NCAA Tournament Memories

by Steve Kirschner, Senior Associate A.D. for Communications

Reading a Sporting News article by Mike DeCourcy this morning reminded me of the very first Carolina men's basketball NCAA Tournament game I watched as a UNC employee – March 17, 1989, vs. Southern University in Atlanta.

DeCourcy's article was a look back at another NCAA game that same night, one in which upstart Princeton went toe to toe with top-seeded Georgetown, a Big East behemoth that was heavily favored but managed only to hang on for a 50-49 win over the No. 16 Tigers.

I watched parts of that game from the same place I watched the Carolina game, a closer-than-expected, 93-79 win for the second-seeded Tar Heels. As the sports information intern in 1988-89, one of my sports was wrestling, and I was working from the Smith Center keeping track of 118-pounder Doug Wyland, who was tracking towards a second-place finish at the NCAA Championships. We didn't have a TV in the office then, so I was watching the basketball from the press box at the back of the Smith Center's section 111, the same booth where we used to keep stats during home games.

Reflecting on that evening 31 years ago got me thinking of some of the other memorable first- and second-round games I've been fortunate enough to witness since then. This should be the first weekend of the 2020 NCAA Tournament. Instead, it will go down in history as the year one of the country's great sporting events was shelved for safety and national security reasons due to a pandemic.

So just some random thoughts and observations about the 100 or so Carolina NCAA Tournament games I've witnessed since then, all since 1996 in person. Since we would have been in the midst of the first and second round, this column centers on those games. The intent is to create some conversation at home, jog some memories and make us look forward to the time when the games begin again.

It's sort of random my next game to remember is the 1994 first rounder against Liberty at the Capital Center in Landover, Md. The reason it's memorable to me is again tied to Carolina wrestling and the Smith Center. The game was played on a Friday afternoon and back in Chapel Hill, we were hosting the NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships. Friday afternoon was the third of six sessions at the Smith Center. It was the first time the NCAA had hosted its wrestling championship in a Southern location in more than 20 years, and while those of us were managing tournament operations, we also had eyes and ears tuned to Landover. The Tar Heel basketball team was ranked No. 1 and seeded No. 1 in the East, so pretty much everybody thought the first round game would be a walkover. It proved to be anything but.

Liberty led 46-45 with just under 10 minutes to play when Dean Smith switched to a zone defense and UNC pulled away with a 16-0 run. The TV set we hijacked and stationed on the scorer's table at wrestling had a terrible picture, so we kept running back into the press room to see what was happening. The non-Tar Heels at the table had a sense the game was a lot closer than we expected when about half of us working the event went AWOL for a few stretches there in the second half. All was well as Carolina emerged victorious, 71-51, and it was on to Boston College…yeah, we know how that turned out.

I literally slept through the first half of the BC game (insert your own commentary here), as exhaustion from hosting the wrestling led to an inadvertent snooze-fest that ended mid-afternoon on Sunday. To my horror, the Eagles led by eight at the break, and it didn't get much better in the second half either as BC unceremoniously dumped the No. 1 seed and defending champion out of the tournament in the second round.

In 1995, the No. 2 seed Tar Heels played in Tallahassee, but without Rasheed Wallace at full strength. The All-America from Philadelphia had suffered a sprained ankle in the dramatic ACC Tournament championship game loss to Wake Forest and Randolph Childress, Tim Duncan and head coach Dave Odom.

Several things stand out about that week – the first is the class with which Odom thanked Smith for passing along a tip on how to manage the high of winning an ACC championship with the preparations that are needed to then turn around and compete for a national championship just days later; next was sophomore center Serge Zwikker scoring 19 points in the first round against Murray State, when Wallace was limited to just 16 minutes, and the defensive effort the Tar Heels turned in against Iowa State's Fred Hoiberg in the second round.

The following season saw the Tar Heels exit in the round of 32 in Richmond against Texas Tech, but the play most everyone remembers from that day was Darvin Ham's backboard-shattering dunk. The details were a bit fuzzy. Not sure many people remember the dunk tied the game at 16 with about 12 minutes to play in the first half; the Red Raiders scored the game's next 10 points after a 26-minute delay and led by 12 at the break. What probably no one remembers in a game in which Ham's slam was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, was Texas Tech raced to that halftime margin by making its last five field goals from three-point range.

