Charlotte Hornets longtime official scorer Michael Harwood, right, on Monday, March 3, 2025 at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, NC. The Hornets hosted the Golden State Warriors in NBA action on Monday. JEFF SINER jsiner@charlotteobserver.com
It’s an hour before the ball is tipped, but game day has long started for Michael Harwood.
It’s Wednesday evening, about an hour before the Charlotte Hornets take on the Minnesota Timberwolves. The halls underneath Spectrum Center in uptown Charlotte are bustling with team personnel and support staff and security. It smells like popcorn. Feels like adrenaline. Everyone has their own missions, their own routines — and Harwood, the Charlotte Hornets’ official scorer for the past few decades, is calmly and swiftly coursing through his.
“First things first,” he says in a rare quiet moment Wednesday, “I get the active rosters from the league.” He then runs through the rest of his checklist: He verifies those rosters with the sports information staff. He does the same with each team’s starting lineup.
Harwood then takes his seat courtside and logs the inactives, the starters, the officials and “all that good stuff” for the contest in his scorebook. That scorebook — an unassuming, legal-sized notebook bound by thick plastic rings — is the living document of history tonight, color-coded to Harwood’s liking: some variations of blue and black to record the running score and the fouls and the delays of game for the first three quarters, and red for the madness of the fourth.
“And once the game starts,” Harwood says, curling his Rs in a way only North Carolina natives do, “it’s all locked in from there.”
Charlotte Hornets longtime official scorer Michael Harwood looks over his i-pad prior to the team’s game against the Golden State Warriors on Monday, March 3, 2025 at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, NC. JEFF SINER jsiner@charlotteobserver.com
Harwood, 60, has been working for the Hornets in some capacity for 33 years. He’s been the official scorer, he estimated, for 25. His work as a scorekeeper has taken him to China and France with the team, and to six of the past seven NBA Finals. He’s an Albemarle native, a banker, an avid golfer and has his commercial pilot’s license.
This week, he’ll be the official scorer for the ACC Tournament, which is making its first appearance in Charlotte since 2019 this year, starting Tuesday.
The ACC Tournament scorebook will be a slightly different size than his typical NBA one. The rules are slightly different as well. College rules, for instance, stipulate that an offensive personal foul is recorded as a team foul. That’s not the case in the NBA, he notes. Technical fouls are team fouls at the college level, too.
But much of his routine will remain intact. He’ll also be working the tournament with the same stats team he’s worked alongside for years — Rich Ward (game clock operator), Kevin Earp (scoreboard operator) and Mark Arcilesi (shot clock operator).
For Harwood, who seems to have the sport of basketball and the state of North Carolina in his soul, working the tournament is something he doesn’t take for granted.
“For our scorer’s table to be thought of enough to be asked to do it is a great honor,” Harwood said. “The ACC Tournament is kind of like the Finals. It’s a huge honor to be asked to do it. Because not just anybody gets that opportunity.”
And if things turned out differently 11 years ago, Harwood wouldn’t have this opportunity, either.
Charlotte Hornets longtime official scorer Michael Harwood, right, looks toward the team’s bench during a break in the action against the Golden State Warriors on Monday, March 3, 2025 at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, NC. JEFF SINER jsiner@charlotteobserver.com
A simple question about basketball
Before we get to the day that will stick with Harwood and his loved ones forever — Aug. 14, 2014 — another day stands out in his story. And that day arrived in 1983, when Harwood, then a Charlotte 49ers sophomore, was approached by his friend and men’s basketball manager Mark Demarcus and was asked a simple question:
Hey, Harwood, you wanna keep rebounds tonight?
“I don’t know if somebody didn’t show up, or what happened, but it was almost a fluke that we needed somebody,” Demarcus said.
Harwood obliged. His first task was simple enough: Keep track of rebounds. He kept getting invited back. As his responsibilities piled on, his consistency and reliability didn’t waver, and “that turned into 40 years of him keeping score,” Demarcus said.
Basketball came naturally to Harwood. It makes sense why.
Harwood grew up in 15,000-person Albemarle, a town about 40 miles east of Charlotte where basketball is a mineral in the water. He attended an elementary school in a little red schoolhouse where he called his kindergarten teacher “Mrs. Durham,” mother of the late great voice of the Tar Heels, Woody Durham. Harwood was also good friends with Bob Harris, longtime voice of the Duke Blue Devils. The Friday of every ACC Tournament weekend growing up, he’d go over to nearby Kiwanis Club and “they would have a TV set up on the stage at the church while we ate pancakes for lunch,” a tradition as common as flowers blooming in spring.
