These are the post-game thoughts of the man who chronicles Tar Heels basketball.
I have so much I want to tell you.
You saw it, of course. You saw Hubert Davis and the North Carolina Tar Heels end Mike Krzyzewski’s Cameron Indoor Stadium career on an eternal one-game losing streak. You saw the 94-81 final score, as there were darn near biscuits to go with all the salt. You saw RJ and Caleb and Brady and Mando and Leaky and so, so many sad painted faces.
But there were also some things you didn’t see, and that’s what I want to tell you. Let’s start at the beginning. The very beginning. Monday night, after Carolina dispatched Syracuse, Hubert Davis was just outside the Carolina locker room. It was less than a half-hour after the win, and he was already pacing with intensity.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, completely unprompted. “We are not going over there for a party. We are not going over there to be part of some festivities. We are going over there to play a game. And we’re going to play.”
This was all said with an absolute stone-faced, steely-eyed, glare that was very un-Hubert Davis-like if the only Hubert Davis you know is the one you see in the press conferences. But that was the exact same Hubert Davis Carolina got at practice every day for the rest of the week.
Thursday, the Tar Heels arrived at practice to hear the sounds of the inexplicable Duke anthem, “Everytime We Touch,” blaring from the Smith Center speakers. Equipment manager Shane Parrish took to singing the song for most of the week anytime he found himself in proximity to any player.
Davis continually emphasized the importance of Carolina competing on every possession and on every pass. In one drill, the scout team easily completed a pass to Ryan McAdoo—simulating Paolo Banchero—at the elbow. Davis immediately blew his whistle. “No!” he barked. “It is not going down like that. I’m telling you right now. That is not how we are playing on Saturday.”
Six minutes into the game, Brady Manek outfought Banchero for a very similar pass, forcing a Duke turnover. Coaching matters.
You didn’t see the respective sidelines with 6:05 to go in the game. Krzyzewski had used two of his timeouts for his patented referee staredown, a throwback to a different era of the Duke head coach (somewhere Dick Paparo shivered and wasn’t sure why).
The mood was different on the Carolina sideline. Over in the Tar Heel huddle, assistant coach Jeff Lebo looked around, considered his team’s three-point lead in a game Duke had been focused on all season. “We’ve got them right where we want them,” he said. “We’re going to win.”
The Tar Heels came out of the huddle to await Trevor Keels’ free throw attempts. Davis leaned casually on the edge of the scorer’s table, the perfect picture of calm in the middle of all the body paint. He did not look like a first-year head coach. He looked completely in control. Ignore all sideshow distractions, he says frequently. The entire college basketball world was captivated by celebrating this one person. And there was Hubert Davis, coaching a game.
You didn’t see the immediate aftermath, the moments immediately after the win. This is when most of us were probably sending some messages in our family group chat that we initially thought we’d have to apologize for later…only to have our grandmother or mother like the message as soon as we sent it.
While that was happening, most of Carolina’s players had already gone down the steps to the locker room. Hubert Davis was at the top of the stairs. It was pandemonium at this moment. Most of the Duke security personnel was stunned, and suddenly the vast majority of the entire Krzyzewski family was standing in the hallway outside the UNC locker room. Security initially stopped them; they didn’t have credentials, because why would the Krzyzewski family need credentials on this day of all days in this place?
Davis immediately stepped in. “Please let them through,” he told the security staff. “This is Coach Krzyzewski’s family. They need to get through.”
Security complied, and you may think you learned a lot about Hubert Davis as he orchestrated defensive matchups or managed Armando Bacot’s foul situation or decided when to call a timeout.
But you will never learn more about Hubert Davis, the person, than in those few seconds, when after the biggest win of his coaching career so far, one of his main concerns was the family of the opposing coach.
After the Krzyzewskis had made their way through the hall, Bacot walked through the door after doing a television interview. He and Davis wrapped each other in an emotional hug. “I’m so proud of you,” Davis kept repeating, as both he and Bacot let the tears flow. And then suddenly Brady Manek materialized from the locker room steps, and he was crying, too, and you might have been crying too or maybe Cameron just sprung a leak, and Hubert Davis, Bacot, Manek and RJ Davis were locked in a four-way hug and I’m here to tell you, it may not be the well or the bell, but being a Tar Heel doesn’t get much better than that hug in that place on that day.
You didn’t see what it was like to celebrate that win inside Cameron Indoor Stadium. After the hug, Davis and the entire Tar Heel team celebrated in the locker room. Everyone else in the building was still in their seat, because the postgame Mike Krzyzewski adulation hadn’t yet occurred. So the only people in the concourses were Carolina fans and the parents and families of Tar Heel players.
This is when Cary Manek, Brady’s dad, very nearly lifted me off the ground in a bear hug. “I love Cameron Indoor Stadium!” he said, and I didn’t think I could love the Manek family any more than I did than when Brady hit that three-pointer with 2:34 remaining, but I think now I do.
While that was happening, you didn’t see the rapidly emptying Cameron Indoor Stadium. I was sitting in the empty stands watching a group of Duke students—the same ones who didn’t sleep in their own beds for six weeks to earn the privilege to watch this game—lie down in a circle around the center jump circle. I was pondering what on earth they were actually doing when my phone buzzed, and it was a text from Roy Williams.
Some of what he said was not for the public, but I don’t think he’d mind sharing this part: “I am so happy for the players and coaches and YES, I am emotional,” the former head coach wrote. “HD is really something and so is the program! It is hard to text through the tears!”
The program, the program, the program. An individual leads the program, but it is never about that one individual. Saturday was a reminder that the Carolina method still works. There is absolutely no feeling on earth that compares to the adrenaline of that locker room and those hugs. Everyone had a part in it, everyone celebrated it. This one lives forever. This one is the all-time one-up in the Carolina-Duke discussions. Tomorrow or next week or next year or 20 years from now, your Duke friends will be talking about the greatness of Mike Krzyzewski, and you’ll give a little grin. “How did he do,” you’ll ask, “in that last game at Cameron?” And that argument will never, ever get old.
You didn’t see the Tar Heels get on the bus. The Carolina traveling party directed the bus to return to the Smith Center by way of Franklin Street. A few minutes earlier, still in Cameron, Lebo had leaned against a wall outside the Tar Heel locker room. “This,” he said, “is something these guys are going to remember the rest of their lives.” And that moment, too, on Franklin Street with their peers—their actual peers, the ones who sit next to Bacot in class at the Kenan-Flagler Business School or who high five Manek on Franklin Street on a Friday afternoon—is forever imprinted.
Remember, this particular group of Tar Heels didn’t really know what it was like to win a game like this. Now they do. Every single Carolina basketball player ever–every single Carolina student ever–should know what it’s like to go out on Franklin Street after a big win and feel completely untouchable for one night, to feel that they are at the absolute top of the world at the greatest school in the greatest town in the world. Finally, through a pandemic and a coaching change, that was Saturday, and it was incredible. That’s part of Carolina Basketball. You’re going to win games and you’re going to get a great education and you’re going to get cool gear…but you’re also going to have the time of your life on Franklin Street, and you might not believe this now, but you’re going to remember that even longer than the cool shoes.
Hubert Davis doesn’t curse. That has been well documented. The players cranked a Lil Durk song on a speaker near the back of the bus, and it’s a pretty safe bet that this was not a song on Davis’ personal playlist. But there was the Tar Heel head coach, grinning, and what did he say?
“Turn it up!”
My Thoughts and the Thoughts of Others 