University of North Carolina Athletics
Tar Heel Monthly: Felton Learning On The Job
February 14, 2003 | Men's Basketball
Feb. 14, 2003
Tar Heel Monthly is the premier magazine devoted to the stories and personalities behind UNC athletics. Click here for subscription information.
The following is the cover story from the most recent issue of the magazine.
By Adam Lucas
There are a few activities more dangerous than inserting yourself into an argument between Shammond Williams and Rashad McCants over the score of a basketball game.
For example, you could try to wrestle a piece of meat away from a velociraptor. Or you could juggle live chainsaws. Or maybe even, if you're brave, try and take a charge from Nigel "Big Jelly" Dixon.
Other than those few isolated possibilities, however, trying to mediate a McCants-Williams argument on the basketball court has about the same success rate as trying to find a legal parking spot on Franklin Street at 3 p.m. on an April Tuesday. Both players are cutthroat competitors who are loathe to give ground on the hardwood.
That's why, as the two Tar Heels argued back and forth on a mid-July night in the practice gym deep in the Smith Center, the other assembled players simply stood and watched. It had already been a chippy evening, with Makhtar Ndiaye and Vasco Evtimov jousting back and forth about their relative talents and several other players contributing commentary to the discussion. Early in the night's second game, a dispute arose about the correct score.
It's an argument familiar to the playground. Anyone who has played basketball has had the same exact disagreement, and usually the teammates of the involved parties simply take the opportunity to catch their breath while the participants work off their frustration. As it became clear that neither Williams nor McCants was planning to back down from what they believed the correct score to be, some players took a water break, some simply looked on in amusement, and some joined in the discussion.
That's about the time that the smallest player on the court grabbed the basketball from McCants. "Hey guys," said Raymond Felton. "Let's say it's 4-4. Let's play."
And then something amazing happened. McCants agreed. Williams agreed. And the two teams again resumed their fullcourt dashes.
Raymond Felton is certain to make a bucketful of memorable plays during his North Carolina basketball career. Already this season he's begun to fill a highlight reel, including an all-around performance at home against Clemson that was among the best in Tar Heel point guard history. But no matter what he does, no matter what kind of shots he makes or passes he delivers or players he defends, that night on the Smith Center practice court may always be his defining moment.
The kid from Latta, a town of about 1,700 better known to most North Carolinians as a thruway to Myrtle Beach, doesn't say much. It's not unusual to have to lean in to hear his low voice when he talks. On the court, he can be active in team huddles, but rarely finds occasion to talk trash to opponents.
But the payoff to being selective with his words is that when he chooses to interject something, his teammates listen. His peers listen. What Felton says matters to them.
He stands 6-foot-1 by the most generous of estimates. He weighs 190 pounds on a good day.
And yet Raymond Felton is already the next big thing in Carolina basketball.
Think back long ago to the days of yore in Carolina basketball. The shorts were short, the socks were high, and the point guards were supposed to do one thing: run the team.
Jimmy Black led the Tar Heels to a national championship even though he never averaged more than 7.6 points per game in his career. Derrick Phelps also has a national title ring and he never averaged more than 9.6 points per game. What, then, was the reason for the early-season obsession with Felton's scoring--or lack thereof?
Sure, Felton was bobbing along below 40 percent from the field as the Tar Heels entered late January. And he was hitting right around 33 percent of his trifectas, a figure he'd like to improve.
But if you're worried that he can't score, ask Clemson. All Felton did against them was come out and nail three straight three-pointers and then, just for emphasis, he casually dribbled the ball with his right hand about 21 feet from the basket, a defender marking him closely, and then flipped the orange sphere towards the hoop, where it went through cleaner than Martha Stewart's kitchen floor.
Four-for-four from beyond the three-point stripe. In ten minutes of play.
