Lucas: Road To The Rafters

By Adam Lucas

Vince Carter is mad at Justin Jackson, and that's pretty much all you need to know about what it means to be a Carolina basketball player in the year 2018.

Jackson and his Sacramento Kings teammates flew into Charlotte Friday night after a loss to Memphis. On Saturday morning, Jackson made the drive from Charlotte to Chapel Hill so he could be awarded the Patterson Medal and have his number-44 jersey honored in the Smith Center rafters.

How many of us wrote excuse notes for our kids after they stayed up late watching Jackson and the Tar Heels win the national championship last April? It turns out that having your jersey honored by the University of North Carolina is plenty excuse enough for even a rookie to miss an afternoon practice.

Jackson was sitting in the Smith Center stands watching the Tar Heels take apart Georgia Tech in what would eventually be an 80-66 victory when one of his Kings teammates began texting him. It was Vince Carter, and he was angry.

This is going to hurt some of us who consider Carter to be a contemporary (in age if not in jumping ability), but the modern-day NBA rookie considers Carter to be, well, old. Jackson had just turned—hide your eyes—three years old when Carter played his last game for the Tar Heels at the Final Four in 1998.

So there's a slight age gap. But they have something much more important in common—they are both Tar Heels. Which is why Jackson said he was getting texts from a miffed Carter, who was adamant that Jackson hadn't told him his jersey was being honored on Saturday afternoon.

"If I'd known," Carter wrote, "I would've come down to be there with you."

There are two takeaways from this statement. First, 20-year NBA veterans don't need an excuse note to miss practice. Second, it doesn't matter when you played for Carolina, or who your teammates were, or who was your head coach. All that matters is that you are a Tar Heel, and everything else is secondary. Of course Carter would want to be there with someone who played 20 years after he suited up in Chapel Hill. Of course Carter and Jackson have bonded throughout the year in Sacramento, two men from different generations but with a bond that's much more important than age.

Jackson's Kings have played the Oklahoma City Thunder, where Raymond Felton sought him out to check on his NBA rookie experience. Jackson and Felton played a decade apart in Chapel Hill.

Sacramento played Memphis, where he met Brandan Wright, who played one season at Carolina but still wanted to make sure to say hello to the latest Tar Heel to enter the league.

The Kings faced Charlotte, and there was Marvin Williams, well acquainted with Jackson from the summer pickup games at the Smith Center, greeting him with a hug.

"You see North Carolina guys everywhere," Jackson said in an interview that will be heard in its entirety on Friday's Carolina Insider podcast (this would be a good time to subscribe). "It's a family when you come here. It doesn't matter if it's two decades ago, you're still going to see them in the NBA and they'll talk to you like you've known them for a while. It's because of the way Coach (Williams) teaches and the way all the other great coaches here have taught. They teach you to look out for the next player."

The next player, now, is Joel Berry, who has already qualified to have his jersey hung right next to Jackson's. The fact that we're getting to enjoy a senior season out of Berry, who shot 3-for-17 against the Yellow Jackets on Saturday and I still wouldn't trade him for any point guard in the ACC, is ridiculous and unexpected and so, so Carolina.

"It's hard when you look up there and see this big space," Berry admitted about the Smith Center real estate his jersey will occupy one day very soon. "Each and every game I try to challenge myself. It's an honor to go up there with those guys."

It wasn't that long ago that Jackson was saying something very similar after winning ACC Player of the Year and qualifying for the rafters, or Marcus Paige after his incredible sophomore year, or Tyler Hansbrough after winning National Player of the Year. And we get to watch them, not just on the basketball court, but off it, too.

Paige went home for Christmas his freshman year wondering if college basketball was too good for him. Hansbrough rode a bike around campus while he was dominating opponents his freshman year. Jackson looked largely overwhelmed as a freshman. One day they're shooting 4-for-16 against Duke, the next day their picture is billboard-size outside the Tar Heel locker room, the last thing every Tar Heel sees before they take the court, the embodiment of Carolina basketball. Tar Heel hoops life happens fast.

"I saw that," Jackson said of his picture finishing the dunk in the national title game outside the locker room. "I liked that."

They get through all of the adversity, and they get better. Much better. But they also mature, and more often than not, they figure out a little bit of life while they're in Chapel Hill. Watching Jackson stand in the UNC basketball office on Saturday evening was a nice reminder of how far he's come. He's still very much the same understated person, the one who planned to walk to midcourt in jeans and a hoodie until Eric Hoots told him the circumstances dictated a slightly different ensemble. His mom and sister were there (the underrated heroes in all of these situations are the parents, because Williams never gets to recruit the "good kids" if the parents don't raise them that way in the first place), but so was his wife.

The group stood talking with the entire collection of Carolina coaches, the staff that pushed him and worked him out and coached him for three years, and that now was very clearly proud of what he's become. They had another game to prepare for in 48 hours, but right now, that was secondary. Because right now, here in the office, was one of their own. Now, he'd made it, and the relationship was changing. Coach/player had gotten him to where he is. Now it was something else.

"Miss you," Hubert Davis told him with a big hug as the assistant coach went in to watch film of the win over the Jackets. "Miss you, miss you, miss you."

On gameday, absolutely nothing interferes with Roy Williams' commitment to his team. Nothing happens that is not related to that day's game. And yet, there he was, staying on the Smith Center court for over a minute at halftime just to take the microphone and address the crowd. "For the last three years I was one of the luckiest guys in the world, because I got to coach Justin Jackson," he said. The reason was simple: he doesn't recruit them for the time they can win basketball games for him. He recruits them for life, and they know it.

There will never be another Jackson. But there will be Joel Berry, and then there will be…well, who knows? But there will be. And we will get to watch them improve, and watch them grow up, and one day some of them will come back and we'll get to remember that we watched them way back when they just wanted to make it through a full practice, and had no thoughts of ever putting a jersey in the rafters. There were days Jackson wondered if the college game might ever slow down for him. Now he is officially one of the very best in the history of the very best program in college basketball.

That's what makes every day at the Smith Center so much fun.

"There are a lot of guys in the NBA that might joke about (the Carolina family)," Jackson said. "What I've realized is that it's jealousy. They wish they had that same type of feel. But they don't."

Players Mentioned

Justin Jackson

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