University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Moving Out
June 9, 2009 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
June 9, 2009
By Adam Lucas
By now, the living room at 106 Carolina Ave. is empty. This seemed improbable, if not impossible, ten days ago.
Just before the end of May, Tyler Hansbrough and Danny Green were in Chicago for the NBA pre-draft camp. This left their housemates--Bobby Frasor, Marcus Ginyard and former manager Preston Puckett--in charge of emptying the house the quintet shared of all their worldly possessions. May 31 was the supposed drop-dead date.
On the afternoon of May 29, they had made the following progress: a pile of clothes Ginyard estimated at "500 t-shirts" was on the den floor headed for Goodwill and a picture of most of the group wearing sunglasses and plenty of hair gel had been pulled off the wall and placed on the floor.
"That's not moving out," Frasor told Ginyard. "That's just relocating something."
There was a distinctly melancholy feeling in the air. Puckett already has a job. Frasor was headed back to Chicago, where he threw out the first pitch for his beloved Chicago White Sox on June 6 and is considering professional basketball opportunities overseas (more on that topic in the linked video above). Ginyard will attend the second session of summer school and is moving in with Marc Campbell and Deon Thompson.
Having lived at 106 Carolina Ave. for two years, it seemed reasonable to ask why Thompson and Campbell couldn't have just moved in there, saving Ginyard the trouble of moving out.
"I couldn't do that," Ginyard said. "It wouldn't feel right, having someone else living here other than these guys."
And so, they were faced with the task of somehow emptying the house before the deadline, a deadline that was progressively described as "Sunday," "Sunday night," and finally, "By sunrise on Monday, we've got to be out of here."
They didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave. On the Friday of move-out weekend, they spent almost an hour reminiscing. A few house traditions were revealed: the "Big Saturday" football game-watching on fall Saturdays when Carolina was on the road, when two televisions were dragged into the den to maximize the available games; the recording of every Tar Heel basketball game, not to watch highlights but to play back embarrassing moments, like counting Hansbrough's steps on a non-called travel; and the photos of the players wearing Santa hats--Hansbrough's eventually became such a novelty that guests had their picture taken with his Santa picture.
The group capped their two years at the house with an end-of-school-year party that featured bounce houses and a live DJ. Soon, Quentin Thomas began rapping. Thomas, a legitimate rapper with an actual future in the business, was soon joined on the microphone by Hansbrough, who has a future in basketball but not in beat-boxing.
"It didn't increase the production value," Frasor said, "but it did increase the comedic value."
The saga began during the second session of summer school before their freshman year, when the entire group lived at Granville Towers. At that point, Ginyard was the only freshman with a car on campus, which meant it was commonplace to see all the rookies crammed into his car--at that point, his air conditioning wasn't working, which meant they'd roll down the windows and listen to the soundtrack of that summer, which for them included Citizen Cope's "Pablo Picasso"--like clowns in a circus Volkswagen.
It's not a stretch to say that that forced time together created the nucleus that would eventually leave Chapel Hill as national champions. Off-court camaraderie turned into on-court chemistry.
"I can't imagine having not lived with these guys," Frasor said. "It made my time at Carolina that much better."
One Fantastic Ride.
