University of North Carolina Athletics
His Education Is Complete
May 21, 2001 | Men's Basketball
May 21, 2001
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Vince Carter began his day picking up a diploma. He ended it missing the biggest shot of his career.
Because he makes his living on a basketball court instead of an office, some people are going to link those events, to see them as cause and effect. What the rest of us should see is proof that too many people take sports too seriously.
Game 7 between Allen Iverson's 76ers and Carter's Raptors was the kind the NBA has been aching for. Aficionados will tell you the basketball has been topflight since just before the All-Star break. But what the game needed was something else, something more, something to make casual fans care whether the last shot draws net or the back of the iron.
The playoffs provided the stage and Carter unintentionally provided the rest. On the eve of the biggest game in Toronto's brief NBA history, he told his coach, general manager, owner and teammates - one by one - that he would spend the morning attending graduation at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, then catch up with them in Philadelphia hours before the early-evening tipoff.
A little perspective is in order here. It's not like every ballplayer spends gameday lifting weights, meditating and breaking down game film. Most of them lounge on hotel beds, watching TV or playing video games, testing the limits of room service.
All Carter hoped to do was fulfill a promise he made to his mother, Michelle, after leaving school following his junior year to enter the draft in 1998. What he did in some people's minds was set himself up for a big fall.
Carter finished the 88-87 loss with 20 points, nine assists, seven rebounds and three steals. But he hit just six of 18 shots. And when the last one, a desperation 23-foot jumper, clanged off the rim, the debate began in earnest. A few hours later, ESPN's SportsCenter led its coverage, only half-in-jest, with the line, "Graduate fails final exam."
But Carter knew better. His morning was already an unqualified success, no matter how the evening went.
"The best part about it was walking into the stadium (in Chapel Hill)," he said. "It was a wonderful feeling."
And then a moment later, Carter added wistfully, "It was almost a wonderful day."
It should have been a wonderful day for 76ers coach Larry Brown, but he felt like a little had been taken off the top.
"I had mixed emotions, because everybody's going to say he should not have gone to get his diploma," said Brown, himself a Carolina grad. "I thought what he did by going to his graduation was terrific."
Not everybody felt the same.
Toronto coach Lenny Wilkens had warned Carter about the consequences of playing poorly in Game 7, and teammates Antonio Davis and Chris Childs gave terse no comments when asked about the trip. Some players and fans around the league said less generous things in private.
During his day off from the Western Conference finals between Los Angeles and San Antonio, Shaquille O'Neal said some of those same things in public.
"If I would've graduated now," said Shaq, who skipped a regular-season game earlier this year to get his diploma in a ceremony at LSU, "I would've just told them to mail it to me."
Calling Carter's trip a distraction is as shortsighted as calling his last shot the only one that mattered throughout the series.
A distraction is a teammate getting seriously hurt or killed, or losing someone close to him. A distraction is then-Falcons safety Eugene Robinson getting arrested on a downtown Miami street for soliciting an undercover policewoman the night before the 1999 Super Bowl. A distraction is Michael Jordan being spotted at an Atlantic City casino late into the night between games of the Bulls' 1994 playoff series in New York.
Of the three, only Jordan came through the debate unscathed. Robinson got blistered, then beaten on the game-breaking touchdown in the Super Bowl. Jordan, though, torched the Knicks for 54 points in Game 4 and put the Bulls back on track toward their third NBA championship.
Carter didn't deliver the goods, and he's going to hear about it for a long time. But Sunday simply proved that for all his mad hops, spectacular dunks and Tar Heel pedigree, he still can't be compared to Jordan. No one in the NBA can, at least not yet. But it was just Carter's luck that with the possible exception of Los Angeles' Kobe Bryant, Iverson comes closest of all.
Iverson scored only 21 points, shooting just 8-for-27. But he had a career-high 16 assists, including two on the 76ers' final three baskets. After a spectacular duel of can-you-top-this through the first six games of the series, both Brown and Wilkens threw kitchen-sink defenses at each other's superstar. By doing more of the little things needed to win, Iverson coaxed enough from his teammates to win the big one.
Carter got a lesson Sunday he won't soon forget. Now he knows what to do when his shot isn't falling. Otherwise, as all those people grasping at straws should realize, his education is complete.
