Blue Blood II: Duke-Carolina: The Latest on the Never-Ending and Greatest Rivalry in College Hoops
320
Blue Blood II: Duke-Carolina: The Latest on the Never-Ending and Greatest Rivalry in College Hoops
320eBook
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Overview
A follow-up to Blue Blood that tells the recent history of the Duke-Carolina college basketball rivalry
When Art Chansky's Blue Blood was published in 2005, ESPN’s Dick Vitale said it was about “the greatest rivalry, not just in college basketball, but in all of sports” and the book was hailed by The East Carolinan as the “holy text for both sides of the rivalry.” Now, 13 years later, Chansky revisits the fiercest college basketball rivalry.
Since 2005, Duke-Carolina has been a study of rival recruiting philosophies, disparate playing styles, classic game encounters, coaching milestones, All-American and NBA draft picks galore, plus off -the-court drama, and most recently, the ultimate question of who will be the next caretakers to this national treasure.
Winning more Atlantic Coast Conference and NCAA championships than the rest of the ACC combined made Duke and UNC the true blue bloods of basketball. When the prequel to this book was published in 2005, few fans thought the passionate backyard battle could get any better, but the last 13 years have added new colors and different fabrics to the mosaic that is the remaining virtue of the college game’s regular season, which for everyone else is now a qualifying run to the NCAA tournament and March Madness.
Chansky brings all of these details to light, making Blue Blood II a must-have follow-up for Duke and UNC fans, and college basketball fans in general.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250193292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 38 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Art Chansky is an author and sportswriter who has covered basketball on Tobacco Road for more than thirty years. By day, he is a sports marketing executive who developed an all-sports competition between Duke and Carolina called the Carlyle Cup. He has written The Dean’s List: a Celebration of Tar Heel Basketball and Dean Smith and Dean’s Domain: The Inside Story of Dean Smith and His College Basketball Empire on North Carolina basketball and coach Dean Smith. He lives with his family on the “Duke side” of Chapel Hill.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HANSBROUGH INDOOR STADIUM
Tyler Hansbrough is not sure he had met or even heard from Roy Williams while Williams was still head coach at the University of Kansas, which is about six hours to the northwest of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, where the Hansbrough family lived. After Williams left KU for his alma mater in April of 2003 to coach the Tar Heels, the recruiting began in earnest.
Hansbrough was recruited by Bill Self, who succeeded Williams at Kansas, and admits he might have gone to KU if not for the coaching change. Painfully shy 6'9" kids from small towns who love their families — and hate to fly, which he did — prefer to drive down the interstate rather than make a plane change to North Carolina. But Hansbrough (as well as his parents) favored the UNC coach after getting to know him.
Williams first saw Hansbrough play at the Nike All-American camp in Indianapolis the summer before the big blond's junior year in high school. "I was watching everybody that day, but I kept noticing this 6-9 kid who was running the floor and banging into everyone," Williams recalled in his autobiography, Hard Work. He said although Hansbrough was "not that skilled and doesn't look pretty, he plays the way I want a big man to play." After watching Hansbrough in another tournament later that summer and going to see him three or four times as a high school junior, Williams had to have him, another big Midwestern post man like Raef Lafrentz and Nick Collison at Kansas. Whether flying a private plane or puddle jumper into the Poplar Bluff municipal airport, it became a familiar trip for Williams.
On one of those visits, during an observation-only period of the recruiting calendar, Williams watched Hansbrough and his teammates lift weights at 7 a.m. and shoot around at 7:30 before school started. He then returned at 8:00 that night to see the team play pickup games. In between, Williams went golfing with four or five coaches from the high school. Aware that Duke had already visited with Hansbrough's coach, John David Pattillo, Williams said to Pattillo, "I can only say hello to Tyler, but can you remind him that when Coach Krzyzewski came here he just watched pickup games, but I've watched him lift weights, watched him shoot, and then stayed all day and watched the pickup. That's the way I'm going to do it. I'm going to try to outwork everybody."
