University of North Carolina Athletics
Book Excerpt: Light Blue Reign
October 13, 2009 | Men's Basketball
Oct. 13, 2009
(Excerpted from Art Chansky's new book, Light Blue Reign, by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books.)
The 1968 season began just after Pat McGuire lost her battle to cancer in September, and Dean Smith was among the hundreds attending her funeral in New York. It was also a time of more upheaval in America, with much of the country growing concerned over President Lyndon Johnson's handling of the escalating war in Vietnam.
On the court, the Tar Heels again led wire to wire. UNC had clinched the ACC race by winning 12 consecutive conference games - 20 straight overall - when South Carolina visited Chapel Hill for the first time since the 104-70 blowout loss that had miffed Frank McGuire. Many old friends and acquaintances in the home crowd knew he returned as a widower.
Carmichael was buzzing for Larry Miller's last home game. Smith took the microphone before the game and asked the crowd to treat McGuire and his team with respect.
Miller, an All-American on his way to a second straight ACC Player of the Year award, expected to go out a winner. But the steadily improving Gamecocks had notched another successful season and, based on their earlier four-point loss to the Tar Heels in Charlotte, arrived confident of pulling an upset. McGuire's penchant for a dramatic entrance gave the game a surreal start, especially considering Smith's request.
Even after his team came out for its final warm-ups, McGuire hung back in the locker room until just before tip-off. When the now 55-year-old legend finally emerged in his requisite silk suit, nodding and waving to familiar faces in the stands and warmly embracing Smith at the scorer's table, the crowd's reaction electrified the auditorium. If McGuire was still a hero to some old guard in Carolina blue, younger or newer fans unaware of the back story only saw him as the enemy and a serious threat to Smith's hard-earned success.
The Four Horsemen were now seniors, and their pony was sophomore Bobby Cremins, a scrapper with unrefined skills. The Gamecocks shot well all night and led late when Smith told his team to foul Cremins and dare the 59 percent free-thrower to protect the lead. Cremins went to the line 16 times and made 13, and South Carolina held on to win by one point.
After the game, McGuire was animated when he talked to sportswriters. He had taken off his gold cufflinks and held them between his fingers as he gestured, almost as if to say he was still the king. Sitting by his locker, Cremins was surrounded by men with notepads and pens for the first time in his career.
Cremins joined his coach as a hero to the state of South Carolina that night, and he has long since teased Smith about giving him the chance not only to ice the game but become the desire of coeds who swarmed him when he got back to Columbia.
McGuire's team tied N.C. State for third place behind UNC and Duke, but lost twice to the Wolfpack, which was now coached by former Everett Case player Norman Sloan. Press Maravich had moved on to LSU after his son Pete failed to score 800 on his SATs and could not attend State or play anywhere in the ACC.
The Gamecocks, thus, got the fourth seed in the 1968 ACC tournament in Charlotte, leaving them in North Carolina's bracket. They had to beat the Tar Heels to reach the championship game and at least be considered for the NIT, which with McGuire's sentimental ties the Big Apple would have been a lock.
Despite falling behind early, South Carolina rallied with an 18-4 run in the second half that tied the game in the final seconds. Miller missed at the buzzer, but the Tar Heels won in overtime, 82-79. The key to survival was another philosophical coaching difference. Smith's freestyle substitutions allowed his bench to contribute nine points. The Four Horsemen and Cremins scored all of their team's points, underscoring McGuire's long-time tendency of staying with his starters and possibly wearing them down.
The winner caught a big break because N.C. State took a page from Smith's strategy two years earlier and held the ball on Duke in the second semifinal. Coach Vic Bubas again refused to come out of his zone ("We couldn't press a team of grandmothers," he said), and the most infamous ACC tournament game in history slowed to a crawl, with State winning the excruciatingly boring game, 12-10. In UNC radio announcer Bill Currie's famous description, the action on the court was "as exciting as artificial insemination."
In the championship game, Sloan could not do the same against the aggressive defense of the Tar Heels, who let the overmatched Wolfpack hang around in the first half. Smith walked into the locker room behind the end zone stands at the Charlotte Coliseum and simply said, "You know what you have to do." He walked out, and his team blew open the game to win by 37 points, locking down its second straight championship.
