University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Turning Points
June 4, 2007 | Baseball
June 4, 2007
By Adam Lucas
You didn't have to be there in Gainesville, swatting at the monstrous bugs and watching a disappointing ending to the 2005 season, to appreciate Monday's Chapel Hill regional championship.
But it helped.
Almost two years ago to the day, the Tar Heels saw their season ended in a listless 3-0 loss to Notre Dame. As the final outs were recorded, Carolina players sat motionless in the dugout. They were not clapping. They were not cheering.
It was a bad loss, sure. The Tar Heels had more talent than the Fighting Irish, including 2006 first-round draft picks Andrew Miller and Daniel Bard. So maybe it was an upset.
But here's what else it wasn't:
It wasn't much fun.
There just wasn't very much zest in the game. Not the winning, but the playing.
Compare that to the events of the last 48 hours in Boshamer Stadium. Saturday night's heart-pounding finish against East Carolina was one of the most exciting games ever played at the venerable old stadium, which will be rebuilt from the ground up whenever the cardiac Tar Heels decide to stop playing.
And there they were again on Monday, down 5-4 to a game Western Carolina club, needing two runs in the ninth inning to advance to the super-regional.
This time, no one was sitting in the Carolina dugout. Every player was poised on the rail of the dugout, rally caps flipped backward. Who knew the creaky old stadium could hold that much drama? Fans were standing, cheers were rocking, every pitch outside the strike zone from Catamount hurlers Greg Holland and Chris Masters was greeted with a roar.
But to see how far the Tar Heels had come, all you had to do was look down in the third-base coaching box. With two on, two out, Josh Horton at the plate and a one-run deficit, that's where Mike Fox stood.
Grinning.
"I was trying to have fun up there," Horton said. "And then I looked down at Coach Fox and he was smiling at me. That took some of the pressure off."
The smile wasn't a psychological ploy. It was just the look of a coach who was--get ready for this--having fun.
"Josh is as clutch a player as I've ever coached," Fox said. "I was about as certain as I could be that he was going to get a hit right there."
Fox and Horton are a Tar Heel odd couple, but there's no better illustration of how far the program has come. It was a bit of a gamble to recruit the Hillsborough shortstop in the first place, because he was highly regarded by professional scouts and a possible pro signee. But Carolina took a chance and has been richly rewarded over the past three years as Horton has blossomed into one of the best players in program history.
His off-field contributions have been almost as big as his on-field exploits. Horton is an extremely low-stress individual who redefines "loose." Fox is a detail fanatic who has found tremendous success because of his demanding approach to every aspect of his program. There is a certain way he wants his players to look, to act, and to represent his program. You can't meet the standards, you're not going to be a Tar Heel--no matter how far you can hit it or how hard you can pitch it.
It's pretty simple and you might have heard of it. It's called the Carolina way.
Put Horton and Fox together and it could have been combustible. Instead, Horton--along with fellow juniors Chad Flack, Seth Williams, Benji Johnson, and Reid Fronk (the quintet picked up 8 of Carolina's 12 hits Monday)--has helped shepherd the Carolina program past the wannabe stage and onto the national stage.
"It's about attitude," Horton said. "We've got guys who have enjoyed our success and who keep everybody up."
"We got kids in here who made it fun," Fox said. "They're good players but great kids. The last two years has been a real transition internally."
The outside world is noticing. With the stands almost shaking above him, assistant coach Chad Holbrook sat in the Carolina dugout Saturday night and had a simple thought:
"Are we really at the Bosh?"
It was that loud. That's progress, folks.
All of a sudden, tickets are hard to find. Games are a big event. Baseball matters in Chapel Hill.
That's partially due to the winning. Wins draw casual fans. But the hardcore Carolina baseball fan base will tell you it's as much fun to be around the program because of the people as because of the victories.
After Saturday night's win, Kyle Shelton's parents gathered all the other parents on the asphalt outside the baseball offices. They had a presentation to make.
Andrew Carignan's family lost everything in a fire almost a month ago. Talk to Andrew's father, Gary, and he'll tell you some of the items he missed the most were all the mementos from his son's baseball career. So with some help from other parents, the Sheltons put together an in-depth scrapbook that chronicled every pitch of Andrew's three-year Carolina career.
They presented it to the surprised Carignans after the win over ECU, a coffee table-worthy example of the Carolina baseball family.
Standing there, watching the parents mill around and congratulate their sons on another big win, you might have thought you were watching a group of brothers. There was a hug here, there was a high-five there.
And one other thing that was absolutely everywhere:
There was fun.
Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
