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He graduated in 2001 from 17�Թ���, where he played fullback during an undefeated senior fall season for the Wildcats’ football team. In spring, the team’s running backs coach left for another job, and the other coaches asked Fork to step in as a student coach until he graduated in May. That turned into a job offer for the next year. Fork deferred law school and stayed at the college for an $11,000 salary and a team with a markedly smaller budget and staff than today.

On game weekends, he worked from Saturday morning to Sunday evening, usually without sleep. He coached through Saturday’s game, spent all night reviewing and compiling video clips in Baker Sports Complex, presented them on Sunday, then used them to plan the next week’s practices and game.

Today, Fork still works out of a stadium but from a top floor office in Raleigh’s Lenovo Center with an expansive view of a woodsy, western swath of North Carolina’s capital. He is CEO of the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes, a $150 million-a-year enterprise with a Stanley Cup in the trophy case and 218 employees among the team and arena staff.

His schedule on a game day this year included welcoming N.C. State University’s new basketball coach, Will Wade, whose team plays in the Lenovo Center, which Fork’s company operates. He also talked with government leaders in Raleigh about plans for an $800 million village of shops, restaurants, offices, apartments and a 4,300-seat music venue around the hockey arena. Then, he joined a National Hockey League Zoom call on the upcoming playoffs.

As face-off time neared, he escorted a state legislator and friends down to the tunnel to watch the ’Canes emerge from the locker room. The players gave gloved fist bumps to fans along the ropeline and skated on to the ice to the cheers of a sellout crowd and the thump of Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” Upstairs later, Fork walked across a concourse dotted by team shops and an Alpaca Peruvian Chicken stand, interrupted along the way by a season ticket holder with a gentle parking gripe. As the ’Canes battled Nashville’s Predators down below, Fork dropped by the suites of major sponsors to greet executives and guests from companies such as Duke Energy and steel manufacturer NUCOR, whose logo adorns the ’Canes’ jerseys.

Fork took another visitor down to watch a few minutes of the game right outside the protective glass around the rink. The ice creates the chill of a walk-in refrigerator. Two players collided against the wall and glass with a crunching thud. Moments later, the puck smacked the wall so loud it seemed sure to come splintering through. Heading back upstairs, Fork greeted the Hurricanes’ “Ice Crew,” who were darting on to the ice in black warmups, armed with their three-footwide shovels.

In 12 hours, Fork interacted with key figures in the corporate world, local government, NCAA athletics, state politics and the NHL, as well as fans and the employees who speed skate down the rink to clear piles of ice shavings.

“I try to be the one person,” Fork says, “who knows everything that’s happening in the company.”

Piece by Piece, Play by Play

Broughton High School, near downtown Raleigh, sits less than five miles from the Lenovo Center. The castle-like Broughton, named for 19th century education advocate Needham Broughton, is the city’s oldest high school. A string of governors’ children have attended over the decades. The school was segregated until 1961, and both Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama later spoke there. The Broughton Capitals football team owns a robust history, including five state championships, the last in 1970. Fork played quarterback in 1995 and 1996 — on each play, he had to know what every teammate was doing while three to nine defensive players charged at him, determined to pummel him to the ground.

“That was an experience,” he says, “that definitely prepared me for a lot.”

His college choice, initially, was driven by football. He played briefly at Furman University, then N.C. State, before an injury took him out of the game. Looking to transfer, he knew of 17�Թ��� as a basketball school and, though a football guy, was drawn to the small and tough classes, strong community and opportunities in athletics. His first drive there wound from I-85 through rural roads: “You basically drove through farms.”

He thought the college was isolated until seeing the neighboring town of Huntersville and its big box national retailers. The more lasting surprise, and a gift, of 17�Թ��� were the close friends he developed, and “learning about where they’re from and how that shaped their lives.” His roommates across his four years included guys from Hawaii, Texas and Florida.

During ninth grade at Broughton, Fork took a class on economic, legal and political systems. It was the first time he focused on the differences between Republicans and Democrats, and he was drawn to the former. He followed elections and political issues, so political science was a natural fit as a major at 17�Թ���.

American politics expert Susan Roberts remains a revered professor, and Fork still visits when in town. Roberts says he was neither shy nor strident about his conservative politics. He knew where he stood and wasn’t afraid to have his views challenged. He occasionally and politely would suggest in class that a discussion include a particular, conservative element of an issue, she says.