Look, the kid can score, OK? He's got the quickness to shimmy past defenders on the perimeter, and as the season progresses, he's learning the difference between taking the ball all the way to the hoop, as he could do at will in high school, and pulling up for a 14-foot jumper, which is the safe play when major Division I centers are waiting for you under the basket.
"We've talked to him about his aggressiveness," head coach Matt Doherty says. "He wants to take the ball to the basket. In high school he could get away with that. In college, when you're going into the lane against 6-8 or 6-10 players, you need to pull up at the foul line more."
The style change has been accompanied by a technique change. Before coming to Carolina, Felton shot with his elbow out away from his body. It's an unorthodox style that resulted in some amazing shooting displays, but it also made him into a streaky shooter. One afternoon, at Felton's home in Latta, Doherty explained a subtle change to Felton's shooting elbow that would make him a more consistent shooter.
Lesser players than Felton have resisted those types of changes to their game. Especially in today's prep basketball world, players are told on a daily basis that they are the greatest player in hoops history and that they do not need to pass go--or a college campus--before moving on to the NBA and collecting millions of dollars.
So Felton could have been excused if he had defied the coaching staff's suggestions. He's the Naismith National Player of the Year, man. He was the hottest name on the AAU circuit in the summer of 2001. Thousands of people used to line up in the parking lot outside Latta's gym on game days just on the off chance that one of the precious few inside might leave and open up a space in the bleachers.
What does Raymond do?
He moves his elbow in closer to his body, which creates some early-season shooting struggles but will make him a more effective shooter over the balance of his career. He begins to learn the difference between the right time to shoot from the perimeter and the right time to penetrate. He becomes a better point guard. All without even the faintest complaint.
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"I made a name for myself by people knowing that I could score," Felton says. "So of course they want to see if I can score at this level. If it's needed, I can score. But I'm a point guard. At this level, you have so many guys who can put the ball in the basket, so you want to make your teammates happy and dish the rock. I want people to know I can play all part of the game, whether it's steals, defense, or rebounds."
Playing all parts of the game, in fact, is what first caught Doherty's eye. During the summer of 2001, he went to an AAU basketball tournament in Las Vegas intent on keeping his eye on a talented post player who was considering the Tar Heels. AAU tournaments are set up with numerous courts adjacent to each other, the better for college coaches to watch as many players as possible. As he watched his post target, the Carolina boss would occasionally turn his head to a nearby court.
What he saw was what people in Latta had grown used to: Raymond Felton was controlling the game. He was scoring. He was passing. And more often than not, he was on the winning team.
When Felton repeated that performance one weekend later at a tournament in California, he wasn't a secret anymore.
"When he was out at those tournaments, his coach called me and said, 'Every coach in the country is going to want your son,'" says Raymond Felton, Sr. "I was blown away. There are so many players in the world and they want my son? It was going so fast."
FedEx packages began arriving almost immediately at the Felton household. Plenty of negative words have been written about the influences of AAU play on the basketball world. But it's entirely possible that without his AAU exposure playing for Beach Ball Select, Felton would have ended up with the same number of college offers as the second-best player in Latta's history--Raymond Felton, Sr., who didn't receive a college scholarship.
From all accounts, Felton's father was a dangerous scorer for Latta High. He didn't quite have the same playmaking skills possessed by his son, but he was a good enough shooter to beat his son regularly until the younger Felton reached his late teenage years.
It was with his father that Felton developed most of the characteristics still evident in his game today. Often, they'd shoot baskets until late at night, well past the point where visibility was easy.
"We'd go out and it might be 12 at night and we'd just shoot," Felton says. "That's how I got better. Just go in the backyard and shoot. I didn't really do any drills, I just shot."
ut it wasn't just shooting practice. Felton dribbles as though he has the ball tethered to his hand. Already this season, many a defender has fallen victim to leaning just slightly to one direction, only to have the Tar Heel freshman cross the ball over to his other hand and zip past his opponent into the lane.
It's a style of basketball that would be at home on the blacktops of New York City. But it wasn't honed on pavement or concrete. It was honed on grass.
