalachian Trail. That piece led to more pieces from Charlotte, which led to pieces in Our State magazine, which all led to some pieces on SB Nation Longform. I now have a blog at charlottemagazine.com, and I’m able to turn stories on-air and online at NBC Charlotte that I want to do. Weird stuff ends up at wcnc.tumblr.com. And, as of now, I’ve tweeted more than 26,000 times since I joined Twitter in 2009. In short, I’ve gone from having one place to say something to many places to say something.

I’ve been gracious for the luck I’ve had. But as with anything, when people ask you to do things, and they’re willing to pay you for those things, you mentality starts to change. Writing is an outlet, but it’s become more and more of a side business. I’m lucky enough to be able to offer things and have things offered to me, but now it has to fit inside an increasingly crowded schedule, one that has grown, since 2010, to include a girlfriend, and then wife, and soon a son, all wrapped around a full time job. I love to write, to explore, to explain and to learn, and I’m grateful that many people have given me the chance to do so. But I’m also more aware that time is a precious resource.

Which brings me back to deftlyinane.com. I hadn’t posted there in two years because I was posting in many other places. It felt somewhat embarrassing to be pointing people to a site that featured my skills as a writer and included a blog that had been dormant since 2012. I let the website’s registration lapse, and one day, it was gone.

I still have the archive from the site, and I’ll probably be posting some of it here. I created this site because I wanted to have a landing page to link people to my work. I wanted to look forward as well as back. And from time to time, when I have something to say that, inexplicably, doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere else, I’ll be able to say it here.

That’s it, really. Not that anyone really cared. Deftly Inane was just sort of a moniker that I came up with years ago. No reason. I thought it was clever. I’m still a little bit embarrassed to say it out loud. I made it my Twitter handle because it was a fad back then to use something creative instead of your real name. I used it for the website too. Now, the site is gone, but I’m on to the next thing, which is exciting and for which I’m always grateful.

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Fifteen Cats In The Basement

We were about to go into the house when the owner opened the front door. He was an older man, with gray hair and a green polo shirt over his belly. He wobbled out and looked at us.

“You were supposed to call first,” he said.

Our realtor said she’d made an appointment for Wife and I to see the house, and she sweetly explained that she hadn’t seen any note that told us to make an extra call. No, the man said, you were supposed to call first. It takes me fifteen minutes to round up the dogs. We could hear them barking somewhere inside the house. They sounded big.

It’s okay, our realtor said. There’s another house in the neighborhood we can check out. We’ll go there and come back, and that should give you plenty of time to round up the dogs. Okay, the man said, but I’d really prefer it if you call me fifteen minutes before you come back.

If you get your dogs right now, our realtor said, we’ll be sure to come back in fifteen minutes. That way, we wouldn’t have to fuss with the phone.

The man again insisted we call.

It was awkward. We had come to check out a brick-faced home in a leafy neighborhood. It had a large kitchen with granite counter tops. The deck out back was spacious. The place had potential.

The owner was quickly killing that potential. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Owners are always supposed to be gone. The whole point of this polite trespassing was to look around inside a stranger’s house and imagine how you could create your own memories there. If there was evidence of owners past — of a home’s true story — a coat of paint or a set of new appliances would conveniently cover it up. It’s easier to never know. It’s harder to forget.

It became clear, though, that we were going to learn plenty about owners past.

The man made a fidgety glance back to the house. The dogs were barking. You know what? Why don’t I just try to round them up now, he said. You don’t mind waiting, do you? The three of us forced smiles and said that would be fine.

He turned and walked back toward the house. After a few steps, he stopped. He turned around — a guilty look on his face. He didn’t mean to be rude, he said. But, you know, the dogs. He paused.

“There’s something else,” he said.

I just got married again a year ago, the man continued. I had no idea my new wife had cats. Fifteen cats. I’m trying to get them out of the house, he said. He shrugged. For now, they’re in the basement. So before you go in there, just know there’s a smell. It won’t smell good. But I’m really trying to get them out. But they’re in the basement. Fifteen cats.

His shoulders slumped. Let me go get the dogs, he said, and he went inside.