Williams said he thought it was something that might appeal to Hansbrough, one of the hardest-working high school players he had ever seen. Williams grew more impressed when he learned the Hansbrough family story. Tyler was in between younger brother, Ben, and older brother, Greg, who at one point was projected as the best athlete.
At seven years old, Greg was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor that was basically a death sentence. Father Gene Hansbrough, an orthopedic surgeon, scoured the country for other opinions about his son's condition and found one at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where a neurosurgeon said he would perform the operation but gave Greg only a 50-50 chance to recover and have any quality of life. Greg survived, and with permanent disabilities became Tyler's hero. Greg made the Poplar Bluff basketball team, playing basically one-handed, and later turned into an accomplished long-distance runner and author who penned his own story. Tyler wore Greg's No. 50 uniform and kept that number through college and his professional career.
By the summer of 2004, Hansbrough had moved Duke out of his final four schools of Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and UNC. The closer he got to Williams and the Carolina program, which included getting snowed in during an official visit in January of 2004 and an unofficial return on a beautiful summer day the following June, Duke fell further down the list. Hansbrough had watched the Duke-UNC rivalry on TV, like most other college basketball fans around the country, but said he did not have a particular favorite at that time. That began to change on his trips to Chapel Hill.
"Before I committed to North Carolina, I was pretty neutral," Hansbrough said years later. "I enjoyed following the rivalry as a big fan of the game. It was just kind of cool to watch and imagine playing in some day."
True to his word, Williams kept outworking every other school chasing Hansbrough. He sent on average three handwritten notes a week to Hansbrough's home, all including a thought for the day from his practice plans. When he found out from his father that Tyler only opened the envelopes with a UNC Basketball return address, Williams then sent something almost daily.
Williams left in August for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, where he was Larry Brown's assistant coach, and figured Hansbrough would announce his decision while he was overseas. On August 5, Williams called assistant coach Joe Holladay at 5:00 in the morning and learned Hansbrough had picked UNC. He had his next star signee, although he had no idea of the once clumsy kid's upside.
An entire season of high school and college basketball remained before Hansbrough arrived in Chapel Hill, part of a highly rated recruiting class that included 6'3" combo guard and coach's son Bobby Frasor, 6'5" athlete and defensive ace Marcus Ginyard, 6'5" explosive scorer Danny Green, and 6'7" banger Mike Copeland.
Even after his Tar Heels won the 2005 NCAA championship, Williams thought Sean May would return for his senior season and allow Hansbrough to come off the bench as a freshman in 2006. May had been the best player in the country over the last month of the season — with eight straight double-doubles from Duke game to Duke game capped by 26 points and 24 rebounds on Senior Day against the Blue Devils in the regular-season finale. After winning MVP in the NCAA East Regional and Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four, May decided his pro stock would never be higher. After all, he had 26 points and 10 rebounds in the national championship game against Illinois, surpassing his father, Scott's, performance (26 and eight) in undefeated Indiana's 1976 NCAA title victory over Michigan.
May joined freshman Marvin Williams, whose tip-in gave UNC its last lead in the national championship game, and fellow juniors Raymond Felton and Rashad McCants in the 2005 NBA draft, the first time four players from one school were lottery picks the same year. (Duke had four first-round picks in 1999, but only three were in the lottery.)
With those four and the team's three seniors gone, Carolina lost 90 percent of its scoring, 79 percent of its rebounding, and 122 blocked shots. The exodus left Roy Williams with one of his youngest teams for the 2006 season.
Suddenly, Tyler Hansbrough was the new center of attention for the Tar Heels, and Williams still had no idea how that would work out. Then Duke stars J. J. Redick and Shelden Williams announced they were forgoing the NBA draft to play their senior years, bent on getting back to a second Final Four and winning it this time. Duke had blown a big lead against UConn in the 2004 national semifinals, and the return of Redick and Williams installed the Blue Devils as the nation's top-ranked team heading into the new season.