Usually, while a young Felton--who once scored 62 points in a game as a ten-year-old--waited for his father to arrive home from work, he'd go in the backyard and work on his ballhandling. Have you ever tried to get a true bounce in the backyard? Grass has a funny way of being uneven, of spinning the ball off in unpredictable directions.
"You really can't dribble that well on grass," Felton says. "But I'd always go out in the backyard and dribble. That was probably why I was so good at it when I got to play on cement."
"Once he got to cement, he probably felt like he was riding in a Cadillac," his father says.
After a flood of publicity for Felton as a high schooler, Tar Heel fans fully expected to get a Cadillac on the court. What was underrated--if anything can be underrated of a player who was described as the "savior of Carolina basketball" more than once--were Felton's intangibles and leadership characteristics.
asketball players lead a strange existence on campus. They can choose to be a part of the student body or they can choose to live in their own bubble, insulated among other athletes and teammates. They're among the most popular students on campus just by virtue of lacing up their Jordan brand shoes and taking the court, so it's easy to coast socially.
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ut when Felton, who never answers questions without a "sir" or "ma'am" attached, arrived on campus for the second semester of summer school this past summer, he did something unexpected. He held conversations.
Other students would regularly say hello to him as he crossed the campus for his next class. Despite not yet playing in a game for the Tar Heels, his face was already familiar to recruiting nuts and fans hungry for some relief to the just-completed 8-20 season. So it wasn't unusual for a student to throw off a casual, "Hey, Raymond," as the point guard trekked across campus.
What they didn't expect, but often got, was a full-fledged conversation. Felton would stop, ask questions, inquire about their hometowns or majors. It was enough to make the lucky students marvel at his down-to-earth nature.
"That's just the way he is," says best friend Jermichael Wright. "He's a people person. He's down to earth. If you give him the chance, he'll talk to you about anything. After our tenth grade year he went out to all those AAU tournaments and got all those big honors. When he came home it was just the usual. He never boasted about it. He never even told me he won MVP of the Gibbons tournament. I had to find out from someone else."
Felton is such a people person that it was especially jarring when a midseason newspaper article described a possible rift in the Doherty-Felton relationship. The basis for that claim was a quote from Felton, Sr. that described the point guard-coach relationship as "not that good."
To anyone who has spent time around the pair, it sounded strange. As it turned out, it was--the elder Felton was furious about the article and says he was misquoted. It's true that Raymond Felton has been unhappy at times in Chapel Hill. But his unhappiness has a different source than the head coach.
"I don't think people understand his love for the University of North Carolina," says John Rhodes, the organizer of the Beach Ball Select squad. "To help North Carolina win is very important to him. When they lose and when he feels like he hasn't performed the way he should, he beats himself up about it."
He shoots, he passes, he rescues old ladies from speeding cars. Is there anything this 18-year-old doesn't do?
He can't sing, according to Wright. ("He thinks he can, but he can't," his buddy says. "He's not shy about it, either.") And he especially can't pick out CD's. In an era when Nelly or Outkast is the usual music of choice for today's hoopster, Felton's tastes are a little mellower. Make that a lot mellower. In the media guide, he lists the Isley Brothers as his favorite music.
That's the musical equivalent of wearing Chuck Taylor shoes on the basketball court or shooting a two-handed set shot. Like much of his personality, however, it can be traced to his father.
"My dad listened to them," Felton says. "I was with him all the time, and we'd go places and he's have his music on and I'd listen to it. It's good music to me."
Assuming he can survive the significant minutes required of him by this year's team, it's a safe bet that Felton's play will be similarly pleasing to Carolina fans. It's already making his coaching staff smile, even as they try to make one more small correction in his game.
"Watch Raymond make a pass when the guy scores," Doherty says. "He gets so excited that he'll jump up and down about three times before he gets back on defense. Maybe we need to work on getting him down to one jump, but he's having a great time."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly, click here.
