not a fan of roses's blog

unc fever group protects campus landmarks

 abuse

After the Wednesday morning painting on the Free Expression Tunnel, we Tar Heels were fully aware that our good ole pals in Raleigh would be stewing for revenge of some sort. Wednesday night, they sent a couple of their band members to play the fight song, and some others got loose and spray-painted pro-State messages sprinkled in with a couple F-bombs in reference to UNC. In comparison to our storming of the Free Expression Tunnel, we felt that the boys in red would have brought at least a little of their "A" pranks to Chapel Hill. Knowing that the first annual Old Well Watch would take place on Friday night, the night before the big game, there was an instinctive feeling among several of us that State would strike Thursday night/early Friday morning.

One of us found from a source or two that a number of Pack students were devising plans of attack for an early morning assault. We figured naturally that the historic Old Well, Davie Poplar, and Bell Tower were all potential targets. DPS stationed a cop car behind the Old Well to protect both the Well and the Poplar. Around midnight, though, several of us still felt uncertain, and I for one didn't want to go to bed knowing outsiders could be lurking around, defacing our beautiful campus, and that I wasn't doing anything about it. About five or six of us stayed by our phones and computers in case something popped up.

Around 2:45, the news came. One of my friends happened to be roaming campus and saw that the cops stationed at the Old Well had turned away several NC State students carrying a bucket of red paint. I alerted everyone at once, and four of my hallmates and I jumped in my buddy's Jeep behind Connor Dorm to take some reconnaissance around campus. Sure enough, almost immediately we spotted three individuals walking towards the Bell Tower. We parked along Stadium Drive, where we spotted THREE cars with NC State University decals on their back windshields. We tracked the three down and asked for their OneCards. They responded that they were UNC students, yet didn't know what OneCards were. LOL. I called the rest of the guys, who live on South Campus, to get ready and meet me around the Bell Tower. A couple of us walked down to the Charlie Justice statue, where we saw a cop car. The cop told us he had caught four State students on wednesday night trying to hang a Tom O'Brien poster around the ram's neck in front of the Hall of Honor. We then took a tour of the sidewalks leading down to South Campus, where we saw only a spraypainting of the words "GO PACK" on one of the white tents rented for tailgating purposes.

Afterwards, we walked back up Stadium Drive to meet the South Campus gang who had arrived in a few vehicles. Almost as soon as we got there, there were two girls and three guys carrying a can of paint (unopened, I might add). They got into one of the cars with the State decals before we could ask them what they were doing. As they left, one of the cops who had just shown up to jump a student's dead battery said that those five were the group who were shooed away from the Old Well by DPS.

Next, we took a quick walk up to the Pit and then to Polk Place, which were both clean. The group I was with, about four or five people including myself, got a call from another group saying a mass of people had gathered in front of Student Stores. As we walked to the SS, we saw some light graffiti on the club cubes near the Pit, like "Go State". upon arrival at the stores we saw that this mass was a bunch of State students, some with paint, some with rollers. They had been run off by DPS and were headed to their cars. The group of Heels all chided them with insults and inquiries about their decision to go on offense, when we had just gotten news that the Tunnel they were supposed to be defending at Ram Roast had been painted that gorgeous shade of Carolina blue ONCE AGAIN. As they left, we asked them if they had bought their bowl tickets yet, since we already had ours. In what was one of the most hilarious moments in a crazy night, a patrol car fulled a U turn on South Road and trailed the car as soon as it pulled out of the parking lot (idk what resulted of this however).

We celebrated the joy of running those bums back to their campus as snowflakes began to fall all around us. However, we lost concentration for about ten minutes as we joked and celebrated. We walked back up to the Pit to find a group of ten more State students painting and spraypainting the cubes near the pit. The Heels all ran to the cubes and asked them what the hell they were doing painting such phrases as "Go to hell Carolina" and "NCSU-STATE CHAMPS" on our cubes. Right about that time, two or three DPS officers rolled up and stopped them. After the officers got their ID's, they forced them to rid the premises, since cubes are off-limits to non-students. We immediately began painting some of the cubes white with some the paint they had left. A couple of the Fever directors who were present got into the Union and got control of some blue and white paint soon after, and then made a Carolina blue shaded mixture. We then took back our cubes by painting them Carolina blue, just like we did with that Free Expression Tunnel less than 48 hours ago.

Yes, the boys in red tried valiantly to answer the "legal vandalism" of the Free Expression Tunnel. However, we did our best to scramble immediately upon learning of their plots and defend the campus of the university that we love so deeply. Sorry students, there will be a few red streaks on a brick here and a tree there when you wake up for class in a few hours. But just know that on a cold, snowy night in Chapel Hill, students and diehard fans turned into vigilantes, purging CH of the Wolfpack and sending them howling all the way back to UNC-R and their Carolina blue tunnel.

EDIT to add: I can't believe I forgot to mention DPS in this. They were on the ball tonight and we couldn't have made all of this happen without their hard work and dedication. It goes without saying they were the heroes of the operation.

This post is copied from www.insidecarolina.com