North Carolina's True Heartbeaker

March 26, 2007 — -- It was halftime at the NCAA regional semifinal game between North Carolina and the University of Southern California. My friends and I were fortunate enough to be sitting right at center court. Sometime between analyzing the first half and spotting celebrities in the star-studded crowd, an odd question occurred to us. "Where is Rameses?"

One doesn't normally miss a mascot. Amid all the excitement of another episode of March Madness, it would be easy to overlook the absence of a fuzzy ram with yellow spiral horns, clad in a powder blue uniform. But one of my friends attending the game with me, Jeffrey Zurofsky, had played the role the of the Tar Heels' mascot during his years as an undergraduate in Chapel Hill. And he just couldn't understand how Rameses could be missing in action for such a huge game. North Carolina was poised to make the Elite Eight, after all, and the band and cheerleaders were all in top postseason form.

It wasn't until after North Carolina's stirring victory that we overheard someone saying that Rameses had been in a car accident a few hours before the game. At first it sounded pretty innocuous -- almost like an ESPN SportsCenter commercial gone awry. But the next day the terrible details began to emerge. Suddenly Rameses wasn't some nameless guy in a costume. He was a kid with a name -- Jason Ray -- and had horribly serious injuries.

Friday afternoon Ray was walking from his hotel in Fort Lee, N.J., to a nearby convenience store. Given the long night ahead of him on the court, he probably knew he needed some extra sustenance. "It's a heavy costume," said Zurofsky, recalling his college days. "It's a lot of physical work."

As he walked back to the hotel along a very busy and dangerous highway, he was struck from behind by an SUV. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, and listed in critical condition. As dozens of friends and fellow students held vigil by his bedside over the weekend, his father, Emmitt Ray, rushed on a friend's private plane to be near his son.