NEW ORLEANS — Hubert Davis has a smile that comes easily, the kind that's contagious, and in moments here on Thursday it was difficult for him to hide it. Perhaps he didn't want to. North Carolina is in the Final Four in his first year as Roy Williams' successor, and there's good reason for Davis, who went through the fire in recent months only to emerge from the other side, to be happy.
At times on the night of his first game as head coach, though, he was not happy. Not with the effort. Not with the rebounding. Not with the screen-setting or the charge-taking or anything else. It was halftime and he was yelling and animated. His tie bounced around in front of him, back when more coaches wore ties, and he emphasized his words with finger-pointing and hand-waving.
This was not the stoic Davis, the one the cameras catch when he might be sitting on the UNC bench, looking thoughtful or unemotional. This was the Davis that few people ever saw aside from his players, the one that couldn't stand a lack of effort or intensity; couldn't stand the idea of one of his guys not caring as much about UNC basketball as he does.
"Making strong cuts, running the floor, boxing out, rebounding, taking charges," Davis said then, raising his voice. "That's effort! Relentless effort!"
This was not almost five months ago, back in early November. This was not during the Tar Heels' season-opening victory against Loyola Maryland, in front of thousands at the Smith Center.
This was more than eight years ago now, back in late 2013. Davis walked into his team's locker room then at exactly 4:01 p.m., superstitious about the time, perhaps nervous before his first game in a new role. Maybe a few dozen had gathered in the lower-level seats at the Smith Center, mostly parents and friends. It was his first game as a head coach: the UNC junior varsity team against the Mount Olive JV, a game that meant nothing and meant everything, because Davis' players wore jerseys with NORTH CAROLINA on the front.
"I kind of had a feeling," Justin Coleman said Thursday by phone from Raleigh.
Coleman eight years ago was a JV basketball player at UNC, and on the first team Davis ever led.
"Even before, like when I was playing, I always kind of felt like he was going to be the next guy," he said.
In the shadow of Duke
Saturday night, Davis will coach the most important game of his life. His Tar Heels, who were the only ones who ever believed they'd make it this far, if even they managed to maintain that belief amid their more frustrating moments, will play against Duke in the second of two NCAA Tournament national semifinals. It's a game rife with storylines.
For one, the Tar Heels and Blue Devils, whom for decades now have been engaged in the basketball equivalent of The Hundred Years' War, have never played each other in the NCAA Tournament, let alone in the Final Four. For another, this one comes in Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's final season, and comes four weeks after UNC ruined Krzyzewski's home finale at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Krzyzewski's retirement, each game bringing him closer to an ending, has been the defining story of the college basketball season, and this NCAA Tournament. The cameras have been following him everywhere — so much so that he said recently he was growing tired of all the attention — and even this Duke-UNC game, one with greater stakes than any of the 257 Duke-UNC games before it, has in a way been viewed through Coach K-shaped prism:
Can the Blue Devils avenge that defeat against UNC from four weeks earlier and, in the process, set up the chance for the ultimate storybook ending for their retiring Hall of Fame coach? Krzyzewski has said again and again in recent days and weeks that he doesn't want his players thinking that way; that this journey isn't about him but that of his team; that he's done with the sort of distracting hoopla that surrounded him and Duke leading into his final home game.
"You can't go into the Final Four just thinking 'rivalry, payback,' or any of those things," Krzyzewski said earlier this week. "You've got to go in (thinking) 'We want to win a championship.' ... And then we've got to beat them, and then we've got to beat someone else. And if you go in with those other two things, there's a good chance you're not going to win."
The focus on Krzyzewski, though, is unavoidable. If Duke wins Saturday night, he'll have the opportunity to win his sixth national championship two nights later, and in the final game of his career. And if Duke loses, then CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz might just already have a signature line ready to send Krzyzewski off.
And then there's Davis, the other head coach; the one no one's talking about. It is not as though he appeared out of the ether and into this moment, yet compared to the man he'll coach against here at the Superdome on Saturday, Davis remains a relative unknown. And that's even after he became an All-ACC player at UNC and spent 12 seasons in the NBA, and even after he became something of a face of the college game during his days as a broadcaster at ESPN.
