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Once upon time, ACC fans had to imagine what was happening on the court and bleachers, even during tournaments.

Televised games were few. Radio was the medium when ACC basketball played its first season in 1953-54. Imagination was a must for visualizing team colors, what players and coaches looked like, and game settings.

Now, TV cameras show everything, even players entering and leaving locker rooms and getting off team buses.

Television has brought sameness. No matter where ACC schools played during the NCAA tournament, which ends tonight, arenas looked pretty much alike on TV.

NCAA logos saturated the courts and other places in range of cameras. the Greensboro Coliseum looked like the one in Glendale, Ariz., at least on the tube.

The old places in the early ACC all were different, with quirks.

When playing Clemson, Wake Forest Coach Bones McKinney had to squeeze in with his team on the front row of bleachers shared with spectators in the old Clemson Field House. There was no room for team benches because bleachers extended to the out-of-bounds line. The feet of players, coaches and spectators rested on the line.

The gym’s walls and hardwood court were a deep brown. Lights stayed dim.

Add Penfield, now 90 and the former voice of the Duke Blue Devils, says Duke player Joe Belmont came out for warm-ups wearing a miner’s helmet.

At one game, McKinney couldn’t read the scoreboard, on which a man posted numbers by hand after each basket.

So, McKinney shouted to zany referee Lou Bello: “Hey, Lou, what’s the score?”

“I think we’re up by one,” Bello replied, not identifying  “we.”

When Duke played Clemson, Penfield did the broadcast from the bleachers surrounded by loud Clemson fans, but protected by Clemson football players.

Radio had its pluses. Families cozily gathered around the Philco to hear Penfield and his counterparts, Ray Reeve and funny man Bill Carrie. Their voices came from settings such as Gore Gymnasium at Wake Forest, then in the town of that name north of Raleigh.

At Gore Gymnasium, Clemson Field House, Virginia’s Memorial Hall and Carolina’s Woollen Gym, the noise of the crowds made it sound on radio as if 10,000 people packed the places.

In fact, capacity was 2,200 to 3,500, except for Woollen’s 5,000.

Basketball remains on radio, of course, but many people listen in cars or while exercising.

They don’t need to imagine. They’ve seen many games on television. They know the style and uniform colors. They know how players look and play. They know the arenas.

They know Maryland’s explosive Coach Gary Williams is chewing out players on the bench who are not even playing.

Only one arena remains in play from the beginnings of ACC men’s basketball,

Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. Not surprisingly, Cameron is the ACC’s wildest place to play.

Cameron with 9,000 seats and N.C. State’s William Neal Reynolds Coliseum with 14,000 (later reduced) were the ACC’s only big spaces that first season in 1953-54.

Maryland left old Ritchie Coliseum the next year for Cole Field House with 14,000 seats. Wake Forest moved in 1956 to Winston-Salem, where the team played in the old 9,000-seat Winston-Salem Coliseum.

Clemson, Virginia, and UNC stayed put in their little boxes well into the 1960s.

Yet, despite small confines, players racked up points. Buzzy Wilkerson, who played in Virginia’s stately but cramped Memorial Hall, averaged 28.6 points a game over his career from 1953-55. People out there in radioland saw Wilkerson score — if only in their minds.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net