University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Believed
March 25, 2012 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
March 25, 2012
By Adam Lucas
ST. LOUIS--In a conversation with Carolina head baseball coach Mike Fox earlier this week, the subject of the 1977 Tar Heel basketball team was raised.
Fox was a junior at UNC that season. His reaction to thinking about that team is exactly the same one I've heard from every other Carolina fan who has any kind of memory of that season: "Oh no, 1977."
The Tar Heels, almost certainly, had the best team in college basketball that season. Crushing end-of-season injuries limited them--Tom LaGarde was lost with a knee injury, Walter Davis broke his finger, and Phil Ford hurt his elbow--and the season ended with a loss in the national championship game.
As long as I've been alive, that's been my dad's prototype for a team that caught an incredible amount of bad luck. And so that has always been my impression of the 1977 team, too, because those who live through it write the history for those of us who have to hear about it second-hand. I've never quite understood the reaction that he and every other Carolina fan have to the mere mention of that team.
Now, I get it. We all just had our 1977.
You may forget that on Sunday, Carolina shot 7-for-31 in the second half against Kansas. A few years may render obsolete the fact that the Jayhawks' late-game switch to a triangle-and-two was problematic.
But you will never, ever forget the injuries. That's why, now, I understand 1977. It's one thing to lose. The 2007 team collapsed in the regional final against Georgetown. The 2011 squad watched Kentucky make some difficult three-pointers.
In my era, 1998 is easily the most painful loss--I really believe, no, I know Carolina was the best team that season. But in a one-game-and-you're-out scenario, they lost to Utah in the Final Four and then Antawn Jamison kissed center court, and we all knew instantly at that very second, without any time to be sad about the ending of one season, that the next season would be about starting over.
At least, however, those teams were able to compete. They lost season-ending games by not playing well. This year's team? They lost a season-ending game by struggling for one half...but it's very difficult not to wonder if they didn't also lose a season-ending game by four players landing awkwardly in games when the Kansas Jayhawks were hundreds of miles away. For a good portion of Sunday's game, the Tar Heels sat Dexter Strickland (torn ACL), Leslie McDonald (torn ACL), Kendall Marshall (broken wrist) and John Henson (sprained ankle and nagging wrist injury) on the bench with injuries. Put any fifth person in America with those four, and you'd likely have an NCAA Tournament team. And that, plus a hyperextended knee that left Reggie Bullock wearing a sleeve and having to go through an extensive stretching program after yesterday's practice, was Carolina's injury list in a virtual road game against Kansas.
"We can't make excuses," said Marshall, who said he simply wasn't able to catch passes or play effectively when he tested his wrist at shootaround. "Other teams have gone through the same thing."
Have they? Henson took a painkilling shot for his wrist before the game and then proceeded to suffer a sprained ankle that kept him hobbling most of the rest of the evening. How much of this are we supposed to take?
That's why the first half was so heartening. While everyone else was feeling gloomy, someone forgot to tell the players who did manage to pull on the argyle jerseys. They passed and they scored and they defended (at least a little) and they fought their way to a 47-47 tie at halftime. Watching them, the thought started to creep in: These guys were really going to do it. That feisty little rascal Stilman White, who accumulated 13 assists and zero turnovers in his first two NCAA Tournament starts, was going to do it. White played 131 minutes since Strickland went down in Blacksburg and everyone panicked about the backup point guard position. He committed exactly two turnovers in those 131 minutes.
These impressive numbers were recited to White after the game. His response: "It doesn't matter. My only job was to win and get us to the Final Four and we didn't accomplish it."
He really believed that. You could tell by the way he said it and even more importantly, you could tell by the way he played the game. Even if your outlook was miserable at 5:05 p.m. Eastern, by the time you watched just a few possessions, you started to think maybe it was possible. It's easier not to have hope, because then you're not disappointed. But what is it that poster of Marshall's x-ray said, the one that was posted throughout the lobby of the Carolina team hotel in St. Louis? "Believe."