Duke again got the NIT bid, inflaming McGuire's hatred for the ACC tournament and leaving him to think that bolting the conference altogether would be an easier way into a postseason tournament. His former player at St. John's, Al McGuire, had proven that as coach at independent Marquette, which had its pick of bids from the NCAA or NIT. That Smith's team advanced to play another independent, St. Bonaventure with All-American Bob Lanier before defeating Davison to win the East Regional, supported Frank McGuire's theory that not having to win a treacherous conference tournament was the easier road to an NCAA bid.
McGuire went back to the Final Four, this time in Los Angeles, and watched his protégé coach the Tar Heels into the championship game against unbeatable UCLA with Lew Alcindor. After playing their own game of stall ball in the first half, the Tar Heels ran with the Bruins and were blown out, 78-55. Smith figured if they were going to lose anyway, why incur bad publicity of continuing to stall on national television.
Even after being run over by the UCLA machine, the Tar Heels were able to find a silver lining. Assistant coach John Lotz even called it "a tremendous thrill to be in the field with UCLA."
The two-time ACC champions had finished No. 2 in the country, and most of the Tar Heels had experienced Los Angeles for the first time. Smith truly had arrived as a head coach, and he received the same gift as his mentor after the 1957 season - a Carolina blue Cadillac - presented to him by some of the same Rams Club officials on the front steps of Carmichael.
"I'm not the Cadillac type," Smith said. "I accept the gift because I'm certain you're really expressing appreciation for the fine play of the team."
Smith drove the car to the airport, where he used an old McGuire maneuver of parking at the Airport Motel across the street from the terminal in exchange for giving the manger a few basketball tickets. He flew to Pittsburgh to wrap up the recruiting haul that would keep Carolina on top - star guard Steve Previs and rugged forward Dennis Wuycik were joining an incoming freshman class that also included Long Island's Bill Chamberlain, the second black scholarship basketball player at UNC.
Richard Nixon was in the White House by the next basketball season, which was to take the rivalry of the two Carolinas to a new level of antagonism. McGuire had recruited some cocksure players from New York who quickly bought into their coach's hatred for the ACC.
The Tar Heels were well seasoned and now had college basketball's most controversial player in junior Charlie Scott, who received the third-most votes on the All-ACC team as a sophomore and had taken over for Larry Miller as the focal point of the 1969 team. Of course, Scott carried the extra burden of his skin color and the racist reaction it provoked.
Smith nearly went into the stands of the new Carolina Coliseum in Columbia after a redneck who called Scott a "big baboon" as the Tar Heels walked off the court. It followed a suspenseful, six-point victory for UNC, which avenged a loss 12 days earlier to McGuire's newly named Iron Five. The South Carolina starters had played all 40 minutes in the game at Charlotte and stunned the No. 2 team in the nation behind 38 points from their cocky sophomore star John Roche.
McGuire apologized for the crass act, fearing that his school was not ready for its first back player, Casey Manning, from the border town of Dillon, who was starring for the USC freshman team at the time. A pioneer like Scott, Manning said he could go an entire day and not see another black student on campus. He went on to law school and became a judge.
Just as Smith had made efforts to integrate before Scott, McGuire had tried to break South Carolina's color line earlier, recruiting such players as Gilbert McGregor, who became a star at Wake Forest.
Scott, a member of the 1968 U.S. Olympic team in Mexico City, was sensational down the stretch of the '69 season, motivated by an absurd All-ACC vote that had left him off of five first-team ballots. Scott was easily among the five best players in the ACC, and he demonstrated that by dropping 40 points on Duke to lead Carolina to a third consecutive ACC tournament championship.
A week later, Scott scored 32 and hit the winning shot against Davidson, knocking his once-to-be coach Driesell out of the NCAA tournament for the second straight year and sending the Tar Heels to yet another Final Four. But playing without injured point guard Dick Grubar, they lost badly to Purdue and All-American Rick Mount in the national semifinals back at Freedom Hall.
South Carolina, which went to the 1969 NIT and lost its second game to Army when the Cadets' senior captain Mike Krzyzewski held Roche to six points at Madison Square Garden, dominated the rivalry and everyone else in 1970 and became the focus of disdain at UNC and around the ACC.
"When I came to college, most of what I had heard about Frank McGuire wasn't good because (the Gamecocks) were the big rivals and the bad guys," said Roy Williams, who was a freshman walk-on in 1969 and then kept statistics for Smith the next three years. "After learning more about the history, that he hired Coach Smith, it hit me that Frank McGuire really started the basketball success at North Carolina."
