For more years than he cares to remember, Wes Moore has spent his Thursday lunch hour at Nikki’s Drive Inn on Cherokee Boulevard.
“Hamburger steak, double salad, half order of onion rings,” Moore said Thursday night when asked what he usually orders. “But I guess this week I might have to eat there on Friday.”
That would be today. And why couldn’t Moore eat there Thursday?
Perhaps because he was in Greenville, N.C., when Thursday dawned, having officially become the East Carolina University women’s basketball coach roughly 38 hours earlier.
But around 2:30 Thursday morning, Moore woke up his wife Linda to tell her he didn’t think he could commit to ECU in the same way he had the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for the past 12 seasons.
“It’s a great opportunity, a great job,” Moore said. “But it deserves somebody whose whole heart is in East Carolina, and a big chunk of my heart is still in Chattanooga.”
Exactly what Linda thought at that moment is open to conjecture. Her mother and sister — “her two best friends,” Wes said — were less than an hour away in Jamesville, N.C., instead of close to 10 times farther away in Chattanooga. Wes’s heart may have never left the Scenic City, but Linda was returning home to where at least a good hunk of her heart always has been.
“But,” Wes insisted, “Linda loves Chattanooga, too.”
And so they came back Thursday night, Wes and his wife turning their backs on all that ECU money. Beyond that, they probably turned the page to the final chapter of his coaching career. Moore now is likely to be a UTC lifer, if for no other reason than every other school in need of a women’s coach will wonder if it might still need a coach three days after Moore took its job.
But that’s a negative and this is a story overflowing with positives for our town and our university’s Lady Mocs.
For starters, it spares UTC athletic director Rick Hart a time-consuming search at a time when the school’s pocketbook is not nearly thick enough to lure easily a coach of Moore’s caliber.
“I know my wife’s glad I don’t have to go through another search,” Hart said at the close of Thursday night’s news conference. “Now she gets to see me the next three weeks.”
The Lady Mocs, both veterans and newcomers, surely are happy to know they’ll be playing for the same coach who has guided the program to 11 straight regular-season Southern Conference titles and NCAA berths eight of the past 10 years.
Then there’s the town itself, which got a headline quote for its next Convention and Visitor’s Bureau ad campaign when Moore said of the Scenic City, “This is a special place with special people. I don’t know if there’s another place in the world quite like it.”
One of those special people is Pam Henry, president of the UTC Mocs Club and one of Moore’s biggest fans.
About four hours before East Carolina formally introduced Moore as its new coach Tuesday, Henry was scheduled to give a talk to her Toastmasters club.
“I called it, ‘How you replace a legend,'” she said. “Not that I was at all sure we could.”
But come Thursday evening, the sun that had led Moore from eastern North Carolina now symbolically setting near McKenzie Arena, Henry was all smiles.
“Turns out we got a coach who meets all our expectations,” she said.
Turns out we may have kept the last basketball coach standing who believes the Beatles got it right when they sang, “Money can’t buy me love.”