Lucas: Iconic

By Adam Lucas

I'm sorry, Cal. I know you are a real member of the Atlantic Coast Conference and I fully appreciate that you flew all the way across the United States before losing to Carolina, 79-53, on Wednesday night. You have a talented coach in Mark Madsen and a dynamic player in Andrej Stojakovic, but to me you are always going to be mostly known as the backdrop for a photo.

Blame it on Vince Carter.

Prior to Wednesday night's game, when the Tar Heels put three guards in double figures to beat the Bears (fair warning: most of the game specifics from tonight's win, including the great defensive job on Stojakovic, can be found in Rapid Reactions), Cal's last trip to the Smith Center came in November of 1997. I can't find the ticket stub to prove it, but I'm fairly sure I was at that game. Carolina won, 71-47. The game itself wasn't iconic, but one specific play was. In the first half, Carter got the ball on the fast break, took off from several feet away from the rim, cocked the ball behind his head and slammed it through one-handed.

Carter did this all the time. He had a one-handed dunk at Georgia Tech that ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He skied nearly to the top of Cole Field House and slammed through a one-handed alley-oop at Maryland that was phenomenal. He dunked on Tim Duncan. He threw down a 360 in live game action…in an NCAA Tournament game…when the game was far from decided.

You get the idea. I could go on. We haven't even discussed the missed off-the-backboard dunk against Duke, the one that might have caused the Smith Center to implode if he had converted it and yet was still so good that we're talking about it 25 years later.

But when I think about Vince Carter at Carolina, the first image that comes to mind is that silly November game against Cal. When he got the ball ahead of the defense, it was guaranteed showtime. Everyone in the Smith Center knew it.

The image is perfect. The version at the top of this story is cropped to a horizontal format to fit this page, but take a look at the original vertical version by scrolling down to the bottom of this story. Everything about it is memorable:

There's Carter, of course. You can almost feel the wind whistling as he cruises through the air. He's soaring above the Cal bench—the Bears players are obligingly hunched over to make sure he is perfectly framed above them. There's the interlocking NC logo just above his head, part of the old Smith Center dot matrix boards that would often remind us "Thanks…for the pass" with a graphic of a pointer finger thanking the latest Tar Heel assist man. There's the rim, which seems too far away for a normal human to reach. Fortunately, instead of a normal human, it was Vince Carter.

Look at the fans behind the bench. This was before the Turn It Blue campaign, so in 1997 we would wear almost anything to a game. I see, perhaps, three people in the crowd wearing Carolina Blue. Regrettably, I was probably wearing baggy jeans and a flannel shirt.

Approximately 30 still photographers covered that game. Only one got the Carter shot, and it was Hugh Morton. Of course it was Hugh Morton.

By that point in his career Morton was a certified legend. The longtime owner of Grandfather Mountain, Morton had photographed everything that mattered in the state of North Carolina for half a century. How far back does it go? He took a classic photo of the Madison Square Garden marquee before Carolina played the 1946 NCAA championship game in the building.

Phil Ford swooping in for a one-handed layup?

Michael Jordan skying for a one-handed dunk at Carmichael, a photo that bears a strong resemblance to the Carter shot?

Dean Smith holding up four fingers to call for the Four Corners?

Smith, James Worthy, Jimmy Black and former sports information director Rick Brewer exhausted after the 1982 championship game while they await a postgame interview?

Morton took all of these, and thousands more. He'd begun his career as a Daily Tar Heel staff photographer, but then left school to fight in World War II, where he took pictures of General Douglas MacArthur (someone almost as important as Dean Smith).

On the day of the Cal game, he was 76 years old and had been taking photos for over 50 years. His knees were worn down from the constant sitting and kneeling associated with being a photographer. He couldn't sit on the floor anymore, so Carolina accommodated him by allowing him to shoot from the steps across from the visiting bench. He'd earned the perk. Every single one of the photos he took, from Choo Choo Justice to Carter, he let the athletic department use for free. "I just love being able to help the University," he would say.

And he helped in more ways than just photography. The giant American flag that still hangs in the Smith Center was donated by Morton, who had it flown over Grandfather Mountain, Mount Mitchell, the Biltmore House, the State Capitol, the USS North Carolina, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and the Wright Brothers National Monument to ensure it was as authentically North Carolina as it could possibly be.

In a conversation at Grandfather Mountain in the early 2000s, he told me the Carter photo was his favorite sports photo he ever took. Think about that: may we all be 76 years old and still doing the best work of our lives. And yet, when he left the Smith Center that night, he had no idea he'd gotten it.

In 2025, we're blessed to have hundreds of digital images of every game available even while the game is still being played. In December, UNC basketball photographer Maggie Hobson took a fantastic photo of Ian Jackson at Madison Square Garden—she and I talked about it on the bus approximately an hour after the game, by which time it had already been liked tens of thousands of times on Instagram and re-shared on that same platform by Jackson himself.

With a Saturday afternoon game, Morton might have made the drive back to Linville, or he might have spent the night at the University Inn. Regardless, he wouldn't have gotten his film developed until the next day, when he—current day photographers, avert your eyes—turned over his film to the Rite Aid drug store near Banner Elk and waited for the prints.

Yes, kids, in many ways 1997 was like the 1800s. The most legendary photographer in University of North Carolina history had to wait for a Rite Aid to develop the photo of Vince Carter that would come to define a Naismith Hall of Famer's career and today is arguably one of the ten most iconic photos in the history of Carolina Basketball.

The image endures. Carter has called it his favorite photo from his Carolina career. It's instantly recognizable despite the fact that it wouldn't have appeared in a daily newspaper, didn't have the benefit of social media, and wasn't from a notable game. How did it get distributed? Well, Hugh Morton regularly sent 4 by 6 prints of shots he thought were extraordinary through the US Postal Service to his grandson, Jack.

The Carter dunk photo eventually made its way to Jack, then a Tar Heel student manager and now a talented photographer in his own right. He remembers bumping into Carter at University Mall in January of 1998 and the two discussing the great action shot. At that point, they would have been two of the only people who had ever seen it. Some pictures are instantly stamped into our consciousness. This one seeped into our brains over a quarter of a century.

Today, in 2025, it's one of the first scenes that comes to mind when the Tar Heels and Bears meet on the hardwood. You just never know. You keep going, game after game, and one November afternoon in a nondescript nonconference game, after 50 years of taking pictures, you snap one that becomes part of your legacy, the one that's memorialized in stone on the walkway between the Smith Center and Koury Natatorium. No setup. No trying to get it just right. No second chances or do-overs.

So it's true that Wednesday night didn't feel much like an Atlantic Coast Conference game. But there's still some history, the kind that is still part of the overall story of why we care, of why 20,031 people bundled up on a 25-degree night and braved the traffic.

Maybe there will eventually be other stories that come from this game. But for right now, it was plenty good enough just to serve as a reason to tell this one, of two very memorable Tar Heels: one of the best to ever play basketball here, and the very best to ever take pictures here, and what happened on the Saturday afternoon that their paths indelibly crossed.

Vince Carter dunk vs. Cal 1997-98, vertical

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Ian Jackson

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