Morality play: how the Panthers got their roar

The last time the Carolina Panthers played the New England Patriots in a game that counted, there were 50,000 empty seats. The Patriots went to the Super Bowl and won; the Panthers ended the season having lost 15 of 16 games. Some fans wore paper bags. The next day, Coach George Seifert was fired. It was a low point for a team that knew its share of struggles - and a dark day for Charlotte's civic pride.

Two years later, the Panthers' leap to the top and another date with the Patriots is symbolic not just of a team that's shed its Mr. Hyde, but of healing and a burst of unity in this divided Sun Belt city. In a gale of sleet on Sunday, nearly 10,000 fans packed Charlotte's downtown to see the Panthers off to Houston, some running half-naked next to the buses, waving flags.

"If there's any way a city can come across racial lines [and] income disparities ... it's sports," says City Councilman James Mitchell Jr. "The Panthers' run has really united our city more than ever."

Here in Charlotte, where a steel-and-glass veneer masks old bickering over segregation, traffic, jobs, and sprawl, unity is a welcome change. Charlotte has become, in recent years, emblematic of the New South's transformation. But though it rivaled Atlanta for the crown of the South, it never caught up: The tidy streets and pink granite plazas - filled with bankers and biotechies by day - rolled up at night.

Worse, the Queen City had become Exhibit A for all that's wrong with professional sports. There were the Charlotte Hornets - once the NBA's best-attended team - whose fans revolted over what many saw as the owners' greed. There was the NASCAR tragedy when native son Dale Earnhardt was killed in a crash. But the Panthers were the most extreme case of teams beleaguered and befouled: Within two years, Rae Carruth was convicted of plotting to murder his pregnant girlfriend; Fred Lane was killed by his wife, apparently in self-defense; and the team's much-anticipated first draft pick, Kerry Collins, got into trouble for drinking and carousing, and eventually left Charlotte.

"I saw what they had going on in Charlotte and it was like a curse," safety Deon Grant told the Associated Press last week.

But in an impossibly short time, the team has turned itself around. A decision to stress character and teamwork has paid off in a process that experts say could help other troubled sports towns in short order.

"This pride would happen in any city with a similar team," says Matt Bernthal, a sports-marketing expert at the University of South Carolina. Still, he says, the pride factor is bigger here, due to a small media market and a sense of the Panthers as an "egoless team" whose biggest star, quarterback Rodney Pete, spent much of the year chatting with teammates on the sidelines.

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