WRAL Sports Fan

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'Blues Brothers' Get Smith Center Rocking

By Sam Rosenthal

Feb 22, 2008

Chapel Hill, N.C. — The first hint arrives when the Tar Heel band breaks into the “2001: A Space Odyssey” theme song during a television time-out. Soon, the first notes of the song, “Can’t Turn you Loose” begin to play.

“What song?” you ask.

Their song.

“Who?”

The men in black – black on their hats, on their jackets, and on their slacks. Black on their shoes, black on their socks and black on their ties. Black on their sunglasses.

But on their birth certificate, and in their blood … Blues.
Brothers: Jake and Elwood. You know them – they’re on a mission from God.

Once immortalized on the silver screen, the Blues Brothers now make cameo appearances at every UNC men’s basketball home game, sometime around the 12-minute mark in the second half.

They run out to mid-court, where they form a line segment of cool.

They dive on the floor like the UNC players do during warm-ups. They leap-frog each other. Then they do “the kicks,” movements as recognizable in the Smith Center as Roy Williams’ crouching, two-fist-pumping celebration or Tyler Hansbrough’s crawling, contact-lens-searching consternation.

Next, “Joliet” Jake Blues crouches near the basket, while Elwood grabs a mini-basketball near the three-point line. Elwood strides, leaps, bounds off Jake and – almost always – slams the ball home.

After jiving, jumping and jamming during the Boston College game in the Smith Center this year, the Blues Brothers bounded toward the home team’s entrance tunnel in a fit of unbridled joy.

Jake and Elwood wore smiles so big their heads looked tiny.

All of a sudden, off came the glasses, and the Blues Brothers became … regular dudes.

Meet Brack Burris and Andy Blackmore, a pair of UNC seniors who play drum sets in the band at home basketball games. After halftime, the dynamic duo leaves the band, hides behind the risers (the standing room only section of fanatics you see every during every TV time-out cutaway) and morphs into the Blues Brothers

“I guess some people in the Dean Dome think the Blues Brothers live under the risers and just come out at the 12-minute time-out in the second half,” Burris said.

“We had one security guy walk by last time, and he was like, ‘I don’t want to know what you guys are doing back here, but I’m not going to say anything.’”

Once suited up, people recognize Burris and Blackmore as easily as they determine the identity of the person inside the Rameses’ suit. Until about a week ago, one of Burris’ roommates had no idea that he doubled as Jake Blues.

“Something that I really like about it,” Blackmore said, “is you can go out there and act as goofy as you want. The people that know you know it’s you, but other than that, it’s an alter-ego.”

Blackmore plays Elwood – the dunker – because he’s “tall and light” (6’2” and a “rounded up” 160 pounds).

Burris bears little resemblance to Jake – the base – originally portrayed by John Belushi. While performing the routine, he wears one roommate’s sport jacket and another one’s dress pants – pants that might reach the shoes of a Belushi or a Gary Coleman but barely make it to Burris’ calves.

Blackmore, for his part, seems eerily like Elwood (and Dan Aykroyd, who first played the role). Lanky like Barack Obama with a demeanor as laid back as a fully extended La-Z-Boy, he showed up for an interview on campus with his oven-mitt hands protruding from the sleeves of his windbreaker, the laces on his Nike Shoxx intentionally untied and grey pants that might well have been made when The Blues Brothers still played in theaters.

Above all, though, one of Blackmore’s accessories stood out:
Are those … the sunglasses?

They were indeed. He wears his game-edition “dark” Ray-Bans around town. (They’re not actually black, but nobody in the stands knows the difference.)

Currently, four UNC students play Jake and Elwood – Burris and Blackmore perform the act almost always, but Thomas Bridges and Josh Wallace sometimes fill in. The tradition extends back a for years, and Burris and Blackmore said that they felt like part of an exclusive group because of it.

“When you graduate, somebody’s going to be like, ‘Oh, well, I graduated in this, and I knew so-and-so professor,’” Burris said. “And I’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, well, I was one of the Blues Brothers.’”

Blackmore added, “Everybody who goes to a basketball game here – if you say, ‘Oh, you know the Blues Brothers at the basketball game’ – they’re going to know what you’re talking about. And only four people this year can say that they were one of those people, so that’s a pretty select group at a school this big. That’s something really neat to be able to say.”

But the job comes with risks.

Well, one risk, mainly – making the dunk.

According to Blackmore, the dance is “kind of auto-pilot – the crowd doesn’t get to me that much. But when you go and get the ball for the dunk, the nervousness comes right back.”

Burris said, “Going out there and doing the dance is second nature … And then it’s over, and you’re like, ‘OK, this is the part that’s variable. This is where I can really screw up.’”

In three years of performances, Blackmore said that he only missed the dunk one time – when Burris was not his partner.

Apparently, the laws of basketball chemistry apply whether you play for the Tar Heels or whether you jump off a friend’s back wearing a Zoot Suit and holding a mini-ball; Burris’ only dunking troubles also happened without his usual counterpart.

“The first time I ever did it,” he said, meaning his first time ever behind the shades, “I missed the dunk. It did not bode well.”

After that, though, Burris never participated in a missed dunk until Clemson visited UNC this year, and Blackmore was scratched from the lineup.

During the Blues Brothers’ routine that game, Burris became the dunker with an inexperienced Bridges playing Jake, and the music stopped – literally – before the dunk started. After some confusion with the basketball, Burris faced a challenge from his base: “He was standing like thirty yards away from the goal, and I’m not Michael Jordan.”

You can find the video on YouTube: Burris runs, leaps, gets the ball to the rim (but not over it) and crashes to the floor, where he lays prostrate for a matter of seconds that he said felt interminable.

Almost always, though, the dunk goes off as planned.

“It is totally worth it, if it goes in,” Blackmore said, “because you hear the Dean Dome full of people cheer … it’s an incredible feeling. It probably can’t be matched by anything I’ve done.”

Also on YouTube, you’ll find a video of the Blues Brothers successfully dunking last year when Duke ventured into Chapel Hill. For games against the Blue Devils, the Blues Brothers don Carolina blue blazers (passed down from Blues Brother to Blues Brother). After dunking in last season’s Duke home game, Blackmore landed and kissed the videoboard camera nearby.

Neither of the boys can dunk a basketball without someone to jump off of, but both said that they can get rim.

More importantly, though – do they ever interact with the UNC team at all?

No,” Blackmore said, “Although I do think that they watch from the huddle to get some pointers. I’ve got great form …Tyler (Hansbrough) takes note every once in a while. I’ve seen my influence in some of his moves, so I like to think they’re interacting with us.”

And what’s it like on the court?

“It’s awesome,” Burris said. “What kind of question is that? It’s like 20,000 people are cheering, not necessarily for you, like, ‘Oh, Brack Burris, hooray!’ But it’s something you did that got them really excited.”

And finally: Are they, in fact, on a mission from God?

“We are on a mission from God,” Blackmore said. “That’s a given.”