(It says a lot about your basketball program when consecutive second-round losses are featured on the covers of Sports Illustrated – BC in 1994 and Texas Tech in '96).

The 1997 NCAA Tournament is a special one for Carolina Basketball as it marked the final post-season run for Smith and included first- and second-round victories when he tied and then set the all-time record for wins.

Two months earlier it looked as though any post-season for the Tar Heels was in doubt, let alone a Final Four run. Carolina began ACC play with three consecutive losses, including a 24-point beatdown in Winston-Salem and 10-point home loss to Maryland when the Terps out-scored the Tar Heels, 41-9, over the final 10 minutes. A rather loud players-only meeting followed the third consecutive loss at Virginia, a get-everything-off-your-chest moment that didn't exactly turn the year around overnight as UNC hit the midway point in the ACC with three wins in eight games.

But a February 1 win over Middle Tennessee State was the first of 12 straight wins for Carolina, and UNC headed to Winston-Salem again as the ACC Tournament champions, No. 1 seed in the East and No. 4 team in the final AP poll.

When the Tar Heels tipped off against Fairfield, Smith's teams had won 875 games, one shy of Adolph Rupp's all-time NCAA record. The Stags were just 11-18 but had won the MAAC Tournament title and led 35-28 at halftime. Future Hall of Famer Vince Carter led UNC with 22 points and All-America Antawn Jamison scored 19, but it was a flurry of buckets by that man Zwikker again that helped UNC chase down and then defeat Fairfield.

Two days later, in front of a legion of former Tar Heel greats, Smith humbly became the winningest coach in NCAA history as Carolina bounced Chauncey Billups and Colorado out of the second round. That 73-56 Tar Heel victory was the second of four wins that March that sent Smith to an 11^th (and final) Final Four.

Not every memory is from a win. In 1999, unheralded Weber State, a No. 14 seed from Ogden, Utah, shocked the Tar Heels in Seattle. It was the first time UNC had lost a first-round game since 1980, but the main reason for the loss didn't come as a surprise to Phil Ford, then an assistant coach under Bill Guthridge.

Ford spent some of the five-hour flight from Raleigh to Seattle impressing upon anyone within earshot of how good Harold Arceneaux was for the Wildcats. Arceneaux, or "The Show," as he was called, certainly put on one, making 14 of 26 from the floor with five threes en route to a stunning 36-point performance.

As disappointing as the first-round defeat to Weber State was, the madness in 2000 was exhilarating and unexpected. Guthridge's third and final season as head coach included an almost unheard of four-game losing streak in January, a dejecting ACC quarterfinal loss to Wake Forest and a No. 8 seed in the NCAA South Regional, UNC's lowest seed in 10 seasons.

The day before UNC's first-round game in Birmingham, Ala., against Missouri, Guthridge was so frustrated with his team's performance he threw them out of the gym midway through its off-site practice.

But something very special happened that weekend. The Tar Heels truly rallied around their head coach, dispatching Mizzou by 14 and upsetting the top-seed Stanford, 60-53, in the second round. Joseph Forte, Jason Capel, Kris Lang, Ed Cota and Brendan Haywood played some of their best basketball of the season, but a postgame locker room visit by Tar Heel Hall of Famer and CBS color analyst James Worthy is the most vivid memory I recall from Birmingham.

Worthy came to the locker room to congratulate the Tar Heels after the Stanford game and tried to remain somewhat neutral to outsiders, but he quickly tossed his CBS hat aside and joined a raucous Carolina celebration.

Carolina missed out on playing in the NCAA Tournament in 2002 and '03, making the 2004 return in Denver that much sweeter, even though the Tar Heels lost to Texas in the second round.

Neither Roy Williams' first NCAA Tournament win as UNC's head coach over Air Force, nor the loss to the Longhorns are as memorable to me as assistant coach Steve Robinson's speech to the team after the Texas game. That was the first time I'd heard Williams and his staff speak to the team after a season-ending game. As many have heard him say since, an NCAA Tournament loss brings such an immediate and sudden end to the season, he typically finds it hard to adequately console his team.