Top recruit Shaun Livingston had gone straight to the NBA and 2004 freshman Luol Deng turned pro, but they had finished 27–6 in 2005 and won their sixth ACC tournament in the last seven years. Duke had lost only Daniel Ewing from its starting lineup and added freshmen Josh McRoberts, a versatile 6'10" forward rated Hansbrough's equal coming out of high school, and plucky point guard Greg Paulus, who was also a high school football star and eventually used his fifth year of college eligibility to play quarterback as a graduate student for Syracuse in fall of 2009.
After Carolina's national championship, the Blue Devils remained masters of the rivalry, having beaten the Tar Heels in 15 of their last 18 meetings while in the midst of an unprecedented string of ACC regular-season and tournament titles. Still, knowing UNC had cut down the last nets the previous April wasn't lost on Shelden Williams. "I want to accomplish some of the things Carolina did," the reigning National Defensive Player of the Year said upon announcing his return with Redick. Projected high first-round draft choices, Redick and Williams had made first-team All-ACC, and Redick was a unanimous All-American, the Rupp National Player of the Year, and ACC Player of the Year in 2005. Duke was loaded, a consensus No. 1 pick in the polls.
The Blue Devils ran out to a 17–0 start and multi-game lead in the 2006 ACC regular-season race before losing to Georgetown at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. They then won four more to stand 21–1 going into the first Carolina game on February 7 in Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels — starting three freshmen, junior Reyshawn Terry, and senior David Noel — had opened the season unranked and got off to the expected uneven start. They had won three straight, were 14–5, and climbed back into the rankings at No. 23 before Hansbrough's debut against the team he had once admired from afar.
"I was pretty programmed the minute I got to North Carolina to start hating Duke," Hansbrough said. "For some reason, it kind of felt natural to me, the way it was supposed to be. They're a different school than us, kind of an uppity private school. I was a small-town country boy, so it didn't really fit with me."
After their last meeting, Carolina's stirring comeback victory at the end of the 2005 regular season, the heat was rising in the rivalry. Roy Williams had not only beaten Duke for the first time at UNC but also landed another recruit both schools wanted for the freshman class of 2007. Brandan Wright, a 6'9" forward from Tennessee, had committed to the Tar Heels the previous October after all the scuttlebutt had him wearing royal blue.
Williams had offered a contingent scholarship to 6'8" Thaddeus Young, who signed with Georgia Tech after Williams rescinded the tender. "I told [Young] that Brandan was coming in for a visit, and that if Brandan accepted the scholarship offer, it was going to be his," Williams said. Although Wright had made official visits to Carolina and Duke when each school was hosting the other during the 2005 season, he showed up on his own at UNC's first preseason practice of the fall, called Late Night with Roy, the following October. "Brandan did not surprise me, he surprised everyone else," Williams said. "J. J. Redick told me at the [2006] Final Four, 'You really surprised us.' I sort of smirked a little bit because I thought we were doing pretty well with Brandan from the start."
Wright and fellow commits Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington, hotshot prep All-American guards, gave Williams his first top-ranked incoming freshman class at North Carolina.
* * *
Despite losing Wright, Duke still had signed its own studly list of recruits the previous November, including 6'5" shooting star Jon Scheyer and Ellington's Philadelphia high school teammate Gerald Henderson Jr., the 6'5" son of the former NBA star, and a future Hansbrough antagonist. But Wright's decision left Krzyzewski and his staff scrambling for a power forward, and they immediately went after 6'9" Lance Thomas, a highly rated New Jersey prospect who had committed to Arizona but wanted to wait until the spring to sign. He did, with Duke.
Helping turn the tide for Thomas was Krzyzewski's appointment as U.S. national team coach for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He was the first college coach to hold the position since NBA players were allowed to compete in 1992. The job would not only keep Coach K in the news through the off-seasons to follow, it fulfilled a fantasy for the former Army captain and West Point graduate, who had closely followed international basketball long before serving as an assistant to Chuck Daly on the original 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona. And it began a vital second career for the Duke coach.
