After winning the men\'s national title in 2010, Duke\'s basketball players boarded an Elite Tours bus one April evening for the short trip to Durham Bulls Athletic Park, where they would be honored and throw out the first pitch.
Every person on that bus knew what it was like to win an NCAA title, including the driver.
Lorenzo Charles drove the Blue Devils to the baseball game that night, 27 years after he won a national championship of his own with N.C. State, collecting Dereck Whittenburg\'s desperation heave below the basket and dunking it to clinch a remarkable upset of heavily favored Houston. Charles died Monday night when he lost control of the empty tour bus he was driving on Interstate 40, not far from the arena where N.C. State plays basketball now. He was 47.
How he went from college basketball hero to college-team bus driver is a story of a man whose dream of basketball stardom never panned out, but who found happiness in a more modest life, even as he occasionally struggled with the financial demands of his middle-class existence.
For 15 years, basketball took him around the world, from Uruguay to Turkey and just about everywhere in between. By 2001, his knees and opportunities had run out, and he returned to Raleigh, where he had met his wife.
Without a college degree, his work options were limited. But once he started driving a bus, he found satisfaction in a new direction.
Most of the time, Charles led an ordinary life, an anonymous everyman, if a hulking one. Yet those who recognized him - passengers and future presidents alike - saw only a basketball hero and icon. His stardom followed him into his new career blue wedding dresses blue wedding dresses, and by all accounts, he never tired of talking about his moment and savored both sides of his dual existence.
\"Everyone talked to \'Lo\' about that shot,\" N.C. State teammate Ernie Myers said, \"but he\'d hardly talk about it unless someone brought it up first.\"
Original shining moment
We know the NCAA tournament today as a monolith, an event CBS and its partners pay more than $77 million per year to televise. It\'s a monthlong diversion that saps productivity in offices across the country and dominates the sports world. There\'s even a name for it: Madness.
It wasn\'t so crazy in 1983. But N.C. State\'s dramatic string of upsets accelerated the NCAA tournament\'s climb to the phenomenon it is today.
In the championship game against a Houston team so powerful it had its own nickname - \"Phi Slamma Jamma\" - with the score tied at 52 and time running out, Whittenburg threw up a prayer from 30 feet that got nowhere near the basket. Charles, standing beneath the hoop low cost wedding dresses , grabbed the ball and dunked it. Whittenburg, Charles and coach Jim Valvano raced across the court. College basketball changed forever.
\"That night in Albuquerque, none of us really realized what we\'d done, or what it would mean - how the shot would live on and on and become the signature moment of the NCAA tournament,\" said Sidney Lowe, point guard on that team. \"We were just kids.\"
A basketball pilgrimage
When Charles came to N.C. State in 1981, he had been playing basketball for only three years. Even though he grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., he preferred the pace of Raleigh.
\"Lo always was extremely shy and quiet, like he had a shell that covered up his thoughts,\" said Myers, the teammate who grew up with Charles in New York. \"But once he got to know you, he was as friendly as anybody you\'ll ever see.\"
Basketball took Charles overseas, but his parents had come from the opposite direction, to Brooklyn from Panama. Herman Charles worked in the meat-packing industry, waking at 3 a.m. to begin a commute that would deliver him to his plant at 5 a.m. Sylvia worked as a typist.
Like his father, Lorenzo Charles adored baseball. He didn\'t make the team in high school, though, and at age 15 a growth spurt shot him up to 6-foot-2. His gym teacher urged him to try basketball. He kept on growing, and Valvano took notice.
But before he became famous for his historic basket, Charles was notorious for something else: During the summer of 1982, Charles stole pizzas from a delivery man on campus and spent a weekend in jail. He was totally unaware of the fuss it would cause.
The next time N.C. State played at Duke, the students there threw pizza boxes onto the court. Charles, his naïveté squashed, scored 25 points and destroyed the Blue Devils.
The NBA, then beyond
In his first two seasons with the Wolfpack, Charles was more of a role player shop little prom dresses 2011. keep your party look classic with a sophisticated lbd. play slideshow, but he blossomed during the NCAA championship run and averaged more than 18 points per game over the next two seasons, earning first-team all-ACC honors both years and was named a third-team All-American by The Associated Press as a junior.
The Atlanta Hawks took him in the second round of the 1985 NBA draft, but he quickly discovered that while he might have been a big man in college, by professional standards, he wasn\'t very large. In that one NBA season, Charles played in 36 games for the Hawks, averaging 3.4 points and 1.1 rebounds in 7.6 minutes per game.
\"If Lo had come along three or four years later, he might have been exactly what everyone was looking for in a power forward - about 6-6 or 6-7, strong, hard to get around, good free-throw shooter, really good passer,\" said Lowe, a former NBA coach.
Charles was paid about $70,000 for his season with the Hawks. As soon as he signed his contract discount wedding dress directory discount wedding dress directory, he bought a Rolex for his father. His goal was to make enough money for his parents to retire, but that wasn\'t going to happen if he stayed in the NBA.
