Why we tracked down some of the greatest sports legends in Carolinas history

In nearly 30 years with The Charlotte Observer, I’ve had the opportunity to interview a number of the greatest sports legends in the history of the Carolinas.

I would leave the best of these interviews in a bit of a daze, wowed with all I had just heard and wishing that more people could have experienced the interview in its entirety. I began to believe that no single newspaper article could do complete justice to an hour-long sitdown interview with a sports figure who had opened up about his or her life.

Many times, I found myself wishing that fans could have listened alongside me to the original interview, riding shotgun for these heart-to-heart discussions about sports, life and what really happened in those moments we all think we remember.

“Sports Legends of the Carolinas” aims to let sports fans do exactly that, and I’m thrilled to announce its launch.

Veteran Observer visual journalist Jeff Siner and I have crisscrossed North and South Carolina in Jeff’s somewhat clean Honda CR-V for much of 2022, tracking down sports legends in person. (Yes, they knew we were coming). We would then interview the legend at length for a multimedia project that became a podcast, an online and print series and a group of striking photographic portraits.

We will roll out these exclusive “Sports Legends of the Carolinas” interviews once a week for the next three months, beginning with Charlotte Hornets legend Muggsy Bogues.

A new “Sports Legends of the Carolinas” podcast episode will drop each Wednesday. The Muggsy Bogues podcast episode is already live, and the Dale Earnhardt Jr. episode will follow on Aug. 24. Those episodes will be available wherever you get your podcasts, with exclusive bonus content for each episode that is available only on Apple Podcasts.

A shorter, edited version of each interview will also appear online each Wednesday in The Charlotte Observer and other McClatchy newspapers, and then in print a couple of days after that.

I’m not going to reveal our entire list of sports legends yet. But they come from many different sports, there are more than a dozen of them and they were amazingly cooperative. We can’t thank them enough for participating. They were honest and self-deprecating, sometimes even arguing with the title of the show itself.

“Some real legends must have turned you down if you had to scrape the bottom of this barrel to get me,” Jay Bilas, ESPN’s No. 1 college basketball analyst and a former Duke player, quipped in our interview.

We hope you will follow along each week for these extraordinary conversations with these extraordinary people.

Subscribe to the “Sports Legends of the Carolinas” podcast. Read the stories online or in print. Remember where you were when something remarkable happened.

We’ve saved you a spot. So hop into the shotgun seat beside us, and enjoy the ride.

This story was originally published August 17, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Why we tracked down some of the greatest sports legends in Carolinas history."

Scott Fowler

The Charlotte Observer

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Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974. Support my work with a digital subscription