Eric Church is now as connected to basketball as he is to music. Here’s how that happened.

In the nearly 19 months since Eric Church’s last concert in Charlotte — a three-hour marathon at Spectrum Center as the pandemic was receding — the country music star has become a bigger name than ever in his home state of North Carolina.

And he’s done so for reasons that have a lot less to do with country music than one might have ever expected.

First, during the 2022 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Church famously (infamously?) canceled a concert in Texas with just a few days’ notice so he could take his family to see the University of North Carolina play in the Final Four against Duke.

Then, just this past June, a different kind of basketball-related surprise: Charlotte’s NBA team announced that owner Michael Jordan was selling his majority stake in the team to a group that includes the 46-year-old Church.

He is, of course, still very focused on the business of making and performing music. When he called to speak with The Charlotte Observer last week, the main purpose was to promote “The Outsiders Revival Tour” — his first outdoor-amphitheater tour — which nears its end this weekend at Charlotte’s PNC Music Pavilion with a sold-out show on Saturday night and an encore to follow on Sunday.

But there is no way to have a conversation of any significance with Church these days without eventually landing on basketball, whether it be the Tar Heels or the Hornets.

In fact, when it’s suggested that if not for music he might have wound up making his living in a job tied to sports, Church quickly agrees.

He eagerly explains that he was good enough at basketball at South Caldwell High School in Granite Falls (northwest of Hickory) that Appalachian State invited him to try out for the team; that he got certified as a basketball referee during college; and that as a sophomore at App he coached a teenage player individually before going on to coach a youth-league team in Valle Crucis that went undefeated and won its league title.

“Still have a signed thing from all those kids. Couple of ’em went on to play college ball,” Church says, proudly.

“And so for me, (if not for music) I absolutely think I probably would have ended up either in furniture somehow, ’cause my dad was, or I would have been a high school basketball coach. I think that’s exactly the other place that I would have probably ended up. And I’d probably be damn happy. You know? I mean, I love the game. ... That could have been a totally different path for me.”

It’d be hard to conceive, though, that another path could ever have been as extraordinary as this one.

‘Who do you pull for?’

Ask Church about his earliest memory of Charlotte, and he mentions not a concert he attended, but a basketball game.

Church remembers being at the old Charlotte Coliseum (now Bojangles, on Independence Boulevard) with his dad — Ken Church, who also went to App State but also bled Carolina blue and white for the Tar Heels — for a North Carolina basketball game in 1984. That was Michael Jordan’s last season with the school before turning pro. Eric was just shy of 7 years old.

“Jordan got a steal,” Church recalls, “and as he was coming down, everybody under the basket of course stood up, and my dad grabbed me, and ... ’cause he knew I wouldn’t be able to see, he just put me straight up in the air so that I could. And all I remember is as I went up in the air and I cleared the hands of the person in front of me ... MJ rose up and dunked the ball.”

It was a seminal moment for Church as a UNC fan.

For years after that, he dreamed of going to college in Chapel Hill, even when it became clear during his later years at South Caldwell High that he was paying too much attention to his music and not enough attention to his classes to achieve that dream.

He actually left Granite Falls planning to attend Appalachian State in Boone for a year and then transfer to North Carolina ... but before Church could do that, his music career started going better than anticipated — and continuing to gain traction playing gigs in the Boone area and in Asheville seemed to make more sense.

Besides, he figured, just because he didn’t actually go to UNC didn’t mean he couldn’t still cheer for their sports teams like he and his dad always had.

So he went right on doing that, openly supporting both the UNC basketball and football teams, as he moved to Nashville after graduation; as his career blew up thanks to No. 1 records like 2011’s “Chief” and 2014’s “The Outsiders”; and as he became an almost-annual part of the Entertainer of the Year discussions at both the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Country Music Association’s CMA Awards.

“People, you know, they ask me all the time: ‘When Appalachian plays Carolina, who do you pull for?’ And I pull for Carolina,” Church says, chuckling. “I mean, App State won’t be happy with that. ...

“If they don’t play? I’m pulling for App State. But there’s one (football) game a year that I don’t pull for App State, and it’s when they play UNC.”

This wasn’t necessarily a state secret or anything. That said, it’s likely Church’s fans didn’t have a true sense of just how passionate the singer was about the Heels until he opted out of that early-spring show in San Antonio so he could take his sons and his dad to the Final Four — something he still calls “one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

Setting an example for his sons

When the 2022 tournament started, the odds were stacked against the eighth-seeded Tar Heels making a big splash.