I glanced at the listing. The sheet mentioned nothing about dogs. Or cats. Or the wife. Or phone calls. Or odors. It looked gorgeous on paper. It was a house. But it was also somebody’s home. We didn’t want to look at the home. We just came to look at the house. Now, it was impossible to separate the two.We decided to give the house the benefit of the doubt. Once, we toured a crumbling bungalow in Dilworth and found a rotting squirrel that had broken in but couldn’t escape. This couldn’t possibly be worse than that.The man came back out. I just got the dogs corralled, he said. Come in. I’ll be in the basement.

We took a few steps inside and the smell hit us, a fetid thick stench. It was coming upstairs, and the deeper we went inside, the thicker the odor became. We looked around. The kitchen was great. The deck was large. But after two minutes, Wife’s stomach turned. I have to get out of here, she said, and she turned and ran out. The dogs barked. The leaves blew. For a second, the cats lurked below my feet. The owner never emerged from the basement. We left, never to know the home’s true story. We only knew we were supposed to call first.

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The Temperature, The Toilet and The Test

Here’s how hot it is.

I left a baseball in the back seat of my car. I left my car parked out in the sun.

The ball turned brown on one side.

It is at least 100 degrees right now. We tied an all-time record of 104 in Charlotte over the last three days. We could have it worse. In Columbia, the city where God focuses His magnifying glass and tries to burn people like ants, it hit 113.

I just went to the store and bought a box fan. It’s on a chair at the end of the couch, blowing luke warm air over Wife and me. Every blind in our condo is closed to repel the sun. The air conditioner, fresh off a Freon recharge, is working as hard as a 1985 Trane still can, coughing and wheezing and somehow able to keep the temperature in here down to 86. That’s impressive. It’s like a 90-year-old trying to run a 5K. The results aren’t great, but you have to admire the effort.

This, I think, was part of my Annual Fortitude Test. At some point during the year, something happens that tests my tolerance. I always pass. Somehow I am able to slog my way through just about anything. A few years back, I passed The Test by spending an entire weekend in Gatlinburg. Another year, The Test took the form of an apartment in West Virginia without a dishwasher. In college, I was able to survive for a week without a functioning commode in my house. The landlord wouldn’t fix it right away. I passed The Test by timing my bowel movements around trips to Burger King.

This year’s Test began yesterday. Wife and I bought a new Kohler toilet. It’s a magnificent thing. The seat is an extra two inches higher than most seats, which the box breathlessly describes as being good for your back. It is low flow. And it has an elongated bowl. Bigger target. The old one had to go, because even though I somehow had been able to tolerate it for six years, it flushed with the sheer velocity of a tree sloth. Instead at whooshing, the water in the bowl would gently ripple while the sound of a crying baby goat came from the tank.

Wife and I had already decided days ago that Saturday had to be Toilet Day. So we dragged it into the condo in the triple-digit heat, dripping with sweat and stopping for breaks every five steps. Then we carried the old one out. She got the tank. I got the bowl. The water that I hadn’t been able to ShopVac out looked horrifyingly refreshing.

After that, I hunched over an open sewer pipe in the stagnant air of the bathroom. I lifted up the porcelain and scraped off the wax and looked into the opening in which every bit of poo had exited the condo for the last 27 years. It was like staring Lucifer in the face. I bolted the new toilet down as quickly as I could to keep any more methane demons from escaping.

I worked quickly. My hair matted into a wet mess, and my face turned red. I put the tank on the top. I had to run back out into the heat to buy a new water hose. Then the tank leaked. Then I couldn’t level it.

The DIY book said I’d finish in an hour. It took five.

I put the seat on. I pushed the button. It flushed. I didn’t sit down on my new throne. That’s no fun when it’s hot.

I don’t think The Test is over. The box fan is moving the air, but we’re still not cooling down. I don’t know the code to get into my complex’s pool. And after showing some initial promise, the excitement of the new toilet has worn off. It is, after all, a toilet.

The only solace I have is that the sun is going down, and that may help us get down to a merciful 80 degrees in here. Hopefully, the air conditioning guys can get back out here tomorrow. Maybe if I can stop sweating before the end of the day, I’ll pass The Test. If not, you have to admire the effort.

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Ohio University, In Seven Regrettable Stories Involving Alcohol

A guy I sorta know came up to me at the gym last night, all sweaty and happy. I’ve talked to him a few times. He went to Ohio University, like me.

“Did you see?” he asked. He was talking about the Princeton Review’s list of the top party schools. Ohio came in first.

He was so proud.

