By Adam Lucas

 

INDIANAPOLIS—He washed his truck.

 

He had to. Eric Montross was going to pick up Eric Church, and he wasn’t going to do it in a dirty truck. So he washed it, inside and out, and when you’re seven feet tall, like Eric Montross, that means you really scrub every inch, including the roof.

 

The occasion was a Carolina game in the fall of 2022. Montross, who played center on the 1993 Tar Heel NCAA championship basketball team, still worked with the athletic department in Chapel Hill, and Church was flying in for a football game.

 

Montross made an entire life out of treating everyone the exact same. He was going to stop, talk to you, and ask your name whether you were just a longtime fan who wanted a picture or one of the many celebrities who entered his orbit. He did endless work for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital, and numerous patients have said they never knew how he knew they needed a visit, but he always knew exactly when to pop into their room and give them a hug.

 

There was only one person who made him just a little star-struck, and it was Eric Church. The basketball player admired the singer’s writing and the connections it enabled him to make with people, and of course he admired the performances and the energy, the same way we all do. He’d seen him in concert, he’d listened to all the albums, and it wasn’t unusual for a Church song to be a soundtrack of a hunting trip with his buddies.

 

So when Church was coming to Chapel Hill, Montross made sure he felt welcome. We were sitting at a basketball practice a few days before that football game, and I nudged the big man. “EC is coming to football on Saturday,” I told him.

 

The widest smile broke over his face. “I know,” Montross said. “I’m picking him up.”

 

So of course he washed his truck before he gave Church the ten-minute ride to Kenan Stadium. The two talked about the 1993 Tar Heels, and a little about music, and a little about that day’s football game.

 

And on Thursday night, Church returned the favor. Throughout the Outsiders Revival tour during the summer of 2023, we tried to get big Eric to come to a show. But he was battling cancer and couldn’t risk being around crowds. “I want to be there,” he would say, “but I’ll depend on you to tell me all about it.”

 

He really wanted to hear about it. So on multiple occasions, driving between tour stops, my wife and I would call he and his wife, Laura, and replay the previous night’s highlights. We made a playlist of all the songs played on the tour and shared it with them. “I can’t wait to get to a show,” he would say.

 

He never made it. Eric Montross died on December 17, 2023, at the age of 52 years old, and it doesn’t make any more sense today than it did on that very dark night.

 

This was Church’s first visit to Montross’s hometown of Indianapolis since that day. I can assure you that the big guy would have been in Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Thursday night. He would’ve stopped and eaten lunch with his parents outside on the patio on a gorgeous day at their home in Indianapolis, and he might have visited his alma mater, Lawrence North High, where his jersey hangs in a case outside the gymnasium. And he most definitely would have stood—conscious to try and keep his seven-foot frame from blocking anyone else’s view—with his arm around Laura while they sang every word of “Carolina” together.

 

But instead we had to do it without him. Church didn’t plan to talk about his friend on stage. Near the end of the set, though, he said, “We’ve reached the point in the set list where it says, ‘Give EC a guitar and he will figure it out.’”

 

That’s what he did. He started with “These Boots,” and segued into “Pledge Allegiance to the Hag,” and fired off four more before he paused for just a minute.

 

“I was born in 1977,” he told the crowd. “And in 1993, my North Carolina Tar Heels played the Fab Five from Michigan for the national title. And the center for the North Carolina Tar Heels was a guy named Eric Montross. He was from Indianapolis, Indiana. He was one of the greatest men I’ve ever met. We lost Eric, but I’m doing this for Eric, and his wife is here tonight.”

 

Then he played the most beautiful version of “Carolina” that I have ever heard.

 

I know there are people somewhere in that crowd of thousands that have a moment like this at every Eric Church show. I know that every night, in every arena, somewhere in the set, there’s a song that brings someone back to their people for those few minutes, because they sang it together in the car or listened to it by the fire pit or went to a concert and yelled every word. Those minutes, singing that one song that holds so many memories of someone we love, are equally heartbreaking and maybe a little tiny bit heart-healing.

 

Thursday night those people were my people.

 

It was a gorgeous five and a half minutes and it completely reframed the song, because “I miss ya, I miss ya like crazy” and “It’s just another song about missing you” felt a lot different in Thursday night’s context.

 

This is what a song can do: In the last 22 months, I don’t know if there has been a moment that I have missed Eric more than during that performance of “Carolina.” But in the last 22 months, I also don’t know if there has been a moment I have felt his presence more strongly than during that performance of “Carolina.” I hope you have a song like that. And all at the same time, I’m also sorry if you have a song like that.

 

Eric Church and Eric Montross should be backstage talking about this year’s Tar Heel basketball team. And they should be talking about how they’re going to change lives in Western North Carolina together, and the big fella would have been so proud that an artist he respected so much is making the welfare of others such a high priority.

 

They would’ve laughed and talked and, yes, maybe one day they would’ve fished Elk River. And you know for absolute certain the truck would have been shiny that day.