University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A Carolina Thing
June 23, 2003 | Men's Basketball
June 23, 2003
By Adam Lucas
It's not quite as mysterious as The Matrix, but the Carolina basketball fraternity still seems to perplex some hoops observers.
The latest to join the Bumfuzzled Bunch is ESPN.com columnist Frank Hughes, who also writes for a Tacoma, Washington newspaper. To his credit, Frank doesn't hide his confusion--he comes right out and admits it.
"I don't really get that whole North Carolina thing," he wrote in a column discussing the possibility that Michael Jordan might purchase the Milwaukee Bucks. "It's like it's a perverse secret society or something. You don't hear other schools say, 'Well, they went to UCLA,' or, 'They went to Kentucky.' But when you say they went to North Carolina, it's like people's eyes glaze over and they are talking about some religious, ritualistic, brain-washing cult that took place because Dean Smith performed some Jedi mind tricks on some unsuspecting kids. Maybe I'm being antisocial, but that's reason enough for me NOT to go to North Carolina. I don't need that stuff trailing me around for 50 years. Send me to Hoboken Junior College and let me get on with my life."
At first, it's hard not to be angered by that paragraph, which has been echoed by many other Carolina-haters over the years. But then you can't help but smile, for one simple reason. Frank's got it exactly right.
He doesn't get it, and he's not supposed to get it. He's likely never been to a game at Carolina--we tried to reach him by both email and phone to find out, but he didn't respond--or had a conversation with Dean Smith. He's been stuck out in Tacoma, a place so gloomy that it averages only 136 days of sun per year, as opposed to the national average of 213 and the Triangle's mark of 220. So we should probably be thankful that he's just getting out his aggression by writing columns and not by doing something more serious.
For Eeyore's benefit, though, we'll try to explain it. Or better yet, we'll let somebody else explain it.
"When you do things the right way, people want to be around good things," Hubert Davis said last week while in town for his annual basketball camp. "What better place to come back to than a place where everything was perfect, so to speak? They call it Blue Heaven, and in some aspects it is. It's a place where basketball was terrific and you were growing up as a young man. And it all started with Coach Smith and Coach Guthridge and doing things the right way."
But what things are done the right way? That's what seems to be most confusing to the general public. They're used to what happens on the court with a basketball program defining what makes that program special.
That's precisely why Carolina is so unique--and at the same time, so hard to understand. Frank Hughes likely never saw Dean Smith stay at the hospital bedside of a Tar Heel player undergoing surgery. He probably doesn't know that a handful of Carolina lettermen returned to Chapel Hill during the difficult 2001-02 campaign to give a pregame pep talk to players on the current roster. It's what happens behind the scenes, beyond the victories and losses, that makes the "Carolina thing" special. UNC hoops isn't just a basketball program that wins a bunch of games. It's an organization that for almost 40 years has prided itself on the way it treats people.
Later in the column, Hughes, who has already established himself as a Carolina expert, writes, "My personal opinion is that Tarheel (sic) loyalty goes about as far as a plate of cookies around Star Jones, and when the rubber meets the road it's every man for himself."
Jones must get a lot of miles out of her cookies, since Hubert Davis flew from his home in Dallas to Chapel Hill last week to host his annual basketball camp. How thick is his Carolina blood? After hitting it off with Brian Morrison last summer, Davis took it upon himself to make sure Morrison was able to find transportation from the west coast to Chapel Hill this summer to help work the camp.
Why do that for a player who only spent two years in a Tar Heel uniform? Well, like Frank said, it's a Carolina thing.
As for other examples of Tar Heel--and Frank, it's two words, not one--loyalty, look no further than last year's Jerry Stackhouse-hosted alumni game, which pulled together nearly every NBA Carolina player of the past 20 years. That same game will take place in Chapel Hill this August (TarHeelBlue.com will have much more information on the game in the coming weeks), and Stackhouse expects an even more star-studded cast.
"We try to support each other in different ways," Sam Perkins said recently of his cross-country trip to attend last year's Stackhouse game. "If I needed him, he would do the same thing for me. At that game we had the support of everybody from the past 20 years in Carolina basketball, because it was a UNC thing."
As Hughes points out, players from UCLA or Kentucky aren't often quoted with similar sentiments. It might make him skeptical, but it makes us smile.
Frank Hughes might be the type of person to shy away from a school with a national fraternity of loyal followers, and the great thing about America is that he has that choice. But Larry Miller, Charlie Scott, Bobby Jones, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Michael Jordan, Brad Daugherty, Kenny Smith, Eric Montross, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, and Raymond Felton all thought Carolina had something fairly appealing. And over 1,800 victories later, things seem to be working out pretty well in Chapel Hill.
Of course, it's no Hoboken Junior College.
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.