A lot of Bobcat alumni have all, in one way or another, said the same thing to me over the last couple of days. Of course the university is all upset about this. But Athens, you see, is in the middle of Ohio’s Appalachian foothills. There are college kids there. It’s a public university. The closest “big” city is, ahem, Parkersburg, West Virginia. They should have seen this coming.

So, rather than try to come up with some well thought-out monologue, I will now relate as many alcohol-related college stories as I can remember from my freshman year:

  • Our all-male freshman dorm won an award for the highest GPA among all-male freshman dorms. We took the title with a staggering 2.1. As a reward, two fellas who lived a few doors down from me in Ryors Hall were invited to the university president’s house for a banquet. They stole two glasses from his home and drank beer out of them for the rest of the year.
  • I was interviewed on Halloween night by my friend Mike, who worked for a TV station in West Virginia where I ended up working a few years later. I don’t know how much I’d had to drink, but the sideburns implied some sort of cloudy judgment. (FULL DISCLOSURE: This may have happened during my sophomore year)
  • A guy on my floor figured out he could get the most drunk for the least amount of money by stocking up on 12-packs of 40 oz. bottles of King Cobra. It’s malt liquor, in case you didn’t know. It is terrible. After finishing each bottle, the guy would rip the label off and stick it to the wall. After one quarter, he had a fourth of his room wallpapered in Cobra labels, ceiling to floor. His dad came to visit. His first words upon seeing the wall: “I am so disappointed in you.”
  • Same guy had too many Cobras one night and decided not to walk down the hall to the bathroom, and instead pulled down his pants and dropped anchor, right there in the middle of his white rug (stained yellow by repeated Cobra spills). He woke up the next morning, convinced that someone had broken into his room overnight and pooped in it.
  • A guy on my floor was drunk and angry. We tried to calm him down by taking him out for Goodfella’s pizza. When we turned around, he was gone. Turns out he had walked back to the dorm, heard footsteps behind him, figured it was us, and punched out a window pane. It wasn’t us. It was an Ohio University police officer. We had to bail him out of jail.
  • I once thought I could keep an inebriated 250-pound redshirt offensive lineman upright enough to get home from a party without falling on top of me on the steepest part of High Street, thereby earning his respect and not ripping a hole in my new pants. I was wrong.
  • A bunch of us ended up at a keg party at some guy’s house. Most Athens keg parties featured Milwaukee’s Best or Natural Light. This guy had Guinness. We didn’t really know him. He was sort of funny looking. He was surrounded by good-looking women. I later found out he was arrested for dealing drugs.
What do these stories mean? I don’t know. They’re a testament to several things: Bad judgement. The idolization of Animal House. The allure of something forbidden to 19-year-olds. The self-destructive influence of new-found independence.
Ohio University is a fine institution. I mean that. I was never arrested. I went to class. I graduated. I grew up. I drank less. I learned more. The best I can do now? Crack a beer, think back to the days when we were invincible, and be thankful I no longer live with people who poop on the floor.
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You’ll Be Taking My Private Markovich Plane

I’ve determined there are at least three people named Jeremy Markovich on Earth. One is me. One is some guy in California. And one is fictional.

Someone out there on the interweb decided to write a novel online. It’s romantic. It’s for young adults. It’s about a girl whose mother dies. She decides to take off to an exotic place to find herself. She does so with the help and blessing of her filthy rich father. Her father’s name? Jeremy Markovich.
Among my favorite quotes:
  • “Pa, you’re Jeremy Markovich, most handsome CEO ever before his time.”
  • “Since this is alot of money, you’ll be taking my private Markovich plane.”
  • “Elliot got his own suite at the hotel, thanks to Jeremy Markovich.”
I cannot tell you how flattered I am.

The novel itself is incomplete. But I am gripped. For one thing, I would like to know how I got so much money. I would also like to know how I started Markovich Industries. And then I would like to know how I can make this all possible for me in real life.

As for the name, I wrote the author, a 13-year-old named SmileyRose. She said her best friend’s last name is Markovich. Her dog’s name is Jeremy. She assures me she means no offense.

I’ve read the first two chapters. It could use a little editing. But the story is starting to develop. And at least it seems like my fictional daughter has her head together. Good parenting, I say.

I’ll read the rest of the story when it comes out. But SmileyRose, if you’re still writing, I have only one request.

Make me tall.
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Picture from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pseudopolis/