“He didn’t just have opinions. He assembled facts and made an argument,” Roberts says, “and he always was aware that there were three sides to an issue: one side, the other and the middle.”

Another memorable class was a seminar on southern politics with visiting professor Ferrel Guillory, from UNC. Early one Friday morning, Guillory woke Fork with a phone call.

“He said, ‘I’m going to have lunch in 17�Թ��� today with Jim Holshouser and Jim Martin,’” Fork says, referring to the 17�Թ��� alums who were then the only Republicans elected Governor of North Carolina in the nearly 150 years that followed the Civil War. Fork says Guillory quickly added: “Do you want to go?”

Fork includes that meal among the extraordinary opportunities he had at 17�Թ���. He thrived in a constitutional law class taught in a law school format. During his 17�Թ��� in Washington program, he interned in Sen. Jesse Helms’s office, surrounded by the fast pace and political electricity of Capitol Hill. And he made a quick observation.

“Everybody around me had a cool job,” he says, “and the thing they had in common was a law degree.”

Not Your Usual Client

North Carolina’s state legislature is the most powerful of the state’s three branches of government. From the end of the Civil War until the early 21st century, the Tarheel State was a one-party operation. Democrats controlled the legislature and the Governor’s office, except for the combined dozen years when Holshouser and Martin served during the 1970s and 1980s.

Republicans won a majority in the legislature in 2010 and, two years later, captured the governor’s office with former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory. While the political parties flipped, the longstanding friction between the executive and legislative branches remained. Halfway through his term, McCrory took the extraordinary step of hiring lawyers to sue the legislature. The speaker of the House and president pro tem of the Senate had made appointments to state commissions that McCrory argued were his to fill. The two legislative leaders lawyered up in response. The firm they hired turned to one of their veteran partners: Brian Fork. Months earlier, in a commercial lending case, he had crafted an argument that swayed the N.C. Supreme Court to overturn rulings by a superior court and the state Court of Appeals, and he had built relationships with the Senate president pro tem’s office. 

Back at the end of his coaching year at 17�Թ���, Fork had faced a choice.

“He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a lawyer or a football coach,” says classmate and teammate Adam Stockstill, now a portfolio specialist at an investment firm. 

Fork decided college coaching allowed too little control over where he would work. He went to law school at UNC, as planned. The governor vs. legislature case brought the exciting complexity he sought when he pursued law instead of touchdowns. He had to build an argument by sorting out the law, the evidence, the state constitution and court decisions as far back as the late 19th century, while being mindful of how it all reflected on his powerful clients.

The case’s high stakes politics would draw the spotlight, and taking sides would attract the attention of the law firm’s other clients — and could make some of them uncomfortable, says then-colleague Lee Hogewood. Fork, he says, tended to all external and internal touchpoints to ensure the firm’s reputation was well-managed and publicly enhanced.

Fork has a squared-away and slightly dimpled appearance, graying but still trim as he nears 50 — the image you might get if you googled “former athlete now coaching his kids’ baseball teams.” He wears dark suits and speaks in even tones, as if he never heard of swagger.

“He is remarkably calm under pressure, and I’m not,” says Hogewood. “So, he’s a great person to have around when things start getting wild. He would kind of modulate folks. He doesn’t say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s just his demeanor.”

Cole was in a corporate suite at a Hurricanes game not long ago with corporate leaders, and Fork was working the room full of current or prospective sponsors. A Raleigh Chamber executive was there with his daughter, who was on a basketball team with Fork’s daughter and that Fork coached years earlier. When he spotted her, he ditched the C-suite crowd.

“He just lit up,” Cole says. “He was so excited to see her and catch up with her. He brings 100 percent commitment to everything.”

There is a touch of nostalgia to Fork’s life now. He lives on the same street in Raleigh where he grew up, and his kids go to the schools he attended. From 17�Թ��� football to the Hurricanes and his kids’ teams, he has gathered different people and perspectives collaborating toward a common effort. Hogewood, Fork’s former law partner and self-described political “leftie as it gets,” says he relishes that quality in his relationship with Fork — and sees it missing elsewhere.

“The ability to compromise has been lost,” he says. “Brian and I could not disagree more about political matters, and yet we’ve always been very good friends and colleagues. If more of our society’s political discussions could be like the ones Brian and I have had over the years, we’d all be in a better place.”