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Love and honor, sure — but respect?

Tar Heel, Jayhawk hoping for wedded bliss, no matter who wins Saturday

By Jonathan Kealing (Contact)

Posted Friday, April 4, 2008

When Jonathan Wingate and Hilary Smith get married this June, the church will be decked out in two hues of blue.

The colors are commonly known as royal blue and light blue, but the happy couple know the colors by a slightly different description: Kansas blue and (North) Carolina blue.

Uh oh.

The couple insist there’s no danger of the wedding being called off — no matter the outcome of Saturday’s tilt between UNC and KU. On the contrary, they say, it’s their shared love of basketball and the ties between Carolina and Kansas basketball that brought them together.

And it’s just convenient that the blues would go together, unlike, say, crimson and blue with black and gold.

“These colors mean a lot to us,” Smith said. “They’re the same color family, much in the same way Kansas and Carolina basketball are intertwined.”

Wingate was born and raised a Tar Heel.

“It’s been a lifelong thing for me. My dad went to school there. I picked up on it pretty early,” he explained. “I got into it and ended up taking it to a whole other level.”

Smith, a physical therapist at Kansas University Hospital in Kansas City, Kan., was born into a Jayhawk family that made it to nearly every game — basketball and football — even though they lived in Salina.

“I played sports in high school. I remember leaving practice a few minutes early, going home, changing and then driving to Lawrence for Big Monday games. We’d study in the car on the way there, then sleep on the way back,” Smith said. “We’d get home around midnight or later and go to school the next day.”

Smith and Wingate seem like the perfect match.

And Wingate’s friends thought so, too. In the early days of Facebook on the UNC campus, Wingate and his friends were browsing for people they might know or want to know and discovered this woman who had just arrived at UNC for graduate school. She was a huge sports fan — particularly basketball.

Wingate sent a message. Smith replied. Their first date was to watch a Carolina basketball game. The rest — as they say — is history.

“My friends said if she can put up with you watching Carolina lose a basketball game, you might have something,” Wingate said.

The two, who’ve spent the last three years in a long-distance relationship, were engaged last May. Their wedding will be at First United Methodist Church in Lawrence, with a reception at the Adams Alumni Center on the KU campus.

“If we can make it through a long-distance relationship — and hopefully through a Final Four game — we can make it through anything,” Wingate said.