Good times

Today was my final day of classes at UNC.  That thought in and of itself is scary (also I am dangerously close to possibly having to rename this blog).  Anyways I was looking at Twitter and saw that former Tar Heel Bobby Frasor had tweeted:

BFrasor: The past 4 years this day has been like Christmas to me.Last Day of Classes(LDOC). To everyone at UNC: I envy you. Now go jump off a balcony

Obviously this struck a chord as I am a graduating senior and have partaken in my fair share of celebrating during the last day of classes, one of which actually overlapped in a weird LOST kind of way with the incident that Frasor is referring to.  It happens to be one of the cooler athlete stories I have from my time here at Chapel Hill and one I've told many people, but I figure now is a good time to share it to a larger audience.

On the last day of classes during my sophomore year, I along with several other friends attended Slugfest, a large party/concert hosted by one of the fraternities here at Carolina.  I myself never pledged a fraternity (in fact that was probably the last day of my college career I spent a significant amount of time at fraternity houses) but one of my close friends was dating a guy in the frat and she had convinced a group of us to all attend Slugfest (which was actually a lot of fun).  After arriving in the early afternoon and visiting everyone for a bit and downing a couple (okay, perhaps more than a couple) cold ones, I decided to venture over to another fraternity that three of my freshman year suitemates had pledged.  Their fraternity front lawn was packed with people with the exception of an area in the middle of the lawn where they had set up an above ground pool.

While hanging out on the lawn and catching up with my old suitemates, the news came down that Tyler Hansbrough had decided to stay for his senior season.  Obviously everyone celebrated when we heard this, as the Final Four beatdown at the hands of the Kansas Jayhawks was still fresh in the minds of most students.  After mingling and catching up with everyone I knew downstairs I went inside the frat house to say hey to one of my former suitemates (Mike) who was hanging out in his room.  Mike's room opened up to the balcony on the front of the house, so occasionally people would come through the room to jump off the balcony into the pool (I refrained... you're welcome, mom).  After I had been hanging out up in Mike's room for about 15 minutes reminiscing about freshman year, Tyler Hansbrough and Bobby Frasor suddenly walked straight through the room out onto the balcony.

Once I realized they were about to jump I immediately thought that it probably wasn't a good idea.  After all Bobby was coming off an ACL tear and Tyler Hansbrough was the key to any possible run at a title the next season (earlier in the day Ty, Wayne, and Danny had all announced they would be testing the NBA draft waters).  I thought for a second about trying to stop it but realized that any attempts to do so could quite possibly end with me being thrown off the balcony into the pool by Tyler Hansbrough.  As such I made the decision to quiclky run downstairs to the front yard to watch the two jump (and hope like hell they didn't get hurt).  In retrospect I kind of wish I had stayed on the balcony as photos Tyler and Bobby jumping made their way onto PTI the next day.

Both landed their jumps fine, and everyone at the party wildly cheered them on.  I ran up and gave Tyler a high-five (my hand hurt like hell afterwards) then quickly snapped the photo shown above of him standing in the pool urging others to jump with the assistance of a bullhorn.

Shortly after, I left to rejoin my friends at slugfest and continued to celebrate the last day of classes.  Two years later here I am again, having just finished my final course at college about to go celebrate my final last day of classes.  I urge all Carolina students to go out and celebrate today.  After all, you only get to go through college once.