Robinson, however, was in no mood for consolation speeches and he wasn't lending anyone a shoulder to cry on. His message and his tone were unmistakable. You have no idea what it takes to be a champion and if you come back next season, you must be willing to play our way, specifically his (Williams') way, and if you do make that commitment, you might just be able to win the whole damn thing.

Chills just thinking about it.

Right on cue, the next season, and again in 2009 and 2017, Williams did indeed lead the Tar Heels to cutting down the nets, making him the first to win three titles at one's alma mater.

One of the most memorable of 25 opening-weekend wins in the NCAA Tournament by Williams' UNC teams came in Greensboro in 2009, a 84-70 heart-stopper over LSU. If you think that was just another 14-point win, well, that's not even close. The Tigers roared back from nine down at the half to take a five-point lead midway through the second. That's when two things happened: Williams got heated in a timeout and Bob Cousy Award winner Ty Lawson went off. As in 21 points in the second half off.

Lawson jammed his right big toe into the basket support the day before Senior Day against Duke two weeks earlier and had (in)famously exacerbated the problem by soaking his toe in the most memorable Epsom salts bath in ACC history. He didn't play in the ACC Tournament (when UNC lost in the semifinals) or in the first-round win over Radford, most notable for Tyler Hansbrough becoming the ACC's all-time leading scorer.

LSU's athleticism and fearless style of play had rocked the Tar Heels and Williams loudly reminded them during a timeout that the season – and their legacy – were in peril. Lawson was spectacular, repeatedly zipping and darting his way through the LSU defense for layup after layup and assists, mainly to his backcourt sidekick Wayne Ellington. The duo combined for 46 points, 10 assists, four steals and only two turnovers as UNC overcame its only second-half deficit of the entire six-game Tournament.

Greensboro was a happy place to be a Tar Heel that day in 2009. It was the scene again three years later for another second-round win, but the post-game atmosphere in 2012 couldn't have been more different. UNC defeated Vermont and Creighton in its first two games but lost the extraordinary passing and leadership of Cousy winner Kendall Marshall to a broken wrist in the second round.

From a purely athletic competition standpoint, understanding now more than ever how a loss in a basketball game is just that, it was one of the most difficult days I can remember. The news that Marshall was out for the season came swiftly and stunned everyone in the building.

(On March 11 of this year, Marshall and I stood in the same hallway as both the locker room and trainer's room, where he was given the bad news about his wrist, at halftime of UNC's ACC Tournament loss to Syracuse. The NBA had just suspended play due to the coronavirus, the Tar Heels were down 21 to the Orange, the ACC had announced a no-fans policy for the next day's games, and we were discussing dark flashbacks to 2012 … fun times).

Carolina went on to St. Louis, where without Marshall it beat Ohio in overtime and lost to Kansas in the Elite Eight. That 2012 team ranks up there with 1977, 1984, 1987, 1998 and 2008 among the best Tar Heel squads not to win a national championship, and losing Marshall was not the only factor, but certainly a decisive one.

Of course, the Tar Heels won the NCAA Tournament for the sixth time in 2017, and most observers and fans will point to the last-second loss to Villanova in the 2016 finals as the catalyst for that title.

It actually started two Marches before in a locker room in San Antonio, Texas. Moments after Iowa State scored the winning basket with 1.6 seconds to play to give the Cyclones an 85-83 win (20 years after that 1995 game in Tallahassee, Hoiberg was now his alma mater's head coach) there were sophomores Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson and freshman Kennedy Meeks dealing with the crushing weight of a lose-and-go-home moment in post-season play. The All-America guard Paige had scored 19 points and Meeks had a rare double-double by a freshman, but Johnson had injured his ankle in the first half and played only two minutes.

Many know about the overwhelming feeling of disappointment in the locker room in Houston in 2016; far fewer know about or recall how, in particular, Meeks and Johnson reacted to the loss in 2014. It was hard even to open the locker room door to the media. But it showed me how personal the players took these losses and was part of the maturation process that came one year and one shot too late for Paige and Johnson, but just in time three seasons later for Meeks in Phoenix.

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