On the court, the Blue Devils seemed to be just fine, too, especially with their 17-game winning streak that opened the 2006 season. Their narrowest margin of victory was 10 points in all but three games before the loss to Georgetown, but a seductively dangerous trend was developing. Redick, who finished the season second in the nation in scoring (26.8 points per game), was ringing up higher and higher numbers — three 40-point games and, in February, five straight of at least 30. He was on his way to setting Duke and ACC all-time scoring records, and he also broke Art Heyman's school career record of 19 games with 30 or more points.
But with Shelden Williams the only other double-digit scorer on the team, Duke was becoming too dependent on Redick, whose teammates found themselves playing tentatively. Krzyzewski, who turned the team over to Redick before the season, told him, "I'm okay living and dying with the shot you take." Duke fans wondered why the athletic McRoberts wasn't used more as an inside- outside threat. Sophomore starter DeMarcus Nelson had a nagging foot injury, and Paulus suffered similar freshman adjustment problems that had plagued starting point guard Bobby Hurley sixteen years earlier. The Blue Devils temporarily dropped to No. 2 in the polls behind Connecticut, heading into the first game against UNC in Chapel Hill on February 7, 2006.
Duke began aggressively, whistled for four fouls in the first six minutes, and did not get into the bonus until the final seconds of the first half. Leading by five, the Blue Devils were hooted off the court and had a shouting match in their locker room, criticizing the calls and yelling at one another about lackadaisical play against an opponent they were supposed to rout. Krzyzewski calmed them down, and Duke scored the first 12 points of the second half, forcing six straight turnovers, which prompted a livid Roy Williams to pull all five starters.
"At that point, we could have lost by a thousand points," Williams said, angered that his team did not meet the challenge and especially by the nonchalant play by some of the greener Tar Heels not named Hansbrough. "I hate 'cool' and have always hated anything about being 'cool.'"
That tantrum might have been the turning point of the season for his young team, which rallied and actually took a five-point lead with less than five minutes left. But Redick scored 11 points in the last 4:22, including three 3-pointers, and finished with 35 points, the most ever by a Duke player on UNC's home court. The Blue Devils survived 87–83. The Tar Heels shot only 40 percent compared to Duke's 49 but were buoyed by dominating the offensive boards, 22–7. Hansbrough, Noel, and Danny Green each pulled down nine rebounds, matched only on the Duke side by Shelden Williams, who led the ACC in rebounding that season with 10.7 a game. The Blue Devils hung on in part because McRoberts had his best college game to date, scoring nine points in the second half and finishing with 17.
Hansbrough scored 14 points as one of five teammates in double figures and remembered being exhausted all night, attributing it to the intense energy on campus before the game. He discovered that the vibe from other students, the constant well-wishing, and his phone blowing up with ticket requests from people he hadn't heard from in months, unnerved him.
"I had worn myself out before the game," Hansbrough said. "I was so nervous, hadn't slept very well the night before. I didn't know what to expect because it was my first big-time rivalry game. I remember when the game started it was a big sigh of relief, finally we're going to get this thing going. We can quit studying the scouting report and having tough practices, we can just go out and play.
"Shelden was pretty strong; I hadn't faced too many guys with his strength. He was a big load for me to handle. J. J. came out and hit us right from the beginning and never took his foot off the
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blue Blood II"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Art Chansky.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword: The Rivalry in Their Own Words
Prologue
Introduction: Celebrations
1. Hansbrough Indoor Stadium
2. “His Will Exceeds His Skill”
3. The Worms Turn
4. The Branding of Coach K
5. The Droughts
6. Lightning in a Bottle
7. Carolina’s Comeback
8. Regret and Redemption
9. Bad Endings
Epilogue: How Long, Who’s Next?
Index