By Adam Lucas
I just want to prepare you that I am about to write a sentence that I never, ever, absolutely, positively never would have believed 25 years ago. So get ready. Hold on to your flannel shirt.
One of the most fun and memorable parts of my day on Wednesday was hearing Rick Barnes talk about his memories of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Carolina’s 100-92 win over 10th-ranked Tennessee was the highlight, of course. The Tar Heels desperately needed that win, needed a signature victory over a high-quality club, and they got it. More about that in a minute.
But there we were, 45 minutes before tipoff—during a window of time when some major college coaches will not even look at you, much less talk to you—and there was Barnes, one arm draped over a chair in the Tennessee locker room, grinning and talking.
It was so out of character for a big-time college basketball coach that apologies were made. This pregame radio interview is really close to tip-off. Sorry about that, Coach. We’ll make this fast.
“Aw, naw,” said the Hickory native. And proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes talking about the ACC—the old ACC, the good ACC—long after the interview was finished.
“I have fond memories of growing up in the state of North Carolina,” he said. “I grew up watching this great program. When I walked in the building today, I looked up at the banners. And the first player I really remember was Larry Miller, number-44. From that time on, I’ve seen every one of those guys play. I have great respect for the University of North Carolina. It started with Coach McGuire, and then what Coach Smith did not only impacted North Carolina, it impacted our country in terms of the kind of program he built.”
Those of you over the age of 30 just don’t understand how jarring it is for the rest of us to hear those words come from someone we’ve tried very hard to dislike over the last quarter of a century. There was a time when I might have been legally barred from being in the same small room with Rick Barnes, who had some very contentious games with Dean Smith in the mid-1990s. But something has happened.
“I’m much older than I was many years ago,” Barnes said.
Maybe we all are. Maybe we are all on the way to realizing that what seems absolutely critical today, and the things that infuriate us right now at this very moment, might look completely different in a month or a year or ten years…or 25 years, if we’re really lucky. Being able to loathe and admire someone in the same lifetime is a pretty cool gift.
Which is why Barnes’s memories and his stories are so precious. Dean Smith retiring in the fall of 1997 was a where-were-you-when moment for all of us who love the Tar Heels. Believe it or not, it was for Barnes, too, and he knows exactly what happened. He was sitting at the breakfast table with his daughter, then in third grade, the morning that Smith retired.
“Why is he retiring?” his daughter asked.
“Write him and ask him,” Barnes told her.
So she did. A complete stranger, an elementary school aged girl, writing the Hall of Fame coach a letter.
“Three days later,” Barnes says, “she got a handwritten response from him. The week that he retired! Imagine how many letters he was getting, and he wrote my daughter back.”
I just have a really hard time disliking someone who is actively still out there telling good Dean Smith stories from first-hand experience. Someone tell the 1997 version of Adam to hide his eyes again. It’s about to get crazy in this next sentence:
There just aren’t enough people like Rick Barnes out there anymore. In basketball, or in the world. If you could sit on the porch this summer with a cold glass of lemonade and listen to Rick Barnes tell stories about the ACC he remembers, you’d have a fantastic afternoon.
You want to know how hardcore he is? He even threw in a Sail With the Pilot reference, and now some of you are humming the jingle and the rest of you are staring blankly at the screen.
Now, let’s all be honest with ourselves. The reason we are able to chuckle about this is because Carolina was absolutely fantastic in Wednesday night’s first half. Beginning early in Monday’s practice, Hubert Davis had been preparing his team for the type of physical test they would face on Wednesday.
“You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “They will try to punk you. You better be ready right away. If you are not going to compete, don’t bother showing up.”
Marcus Paige played against Barnes-coached teams during his Tar Heel career. “You have to be ready in the first five minutes,” he said. “Because they will fight you, and you have to be ready to compete at that level.”
And the Tar Heels were. They played, as Hubert Davis said, “some of the best basketball I’ve seen in the 12 years I’ve been here as an assistant coach or head coach.”
The pace, largely generated by Elliot Cadeau (10 assists and zero turnovers) and RJ Davis was breakneck. Early in the game, the Tar Heels scored seven seconds after a Volunteer made basket. Later in the half, they scored 10 seconds after a made Tennessee basket.
Hubert Davis frequently barks, “Our pace!” at practice, even when Carolina is running 5-on-0 offense. That half was the living embodiment of “Our pace.”
We are already throwing out some old-school names here, so we might as well continue the trend. Carolina’s all-time assist leader, Ed Cota, was walking through a back hallway of the Smith Center at halftime after watching the Tar Heels build a 61-39 lead. He just whistled and raised an eyebrow. “Ball movement…sharing the ball…now that was Carolina basketball,” he said.
It was very pretty basketball, but Carolina wasn’t just pretty. The Tar Heels were also tough. In the first three minutes of the game, Armando Bacot set the tone by fighting Jonas Aidoo for an offensive rebound and refusing to turn loose of the ball even after Aidoo grabbed and swiped at it. The Tar Heels were regularly the ones initiating contact on box outs, another point of emphasis from the coaches this week. They made offense very difficult for the Volunteers, because all five players were defending as a group.
“We knew it was going to be a brawl,” said RJ Davis, who had 27 points. “We knew they play with a lot of physicality. We wanted to throw the first punch…This team is special. It’s so dynamic. The way we fight, from the starters all the way to the bench, this is going to be one hell of a season.”
Maybe so. This is an incredibly difficult stretch for the Tar Heels, with formidable opponent after formidable opponent. There will be plenty more chances to prove their toughness over the next few weeks, even before ACC play begins in earnest in January. For now, though, let’s just enjoy one really fun night of old-time Carolina basketball, in front of a big, appreciative crowd, against an opponent that understood just how vintage this performance really was (and, let’s be clear, knows exactly what it means that Dalton Knecht scored more points in the Smith Center than any individual opponent in the building’s history, tying LaSalle’s Lionel Simmons with 37 before suffering an injury).
And so, we’re going to give the last word to someone who has seen so many of those ACC seasons, and who made so many of them memorable when he was in the league himself.
Because right now Rick Barnes is tapping you on the knee. “You got time for another Coach Smith story?” he asks.
Of course you do.
“We were at ACC meetings,” he says. “We were all talking and I asked him, ‘How much tape do you watch of a team you’re getting ready to play?’ He said he watched one or two of their games and then watched whatever his assistants told him he needed to watch.
“Then he looked at me and said, ‘How much do you watch?’ I told him I watched everything I could get my hands on, as many games as I possibly could.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘You can’t really be that much smarter than me, can you?’
“And Coach Smith looked back at me and winked and said, ‘Probably not. But now you’re worried that I might be.’”