University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: One For The Ages
March 9, 2003 | Men's Basketball
March 9, 2003
By Adam Lucas
Admit it, you were glued to ESPN Classic this week.
For five nights, the network replayed a classic Carolina-Duke game as part of their "Tobacco Road Week." And you watched them. You know you did. You sat there with your wife or your daughter or your son or whoever lives with you and humors you and grabbed their arm and said, "Watch this, this is where Jerry Stackhouse throws down a reverse tomahawk dunk," or "Watch this, this is where Haywood hits those free throws," or "Watch this, Cota's going to throw the ball off the backboard to Vince."
Truth is, you didn't really have to watch those games, because you can remember every second of them, remember certain plays better than you can your own phone number. Who won the War of 1812? You have no idea, but you darn sure know that it was Shane Battier who fouled Haywood in the last moments of that game in Cameron two years ago, or that it was Eric Montross who strode to the free throw line with blood on his jersey and sank free throws in 1992.
And so you automatically knew something beyond the shadow of the doubt as the final minutes of the second half ticked away on Sunday: you knew that this was one of those you were going to remember. It was either going to hurt you or make you smile, but it was going to be one that will come on television a few years from now, and you'll grab someone and say, "Look, I remember this! I was in row E, Seat 6, I still have my ticket stub! When we won, your mom and I ran out on the court and I put her on my shoulders and we twirled around the court and then we ran down to Franklin Street!"
Coming home, my wife and I were already wondering how we'd describe this game to our unborn daughter, who is scheduled to join us somewhere around June 10, by which time it is possible that both of us will have gotten back our voices.
We're going to tell her about Raymond Felton, of course. She's probably going to think we're making it up.
"Come on, Dad, he didn't really have to go to the locker room and get stitches. You always exaggerate that part. And he surely didn't come right back to the bench, come right in, and hit a three-pointer."
But he did, he absolutely did. Almost as soon as he went down, the victim of getting too close to Dahntay Jones, who seems to have an odd habit of being in the vicinity of people who get injured, you knew that if he could physically stand up, he was going to come back and make the Blue Devils pay.
Just a couple minutes earlier, there had been a loose ball under the Duke basket. Shavlik Randolph, Jones, Jawad Williams, and Felton all battled for it. Roughly 830 pounds of Division I basketball players battling, scraping, scrapping for the ball. Who came out with it?
Felton, of course, who missed a triple-double by just two rebounds (18 points, 10 assists, eight rebounds). He ripped the ball away from Jones, scowled, and shimmied coast-to-coast. It hardly even mattered that Byron Sanders missed the shot after a sweet dish from Felton on the other end, because by the time we're retelling this story in a few years, it's going to end in a thunderous alley-oop to Rashad McCants.
Speaking of McCants, we're going to have to mention him, too.
"C'mon, Dad, Rashad wasn't really unstoppable. Coach K didn't really point at him and tell Dahntay Jones to guard him, only to watch Rashad go right past him for four straight points."
He did, he absolutely did. In the first half, with McCants torching the Devils on a variety of offensive moves, Duke was setting up their halfcourt defense when Krzyzewski motioned for two defenders to switch, for Jones to guard McCants man-to-man.
Do you know what the Asheville native did then? He blew by Jones for a layup. And on the next possession, he got the ball at midcourt, pounded it a few times, and then went right down the lane for two of his 14 first-half points.
And we're going to have to tell her about "the incident," the biggest Carolina-Duke staredown since at least the 1989 ACC Tournament championship and maybe since Art Heymann and Larry Brown went toe-to-toe in the early 1960's.
"Dad, you exaggerate this every year. One of the Duke assistants did not start talking to Carolina head coach Matt Doherty, and then the players and coaches didn't really start pushing and shoving and stuff."
But they did, they absolutely did. But the best part of it, the part nobody even noticed, was how when it was clear Doherty and Duke assistant Chris Collins--who showed exactly the same decorum he showed as a player--were jaw-to-jaw, it was, of all people, Rashad McCants who quickly jumped in.
All the rumors, all the talk, and we're left with this: when the Carolina head coach looked like he was in a bad situation, it was McCants who was first to bail him out.
We're going to tell her about all the people who said Duke-Carolina was dead.
"Dad, I may be young, but I'm not stupid. Nobody would say that Duke-Maryland was better than Duke-Carolina. Everybody knows Duke-Carolina is the best."
But they were saying that, they absolutely were. It was the popular sentiment lately in the media, where all the talking heads were saying that the Terps and Devils put on a better show than Duke and Carolina.
For the final word on this, we'll go to senior Jonathan Holmes.
"Duke-Carolina will never be replaced, and that's the way it's always going to be," he said. "You don't see a whole week of Duke-Maryland on ESPN Classic."
We're going to tell her about the finish to the game, about Felton and David Noel stepping to the free throw line and shooting free throws like they were layups. And we're going to tell her about the postgame locker room, where Felton couldn't talk to the media even though some scribes tried to write down a statement on a piece of paper and get him to agree or disagree, because of the three stitches in his lip. We're going to tell her about Jackie Manuel sitting back in his locker, a towel around his shoulders, a gigantic smile on the face that J.J. Redick (4-of-13) will be seeing in his nightmares tonight, and saying, "This is why you come to Carolina, right here. This is it."
We're going to tell her all those things, just like you will. It's going to get sweeter every time we tell it, the shots are going to be cleaner, the dunks bigger, the crowd louder.
But no matter how well we tell it, she will not realize what you know, what I know, what the fans who were in the Smith Center know: that no matter how much we embellish it, it will never measure up to being there, to watching the students stream down the aisles with 10 seconds left in preparation for storming the court, to having your ears ring with the full-throated screams of 21,572 human beings.
She will not be able to appreciate that, not until she lives it. But that sure won't stop us from trying to tell her about it.
"Hey, watch this, honey! It's the 2003 Duke-Carolina game in Chapel Hill. You know, I was at that game, and I remember..."
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.
