University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Super Dave
October 7, 2011 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Oct. 7, 2011
By Adam Lucas
For almost any Carolina basketball freshman, one of the highlights of their first road trip as a Tar Heel came at the very end.
That's when longtime bus driver "Super" Dave Harder would navigate his 45-foot bus through the Smith Center parking lot and back it down the ramp that runs beside the building.
"There would be cars parked everywhere," remembers Bobby Frasor. "If I was just trying to do it in a normal car, I would have been very careful. But Super Dave could drive that bus like it was a moped. He wouldn't even have to slow down, and he'd wheel the bus right down into the tunnel. Everybody in the back of the bus might be a little nervous, but he had that thing totally under control."
Harder, a Tar Heel fixture who drove the team for 27 seasons, passed away unexpectedly on Thursday night. The news sent shockwaves from Chapel Hill--where Frasor and Tyler Hansbrough learned of the untimely death while preparing for a workout--to Slovenia, where Danny Green tweeted disbelief on Friday afternoon.
"The man was always smiling," said 2005 Final Four Most Outstanding Player Sean May. "It didn't matter if it was 3 in the morning and we had just gotten back from Hawaii, or we had just lost a close game at Duke. When we walked out of the gym or off the plane, you can bet Super Dave would be standing right by the door, smiling and high-fiving everyone before they got on the bus. He truly was one of the nicest people I had a chance to have a relationship with."
Harder didn't just drive the Tar Heels locally. He met the squad at most road destinations, greeting the team when the charter flight landed and whisking them to the hotel. Naturally, he had arrived several hours earlier. That's when he worked out the most efficient route to all destinations on the trip, plus an alternate plan in case of traffic. The city streets of Detroit were as familiar to him as the back roads of Clemson.
One of his crowning achievements came in 2010, when the snowstorm of the century blanked the Washington, D.C. area. When the team awoke in their hotel outside of College Park on the morning of Feb. 5, nearly a foot and a half of snow had fallen, with more still on the way. Carolina was scheduled to play Maryland the next day in College Park, which made Feb. 5 the usual shootaround day at the Comcast Center. Super Dave was one of the first people spotted in the hotel lobby that morning.
"No shootaround today," a member of the traveling party said. It was a statement, not a question.
"What do you mean?" Super Dave asked.
The friend pointed out the window, where the blizzard had paralyzed everything from cars to buses to even the movie theater located across the parking lot, which memorably denied a toboggan-capped Eric Montross the opportunity to see a film. Looking out the window, it seemed obvious--no cars, much less a bus, were driving on area roads today. The weather was so bad that then-Maryland head coach Gary Williams spent the night at the arena rather than risk returning home.
"Oh, we're going," Super Dave said.
And they did, without incident, with Harder at the helm.
In 2007, with the Tar Heel traveling party bracing for what promised to be a turbulent flight home from Atlanta after a game at Georgia Tech, Hansbrough opted to ride the bus home with Harder rather than board the plane. After over an hour of the bumpiest air travel since Orville and Wilbur Wright, Roy Williams declared, "Tyler Hansbrough is the smartest one of all of us."
Through all the trips--the late nights at the airport, the solemn rides after a loss, and especially the boisterous journeys after a win--Super Dave became a silent member of the team. He never tried to step in where he didn't belong, wouldn't offer advice on a play or a shooting tip. He'd seen it all and had some incredible stories, but to him it was always about the players and coaches, never about him.
You could always count on him, though, to be standing by the bus door with a handshake for each player, and on the road you could often find him rebounding for a shooter in the hours before a game, silently passing the ball back, over and over again.
"The thing about him is that he always made you feel good when you saw him," Wes Miller said on Friday afternoon. "He was always smiling, and he was always upbeat. With him, it was always fun stepping on the bus, and when you've been around a lot of different people in that role, it makes you appreciate how unique that kind of feeling can be."
"Dave Harder was a part of the North Carolina basketball family and will always be thought of in that way," Roy Williams said on Friday. "He was extremely dependable, trustworthy, and fantastic at what he did. We will truly miss him, but we will remember him every time the Carolina basketball team steps on that bus."
Being part of that family was meaningful to him. A constant presence at road games, his cheering never tipped you off that he was someone from the Carolina inner circle. He wouldn't volunteer his very important role or the fact that he was on a first-name basis with everyone on the court. That wasn't his style. Instead, it was his choice of accessories that provided a subtle clue.
"No matter when I saw him, I never saw him without a smile," Frasor said. "And I never saw him without his national championship ring on. You could tell how much it meant to him and how proud he was of it."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter and Facebook.