UNC kept winning, however, and when the team not only advanced all the way to a crucial semifinal game but also was pitted against archrival Duke, in Church’s mind there was no other choice.

“People were mad at me in the moment because I didn’t have a backup plan,” the singer says now. “But it happened so fast. I just didn’t have anything to tell them, other than ‘I’m going to this game and there will not be a show that night.’ I mean, if North Carolina had lost that game (its East Regional final against Saint Peter’s), I would have been in Texas the next week.”

Since then, he’s explained himself and defended his decision publicly plenty of times. He fully refunded fans who had tickets to the canceled show and later that year returned to San Antonio for a pair of free shows to make amends. And he’d do it all over again the same way if he had to.

“Them winning the game certainly helped, but it was just a great moment. We still have all kinds of pictures. ... We get back to North Carolina in the summer, but my sons —” he says, referring to his then-10-year-old Boone and then-7-year-old Hawk “— they grew up in Nashville. So it’s always a hard thing as a dad.”

What he means is this: “I’m trying really hard to make sure they’re Tar Heels fans,” Church says, laughing, “and that certainly helped me to get them to be Tar Heels.”

Next up, he’ll have to work on turning them into Hornets fans, too.

‘Beyond any dream I ever had’

Church was, in fact, the same age as his older son is now — 11 — when the Hornets made their Charlotte debut in 1988 with guys like Muggsy Bogues and Kelly Tripucka and Dell Curry.

He remembers having the purple and teal Hornets Starter jacket that everyone else around here seemed to own in the late ’80s and early ’90s; he remembers his dad bringing him to Hornets games (at the since-demolished Charlotte Coliseum on Tyvola Road); and he remembers those games being “one of the best fan experiences you could find anywhere.”

During the height of the original Hornets craze, Church was as big a fan of them as he was of the Tar Heels.

His passion for those teams, and for basketball in general, bled into conversations he had while cementing relationships with Hornets president Fred Whitfield and then-majority team owner Michael Jordan during the NASCAR Cup Series race weekend in Nashville in June 2022. (Jordan has owned and operated NASCAR team 23XI Racing since 2020.)

Then Church accepted the Hornets’ invitation to park his tour bus at Spectrum Center for last December’s Jumpman Invitational, which featured schools signed to Nike’s Jordan Brand and which saw Church hanging more with Whitfield as well as with former Tar Heels coach Roy Williams.

By the time he showed up for a event to support Whitfield’s HoopTee Charities in March, Church counted both Whitfield and Jordan as good friends.

So when Whitfield was helping new owners Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall assemble the group of minority partners that would help the two buy a majority stake in the team from Jordan this spring, “Eric came to mind immediately,” Whitfield says. “I thought he’d add enormous value to our organization with his profile and his brand, and I thought it’d be a lot of fun for him ... with him being such a big basketball fan.”

Church and the Hornets haven’t publicly disclosed the amount of his investment, but it’s believed to be at least $15 million based on the NBA’s ownership rules and the reported $3 billion paid to Jordan for his majority stake.

As it turns out, one of the many things that appealed to Schnall about Church — in addition to his relationship with the state, his relationship with the sport, and his celebrity appeal — was ... his decision to cancel a concert to watch the UNC-Duke game.

“I love that. Love that,” Schnall says, chuckling. “Love the passion.”

That passion is already rubbing off on his fans. Church says that since the concert cancellation, he’s noticed more and more Tar Heels jerseys at his concerts, and that since June, he’s started seeing more Hornets jerseys.

And many of those jerseys have the name “Church” on the back of them.

Stuff like that still blows the singer’s mind, especially when he ties it back to his dad lifting him up so he could see Jordan dunk, or when he connects it to the fact that he’s now friends with Jordan. Or with the fact that he now owns — along with Jordan, who held onto a minority stake — a part of his favorite childhood NBA team. “It’s something,” Church says, “that was beyond any dream I ever had when I was a young man.

“I mean, it’s just beyond anything that I could have ever imagined.”

How to see Eric Church in Charlotte

Eric Church will perform at Charlotte’s PNC Music Pavilion Saturday and Sunday nights. Saturday’s concert is sold out, but tickets remain for Sunday’s show via livenation.com.