University of North Carolina Athletics
Woody: Traveling with the Tar Heels
December 25, 2006 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 25, 2006
Happy Holidays to you and yours from the basketball Tar Heels!
Following Friday's win in St. Louis, the players got to go home for a few days, but they'll be back in Chapel Hill Tuesday night to start getting ready for Thursday's game against Rutgers. It'll be the first of five contests during a stretch of 14 days, including the first two ACC tests.
During his career as a head coach, Roy Williams has taken a few of his teams on the road during the Christmas break. His Kansas Jayhawks made a couple of trips to the Rainbow Classic in Honolulu, and they also went to France for a series of exhibition games. However, he prefers to stay home and give his players some time off.
"It's important to me for my players to have some days off at Christmas," he said. "When you do extensive travel to Europe I'm not so sure it's good for your team, so that's my focus. But I like having the kids go home also."
During my 36 years on the Tar Heel Sports Network, I've been fortunate to make many trips with the basketball team outside the continental United States. I have a couple of huge wall maps of both the USA and the World in my at-home office, and I have put pins in the maps at every location I have done a Carolina broadcast. Several Christmas breaks have been spent in Honolulu, Madrid, London, Tokyo, Canary Islands, Frankfort, Amsterdam and Florence.
Two of the most memorable trips, at this time of the year, were to Japan and Germany.
In December, 1984, Dean Smith's Tar Heels were one of three teams invited to play two games in Japan as part of the Suntory Tournament. The other two teams in the rotation were Wichita State and Arizona State.
Carolina's first game against Wichita State was played Friday, December 21, at a sumo wrestling palace in Osaka, Japan. It attracted a sellout crowd of 15,500. The Tar Heels won 80-69, and Steve Hale led the scoring with 17 points. Joe Wolf contributed 16, and Buzz Peterson added another 14. Brad Daughtery had only eight points before fouling out, but he led the rebounding with 10 boards.
The next day the Tar Heels took the bullet train to Tokyo. They wore their warmups because they had to get off the train and go right to the gym for the opening ceremony prior to the game between Wichita State and Arizona State.
On Sunday, December 23, Carolina faced Arizona State in a small college gym in the heart of the city with a soldout capacity of 5,482. The Tar Heels beat the Sun Devils 85-66 behind Daughtery's 20 points and 17 rebounds. Kenny Smith added 17, and Warren Martin chipped in with 14.
From Japan the team flew to Hawaii for the Hawaii Pacific tournament, which was played in an open air gym on the U-S Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Carolina whipped Hawaii Pacific in the opening round, but lost to Missouri in the championship game.
Before leaving Tokyo, Coach Smith had a Christmas Day brunch set up at the team hotel for the players and members of the traveling party. The players, as you might imagine, were quite homesick being away from family and friends at this time of the year, and they were really down in the dumps. However, their mood was about to change.
Jack Petty of High Point, an avid Tar Heel supporter and close personal friend, was traveling with the team, but he had not told anybody that he had an extra suitcase containing both a Santa Claus suit and individual bags of cookies his mother, Bess, had prepared for the players. Jack and Larry Larson, another close friend from High Point, slipped out of the brunch after a few minutes and went upstairs to get Jack into his Santa suit.
Larry told me later what a big treat it was to walk back through the large hotel lobby and watch the beautiful Japanese children react to Santa Claus.
Everybody knew who it was, but when Jack came into the room a few minutes later, laughing and passing out the cookies, the mood of the players changed immediately, and they were laughing and talking again. It was a lasting Christmas memory for everybody who was there, and a lasting memory of Jack who passed away in 1998.
Roy and Wanda Williams were not there. They had never been apart from their children, Scott and Kimberly, on Christmas Day, and soon after Carolina beat Arizona State they caught a flight back to the United States and Asheville. Once they celebrated Christmas together, Roy caught a flight back to Hawaii and met the team upon its arrival in Honolulu.
I also vividly remember following the Tar Heels to the Canary Islands just before the Christmas of 1991. Antonio Diaz Miguel, the Spanish Olympic coach and a close friend of Coach Smith, had set up a couple of exhibition games in Las Palmas. Carolina won both contests, and then flew to Frankfurt, Germany on Christmas Day. The team was going to play Henrik Rodl's home game against a club team in surburban Heusenstamm on December 27.
The Tar Heels needed to practice on December 26, and Colonel Don Streater, a 1968 UNC graduate and the Wing Commander of the 435th Tactical Airlift at Rhein-Main Air Base, had written Coach Smith prior to the trip and invited him to bring the team out to the base for its practice.
Just like the group in 1984, these players were homesick and mighty droppy the day after Christmas. But their mood changed when the bus pulled up to the gym and there were 250-300 Carolina fans, in their blue shirts and caps, cheering for them. As homesick as they might have been, the players realized they were bringing Carolina to these people living so far away from their homes during the holiday season.
Coach Smith invited the fans to come into the gym for practice, and they treated it just like it was a game. Then when it was over, the coaches and players stayed until every picture was taken and every autograph signed.
To this day, I get emotional every Christmas when I recall taking those two trips with the Tar Heels.
