University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Calm, Cool and (Mostly) Collected
December 3, 2005 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 3, 2005
By Adam Lucas
LEXINGTON, Ky.--As is his custom, Roy Williams wrote three things on the Carolina locker room board before Saturday's game against Kentucky. The first word was "poise."
Carolina held it all the way until about 3:15 p.m.
That's when Ashley Judd walked into the general aviation terminal at Lexington's Bluegrass Airport.
This is a team that can stand at the free throw line in front of 23,860 screaming maniacs and coolly deposit game-clinching free throws.
They can go into fabled Rupp Arena, where Carolina had never won a game, and pull out an 83-79 victory.
They can start an alleged "rebuilding" season 4-1, sending ripples across a college basketball landscape that included some preseason prognostications of missing the NCAA Tournament.
But let one of the world's most famous movie stars walk into the building and some of that poise vanishes.
Wes Miller had just played his third consecutive "best game as a Tar Heel," a streak that began against UC-Santa Barbara and continued against Kentucky with some devilish defense on the Wildcat backcourt. Tyler Hansbrough was coming off his first game as the designated bad guy, as his every move was booed by a crowd that apparently expected him to pick Kentucky over Carolina.
But when they saw Judd walk through the terminal, every pretense vanished.
Miller stood by the door to the runway, transparently killing time until Judd would walk by.
"Dude, tell her you just scored 12 points," someone told him.
"That is Ashley Judd," he said, apparently rendered powerless to do anything other than state the obvious.
His freshman partner in crime, Hansbrough, joined him by the door.
"Tyler, let's just stand here for a minute," Miller said with a smile bigger than any he had flashed in Rupp.
This is the kind of upperclassman leadership a team has to have.
Judd eventually walked by, having recognized that she was joined by the entire Tar Heel squad that had just vanquished her beloved Wildcats. She passed by Miller and Hansbrough on the way to the jet she was using. For the first time all day, they got tense.
She turned back to them on the way out the door.
"It's not nice to snicker," she said with just the right timing and just the right smile, and for the first time all day, they looked like a couple of college guys.
And then she was out on the runway, where she would pass by oblivious associate athletic director Norwood Teague, who would later utter the most famous words of the day: "No way, was Ashley Judd in there?!"
This, Tar Heel fans, is the definition of a pretty good day: you go into Lexington and win for the first time since 1968. You score a career-high 12 points, including three critical three-pointers and the new designation as the team's defensive stopper when the Heels go to offensive/defensive substitutions late in the game. And then you head back to the plane, where Ashley Judd smiles and talks to you on her way out the door.
Roy Williams left directly after the game to go recruiting, but he could have just filmed his team's last three hours, mailed it out, and saved himself the time. Come to Carolina, the film would say: we go on the road, we win, we hang out with Ashley Judd.
That's a Carolina basketball recruiting commercial right there.
It's a good bet that the players will remember the postgame experience much longer than the game. For the most part, they don't yet seem to understand exactly how impressive these first two weeks have been. Frasor and Ginyard, the two guys who spent one timeout Tuesday night against Illinois marveling at their good fortune at playing for Carolina, had a similar moment late in this game.
Frasor was at the free throw line with under 30 seconds to play. Kentucky had closed their deficit to five points and the game was still in doubt. Just a couple rows behind the baseline, one Kentucky fan screamed at the top of his lungs, "Everybody is watching, Frasor! Everybody is watching!"
But here's the thing: that seemed to make Frasor happy. He walked back to Ginyard, slapped him five, and said, "Hey, I'm going to make these."
Both players broke into wide smiles. And then Frasor dropped both shots cleanly through the rim. Carolina coasted in for the victory.
You're not supposed to make those shots. Not supposed to shoot 43 percent, get just four fast break points, allow the other team to shoot 51 percent, and win the game.
But this team doesn't know that. After the game, they were as interested in checking their Sidekicks for emails as they were in rehashing their impressive victory.
"Hey, we just came in here thinking we could win every game," Miller said. "We just want to compete and play hard and do the things Coach tells us to do. If we do that, we'll be in a position to win a lot of games."
Early in the second half, Kentucky made the run you knew they'd make and closed to two points with 15:57 to go. That's when Roy Williams decided to use the first timeout he's used all year in a stem-the-tide type of situation. He drew his team around him in a tight semicircle, got down on one knee, and preached one thing:
Poise.
"That was the biggest part of the game," Miller said. "Staying poised."
Now if the Tar Heels could just learn how to carry it over into airport encounters with movie stars.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and his book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about Going Home Again, click here.
