The last time the NCAA tournament visited Greenville, in 2002, Duke was one of the teams playing there. Mike Krzyzewski refused to answer questions about the Confederate flag, which at that point still flew on the capital grounds in Columbia and would, shortly, ensure that the tournament didn’t return for 15 years thanks to an NCAA boycott.
Basketball returns Friday for a combination of reasons – the flag came down in the summer of 2015, less than a year before North Carolina enacted House Bill 2 and got this weekend’s basketball moved from Greensboro to Greenville – and this time, while Krzyzewski again “didn’t want to get political,” he couldn’t help it.