Valvano and Mike Fratello, the Hawks\' coach at the time, worked together to set Charles up with a team in Italy, beginning a 15-year international career.
\"I think he was paid about $120,000 for that next season, which was more than he would have made if he could have hooked on with an NBA team as a reserve roster-spot player,\" Myers said. \"Lo loved playing over there. ... Money was never the No. 1 thing in life for Lo in the first place, though.\"
Return to Raleigh
For years, there was always an interested team, including the Raleigh Bullfrogs of the Global Basketball Association. But as his basketball career wound down, his friends started to wonder what Charles would do next. Garry Pierce, a friend who met Charles while working as an N.C. State team manager, sat with him at his apartment one day during the late \'90s, waiting for a call from an agent that never came.
After a final stint as a player-coach in the minor leagues in 2000-01, his knees and options had run out. Basketball had given him a career, but he came back to Raleigh looking for a new one.
He met his wife, Theresa, at a club. The two married, and he moved into her townhouse in Wake Forest. The rest of his personal life was less settled. He had not graduated from N.C. State, so a high-paying job was unlikely.
\"When the chips are down, you have to do what you have to do,\" said Patrice Charles, his younger sister. \"He never really wanted to talk about it, though. He really didn\'t want me to have to worry about things.\"
Charles took a job with UPS, driving a truck, but loading and unloading packages was too hard on his battered knees. With his commercial driver\'s license in hand, summer maxi dresses 2012 summer maxi dresses 2012 he went to work for Elite Tours. The state Employment Security Commission estimates an experienced bus driver in North Carolina will earn slightly less than $15 an hour.
As a child, he had been fascinated with trains, demanding to ride in the front car on the subway to watch the engineer.
\"I\'m convinced that if he\'d have stayed in New York and hadn\'t pursued basketball, he would have been a conductor,\" said Patrice, who moved to Durham 18 years ago to be closer to her brother.
In a different life, maybe he would have been a train conductor or engineer. In this life Pendants , he was a bus driver.
The long-distance driving wasn\'t great for Charles\' health - Pierce got on Charles to work out more often, while his sister tried to get him to order a salad once in a while - but it was great for his mood. He never wanted to own his own company, because Charles didn\'t like the idea of management, Pierce said, and liked meeting the people who boarded his bus too much.
Still, financial problems dogged Charles to the end.
In January, the U.S. Treasury obtained a lien on Charles\' wages and property for $23,385 in back taxes the IRS says he failed to pay since 2004. He and his wife took out two loans against the Wake Forest townhouse she bought in 1994, for $60 white summer dresses 2011 white summer dresses 2011,000 in 1998 and $67,500 in 2003.
The townhouse was on the market for six months last year without selling, but it was put back up for sale the day after the tax lien was filed.
Charles was working a full schedule for Elite Tours, transporting a wedding party to Duke Chapel on Saturday and driving the Duke lacrosse team on Sunday. He was on his way to Durham for another job, driving without his seat belt, when he died. The cause remains unclear.
A fund to assist his family has been established at the Wachovia branch on Forest Pines Drive in Raleigh.
Another championship
Elite Tours had contracts with sports teams at Duke and North Carolina, which brought Charles into contact with a new generation of college athletes who knew him not as a basketball star but as the friendly face behind the wheel of their bus.
\"He loved talking sports, and those students kept him young,\" said Bill Chamberlain, a former North Carolina basketball player who first met Charles during his court-ordered community service after the pizza incident. \"He didn\'t feel like he was some guy who failed. He didn\'t hang his head.\"
At Duke, he drove both soccer teams as well as the men\'s lacrosse team, which won a national title in 2010. When he drove their bus, he wore a blue Duke lacrosse shirt and ate with the coaching staff. Duke coach John Danowski called him \"part of the team.\"
Danowski asked Charles to give his team a pep talk before the championship game in 2010. When the team\'s bus pulled up to the stadium before game, Danowski and the coaches got off the bus and left the team with Charles.
\"He said, \'This is what you worked for, what you fought for, now let\'s go get it!\' \" said Michael Manley, a captain on that Duke team. \"I\'ll always remember that: \'Let\'s go get it.\' \"
Duke beat Notre Dame in overtime to win the title.
In 2008, Charles was assigned to then-senator Barack Obama\'s entourage on one of his campaign visits to the area. At the airport at day\'s end, he was summoned by the Secret Service to have a word with Obama.
According to Charles\' friend Pierce, Obama extended his hand and told Charles he had to meet the man behind that famous dunk, while one of Obama\'s assistants took a picture. A White House spokeswoman last week described the president as \"thrilled to have met him.\"
\"He couldn\'t get over it,\" Pierce said. The future president \"was delighted to meet Lo. I don\'t think he ever fully understood how much he mattered to people.\" NEWS RESEARCHER BROOKE CAIN CONTRIBUTED.