As you watched White score the first two points of the game and Justin Watts hit a three-pointer and James Michael McAdoo get steals and dunks, it was impossible not to believe. This was going to happen. This was not our 1977. Marshall had said earlier this month that his teammates wanted a chance to be legendary. That's exactly what this was going to be. This was going to be one of the greatest stories in Carolina basketball history.
"Our job," Roy Williams had said earlier this week, "is to have those guys in our locker room believing we can win the game."
That's what they did. And after a halting performance Friday, on Sunday the belief radiated outward, from the locker room to the sliver of Tar Heel fans in the Edward Jones Dome to maybe even your television set, wherever you sat or stood or paced. It's so much less painful to have low expectations. But man, a little bit of hope can be exhilarating.
Eventually, it was gone. There were too many missed shots and too many turnovers and untimely blocked shots. The Tar Heels had to play a nearly perfect game to have a chance to beat a capable Kansas team. They very nearly did, but ultimately they didn't, and the Jayhawks will play on into next weekend.
After the game, NCAA officials loaded White and Tyler Zeller into one golf cart and Williams into another to drive them across the spacious Edward Jones Dome to the postgame press conference. Zeller, one of the last people in America who should ever be ashamed about anything, had a towel over his head. As they pulled away from the Tar Heel locker room, it was completely silent. The only audible sound was the electric whir of the cart.
By the time the players returned, though, they already had some perspective. More perspective, in fact, than some of the rest of us. Maybe we still wanted to talk about what could have been or what might have been or why, please tell me why, all these things had to happen to Carolina.
"So many times, we don't know the reason or purpose for why things happen," said Zeller, who was still wearing the number-44 jersey that will look very strange the next time you see it on someone else. "You have to accept that somewhere, the reason is there. That doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt. I wanted to win the game. But we didn't, and there's a purpose for all of us in here."
Across the locker room, fellow senior Watts was already dressed in a coat and tie. The departure of the two seniors means that for the first time since Williams's second season at Carolina, there won't be anyone on next year's roster who has ever experienced a Final Four. At the very end of his college basketball career, Watts was going back to something his coach had told him from the very beginning of his college basketball career.
"What does Coach Williams always say?" Watts said. "Don't make excuses. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Try to fight through it. That's what we wanted to do today. Those guys we put on the floor are my teammates. We knew we were going to play hard today. We wanted to pull together as a team and try to prove everybody wrong, to show that we are North Carolina."
Watts and White and all their other teammates indicated they'd failed. I'm not sure about that. They will not play in the Final Four. Kansas cut down the nets and the Jayhawks escorted the trophy out of St. Louis.
Carolina took, well, nothing. For that reason, tomorrow and next month and next year and 20 years from now, the first thing you're going to say when 2012 Tar Heel basketball is mentioned is, "If it hadn't been for those injuries..."
If the conversation goes deeper, you're going to remember that they won at Cameron Indoor Stadium and they won the ACC regular season title and they played a game on a real live aircraft carrier and they had the academic All-America of the year and the best single-season passing performance in conference history. Of course, it will almost always come back to the injuries.
They did not win a national title and they did not go to the Final Four and to outsiders, that is ultimately how these things are judged. Hopefully, those of us who lived through it--like you and like me and like my son, who sobbed when it was over and is at this minute upstairs asleep in full Kendall Marshall uniform, including game shirt, shorts and shoes, which is how we'd probably all go to sleep if we had a uniform to squeeze into--will also remember something else. For the next months and years and decades, we're in charge of writing 2012 history. You know as well as I do that we've got our own kind of historical memory that goes beyond the record book and often supersedes what's in black and white. 1984: Kenny Smith went down. 1991: foundation for '93. 1995: just not deep enough. 2000: incredible NCAA run. 2006: our own version of the Unforgettables. 2011: played through crazy adversity.
So if your conversation about 2012 Carolina basketball goes on a little longer, once you get past losses and breaks and sprains and tears, maybe you'll remember to tell the curious something else--that even with all the injuries, or especially with all the injuries, this group competed. And for at least a few minutes on a night when there should have been no hope, you believed.
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.
