Keeping score.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer
• Position: UPFRONT - Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford

After college I sold wheelchairs, then storage containers. I was a natural at neither, so I went to grad school to learn to be a sports writer. Getting paid to watch games sounded like a decent way to make a living. I soon fell under the spell of a professor preaching "narrative journalism." Rather than focus only on facts, he extolled us, craft character, conflict and emotion--elements that engage readers--into our stories. I drank the Kool-Aid. When I began to ply my trade at the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier, I did my best to carry narrative to its sports pages. Reader-engaging elements are important, but I soon learned what the good folks of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee wanted most was the "dadgum" score.

I never lost my love for narrative storytelling. It's what attracted me to BUSINESS NORM CAROLINA. This is a magazine that puts a human face on commerce and never lets numbers, vital as they are to what we write about, turn people into ciphers. After the Atlantic Coast Conference announced it will add Syracuse and Pittsburgh, we began examining why a once regional alliance of schools had ventured so far from its roots. It was evident the answer ran through John Swofford, the conference's commissioner since 1997. He consented to an interview, and despite a phone that was leaping off the hook, he spoke at length about growing up in North Wilkesboro.

The death of his father, when Swofford was 13, is an unhealed wound. "I don't have hardly any regrets in life," he told me, "but one of the very, very few is I never had the opportunity to know my father as an adult. I've always been a little envious of men that have had their father." In high school, Swofford was a much-coveted quarterback prospect...