Welcome in Inside Carolina Daily for Wednesday, March the 11th.

I'm Tommy Ashley.

That, of course, is Greg Barnes.

We are always sponsored by Johnny T-shirt, Johnny T-shirt.com.

Greg Barnes has dropped yet another column.

Well, not a column, a solid piece or unbelievable piece of reporting on the origins of the Smith Center and the seat licenses and all the good things that have come up in this debate about what to do with the current Smith Center.

And Greg, the origins are 40, 45 years ago in the making and they still ring very important.

Your column and work and article and reporting speaks for itself, but I think, I find it fascinating that we are discussing what does

forever mean. I've always thought it's pretty simple answer, but evident, it is not. Your take on all that.

It is.

This is really kind of working through all the documents and talking with a variety of people

who were either involved or were familiar with the process back in the early 80s.

It's just enlightening to understand kind of what the thought process was,

what they were trying to achieve, the scope of it. Now, in hindsight, it's easy to kind of generate

a perspective on it.

But at the time, it was unheard of for university to go through this type of process where an arena is privately owned, getting the money raised.

I mean, at the time, they were thinking it was going to be 30 and a half million you know in

1980 81 that is a tremendous amount of money to be privately owned I don't know what the exact

inflation ratio would be but probably you know four times that now so it was like raising $125 million in short period to build an arena.

So just a daunting task.

And they were determined to make it work.

You know, Carmichael Auditorium was busting at the seams while at the time it held,

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