NEW ORLEANS — In this city of old haunts and mysterious hexes, where the sound of music is as much of a part of the culture as the spirits who give this place its soul, North Carolina has made its share of basketball history, and now seeks more magic alongside the Mississippi Delta on the final Monday night of this delirious season.
Now, though, comes a colliding of worlds and spells, the good juju of the Tar Heels' New Orleans triumphs left to work its might against Kansas, of all opponents, and all the odd history between two schools that have shaped college basketball at least as much if not far more than any others.
You better believe Roy Williams spit in the river.
"What do you think?" Williams, the Tar Heels' former coach, said on Saturday, when asked if he'd indeed hocked one into the Mississippi for good luck. This was before UNC's 81-77 victory against Duke in the late national semifinal, a victory that set up this final Monday night dance between the Tar Heels and Jayhawks.
First, though, some history, for the uninitiated: Williams was but a young man, the youngest among Dean Smith's assistant coaches, when UNC traveled to New Orleans for the Final Four in 1982. Once in town, the story goes, someone approached Williams by chance and told him it was good luck to spit in river.
So sure enough, Williams said in 2017, "I spit in the Mississippi River, and I came back and everybody was laughing at me. We beat Houston, the next morning, I got 10 or 12 Carolina people who just came back from the river."
And then the next day, perhaps after even more UNC fans made the pilgrimage to the Mississippi, a freshman named Michael Jordan made a shot in the final seconds against Georgetown. The Tar Heels won their second national championship, and first under Smith.
By then Williams was sold. He spit in the Mississippi whenever his teams played in cities that bordered it during the NCAA tournament, including when Kansas made the Final Four in New Orleans in 1993. It didn't work then, not for the Jayhawks, anyway, who lost against UNC in a national semifinal.
But is it conceivable that it worked, nonetheless, for the Tar Heels, and helped them work their magic in the championship game against Michigan? Perhaps it helps explain why Chris Webber attempted to call a timeout the Wolverines didn't have, thus ensuring UNC's victory in the final moments.
Indeed, the Tar Heels' history in this city is the envy of some of the teams that play here regularly. The hometown New Orleans Saints suffered so much misery inside the Superdome, which was built atop an old cemetery, that in 2000 the team hired a Voodoo priestess to enter the building and cleanse it of "negative spirits," according to a 2019 ESPN story about the spectacle.
If the Superdome lost of any of the sort of mojo that helped UNC in 1982 and '93, it didn't show here Saturday night, when the Tar Heels prevailed in the final minutes of a classic against Duke. That victory gave the Tar Heels a 5-0 Final Four record in New Orleans, but now that streak is colliding with another: UNC's three consecutive defeats against Kansas since Williams left that school in 2003 to return home to North Carolina.
The Tar Heels and Jayhawks played each other three times in the years following Williams' departure from Lawrence, Kansas, and all three times came in the NCAA tournament, including one in the Final Four (2008) and another in a regional final (2012). Kansas won all three by double-digits, and the Jayhawks, who entered this tournament among its four No. 1 seeds, are again the favorite Monday night.
But then there's UNC's victory against Wilt Chamberlin and the Jayhawks in the 1957 national championship game, and the Jayhawks' victory against Dean Smith and the Tar Heels in the 1991 Final Four. Proving the strangeness, once again, of UNC-Kansas basketball affairs, Smith, remembered as one of the most gentlemanly coaches in the history of the sport, was ejected late in that '91 defeat after collecting his second technical foul.
Hubert Davis, UNC's first-year head coach, was a junior guard for those '91 Tar Heels. He'd arrived at his first Final Four with visions of cutting down the nets, and left with a scarring memory, one that over the years he elected to relive over and over again, as if the pain did him some kind of good. At least once a year, every year, Davis re-watched that defeat against Kansas. The ritual began after the loss in 1991 and continued through 2017, he said, when UNC won the national championship.
"It would make me cry," Davis said of reliving a loss he first experienced when he was 20 years old. "And I was hoping that — it's interesting, every time that I watched it, I would think, it's going to turn out differently."
Entering the tournament, Davis regaled his players with stories of his one and only Final Four as a player. He'd spent 12 years in the NBA, but he told them that "the best experience that I have had as a player" came in 1991, in that Final Four that ended, for him, with so much heartache.
And now things have come full circle, in a way. It's another in a final Monday night full of storylines: the Tar Heels' charmed New Orleans history vs. Kansas' recent mastery against UNC. The blessing of Williams' original salivatory contribution to the Mississippi vs. the apparent curse of his departure from Kansas, at least when it comes to UNC's recent games against the Jayhawks.
Not to mention the basketball lineage, the direct line that can be traced from Davis to Williams to Smith to Phog Allen to James Naismith, himself. The history of basketball, the very fibers at the heart of the game, run through these two schools, one along the Atlantic in the southeast and other smack dab in the middle of the country. And now they're going to settle a long score for basketball supremacy, once and for all (until next time, at least) down here in the city of music and the spirits.