After UNC Charlotte, Harwood worked for Piedmont Airlines at the Charlotte airport and started out “throwing bags in the bag room” alongside Vince Calipari, the father of college basketball coach John Calipari. He worked at the airport for about five years, he said, and took flying lessons there because he wanted to be a pilot. (He met his wife, Deidra, in those training sessions.) After a brief stint as a pilot for US Air Express in 1999, he went into banking, which remains his day job today. (The first person who hired him at Wachovia? Mark Demarcus, the aforementioned Charlotte student manager.)
All the while, as his day jobs changed, Harwood stayed around the game. He kept stats for UNC Charlotte for years after his first game in 1983. He linked up with the Charlotte Hornets in 1993 and became the official scorekeeper around 2000.
Every experience yielded memories of gold.
A sampling:
Harwood remembers, in the early years, going into locker rooms after every home game to fetch quotes for the newspaper reporters pressing up against their deadlines. He remembers watching the sea of camera bulbs flashing in unison as Michael Jordan shot free throws. He remembers scribbling in the margins of his scorebook when the All Star game came to Charlotte in 2017 and the final score for each team inflated into the 190s. He remembers fighting the traffic to work the 1994 Final Four game in Charlotte, which Bill Clinton attended. He will never forget Big Pat, the PA announcer for the Hornets he sat next to for decades, who passed in July.
In 2018, Hornets PA announcer Patrick “Big Pat” Doughty posed at center court for a photo. Doughty, who has kidney disease and neuropathy, says he is on the list for a potential kidney transplant. Photo courtesy Charlotte Hornets
Harwood kept showing up, kept doing a good job and kept getting rewarded for it. All such rewards are deserved, friends and colleagues said.
“You just know that things are going to be right when you’re around him,” said Paul Denny, the primary inputter for the Hornets. Denny and Harwood have worked together back before the NBA live-audited every game — before a replay monitor helped erase mistakes.
“It does get very fast-paced sometimes. Sometimes the flow of the game goes not quite the way you’d expect it, and it’s challenging to stay up with the stats. We can’t hold check like you do in pickup,” Denny continued. He then laughed. “So in those situations, Mike would just kind of call out and say, ‘Oh boy, we’re all to hell’ in a great drawl. It immediately just calms everybody.”
Mike Cristaldi, chief communications officer for the Hornets, praised Harwood, too.
“He rarely misses a game, and that piece is really important,” Cristaldi said. “Consistency in those roles is so huge, so important. You don’t think of it, but the amount of people he’s working with every game: you have the officials, you have the team trainers, assistant coaches, our stats guys on top asking him questions. You need that person to be a consistent presence every game.
“I’ve been here for 12 years, and I think in my time here, he’s missed five? Six? And clearly what that speaks to is how good he is at the job.”
Charlotte Hornets longtime official scorer Michael Harwood, right, on Monday, March 3, 2025 at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, NC. The Hornets hosted the Golden State Warriors in NBA action on Monday. JEFF SINER jsiner@charlotteobserver.com
‘You learn that life is fragile’
If you ask Harwood about his time around basketball, he’ll shrug and offer some trademarked modesty: that he’s always been at the right place at the right time. That applies beyond basketball.
Consider the aforementioned date: Aug. 14, 2014.
It was a balmy day in North Carolina. Harwood had just shot four-under in 18 holes of golf. A few hours later, he wasn’t feeling well, so his wife took him to the Atrium Health Stanly hospital in Albemarle, where they said he was having “a full-blown heart attack.” He then took a 12-minute helicopter ride to Concord and “got me a stint put in my heart through my wrist, and I’ve been good ever since.”
“Had I not listened to my body, I probably wouldn’t be here,” Harwood said. “A lot of people say, ‘I don’t feel good, I’m going to take a nap.’ I never would’ve woken up.”
Eleven years later, Harwood wonders what made him so lucky to have his life saved. He recalled the weather being nice enough for the helicopter ride. He mentioned his wife being there and transporting him where he needed to go. To this day, he volunteers at the Stanly hospital where he almost died, and remains close friends with Sarah Brown, the nurse who helped saved his life.
His friends who know the story don’t buy the “right place, right time” rationale. They insist it needs a third distinction: “Right person.”
“You learn that life is fragile,” Harwood said. “And you also learn to appreciate the little things.”
As he sits courtside at his childhood favorite tournament this week, locked in on the game’s details, calmly double- and triple-checking foul totals — you’ll probably realize his modesty is shining through once more:
He never needed help appreciating the little things at all.
The Charlotte Observer
Alex Zietlow writes about the Carolina Panthers and the ways in which sports intersect with life for The Charlotte Observer, where he has been a reporter since August 2022. Zietlow’s work has been honored by the N.C. and S.C. Press Associations, as well as the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) group. He’s earned five APSE Top 10 distinctions, most recently in the Long Features category in 2024. Zietlow previously wrote for The Herald in Rock Hill (S.C.) from 2019-22. Support my work with a digital subscription