Position to make decisions
By now, Krzyzewski has been coaching for so long at Duke that it seems like it's the only thing he's ever done. For people who are 40 years old, or younger, Krzyzewski has been the Blue Devils' head coach their entire lives. Davis, meanwhile, has been on the job for about a year. He earned the chance in a similar way to how Roy Williams earned his start: by leading UNC's junior varsity program and earning the trust of his boss.
The difference, though, is that Williams first started working with UNC's JV program as a 20-something kid in desperate need to prove himself. Davis accepted the responsibility after he'd become one of the best perimeter shooters in NBA history, and after he'd become a successful broadcaster. The coaching life is difficult, late nights turning into long seasons; the never-ending nature of recruiting and booster-schmoozing, and Davis didn't need it, necessarily.
And yet he felt a calling when Williams offered him the job. His journey to his moment, at the Final Four in New Orleans, began with his time leading the UNC JV, learning about how to run a practice and how to develop substitution patterns and how to try to inspire players on nights when it might have been difficult to find inspiration.
Before Davis became a UNC assistant coach in 2012, Williams' assistants often rotated JV responsibilities. It was as if no one wanted the permanent grind of it along with everything that comes with being a varsity assistant. UNC's JV program is a throwback to a different time, and when freshmen were ineligible to play on the varsity. Even after that changed, Dean Smith continued to believe in the value of the JV program, and kept it.
It remained through Roy Williams' tenure and has continued on into Davis'. The team allows regular students the chance to become a small part of the larger UNC basketball program. It allowed Davis, meanwhile, a small taste of what being a head coach might be like.
He remained the JV head coach for seven years. He'd coach a game in front of a few dozen that might begin three and a half hours before the varsity tip-off, take a break and then meet Williams and a roster of McDonald's All-Americans for his other job.
Coaching JV was never glamorous. It was never the sort of thing that earned Davis much attention.
Yet his time as JV head coach, he said earlier this week, "put me in a position to make decisions."
Those decisions came on "a much lesser scale," he acknowledged, but "you're still making substitutions, you're still making play calls, you're still putting together practice plans and running practice, you're still dealing with individuals and personalities and relationships."
'How much he cares'
It's the last one of those, the relationships, that two of his former JV players remembered Thursday. Coleman, a Raleigh, N.C., native who'd been a standout high school player at Broughton, could tell stories about how seriously Davis took his work with the JV, how he had the same kind of open-door policy with the JV guys as he did players like Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson and others who at the time were the most well-known players on varsity.
"He would be up late trying to figure out schemes to make it work," said Coleman, who eventually lived the dream of every UNC JV player and walked onto the varsity. " So no matter the scale, he was always going to try to do his job to the best of his abilities."
Like Coleman, Spenser Dalton also walked onto the Tar Heels' varsity teams after years with the JV. And like Coleman, Dalton also was a member of Davis' very first team. Eight years later, what struck Dalton about Davis was "how much he cares," he said.
"It's visceral. You can feel the energy in the air, about just how passionately he cares about his job and the people around him. That struck me, just the pure intensity."
There was another thing, too, Dalton said, that spoke to Davis' ability to build relationships, to get the most of his players, even those who'd never play a significant role on varsity.
"He always made a point to say hello to my grandmother," Dalton said. "My grandmother doesn't see very well, and so him walking over to her after a JV basketball game and calling her by her name, or once I made varsity, just saying a quick hello, passing in the hotel or something like that. I think that meant a lot to me that he would even take the time to remember who she was.
"And it was really awesome for her. She loved it."
At the end of the second and final day of JV tryouts before Davis' first season as a head coach, in the fall of 2013, he gathered those who'd competed for a spot on the team. They stood in a circle in the middle of the Smith Center court, around the Carolina blue logo of the state. There were about 40 of them, regular UNC students who'd not been recruited; guys who'd been good high school players and others who might have been able to play at a smaller college but instead chose to pursue academics in Chapel Hill. Davis knew he was going to have to cut the great majority of those players, that their dream to play on this floor wouldn't last beyond that day.
He told them a story about the power of belief and effort and not giving up. It was his own story.
It was about how he'd longed to follow the footsteps of his uncle, Walter Davis, to become a Carolina basketball player. About how Dean Smith wasn't sold that Hubert Davis was good enough. About how Smith offered him a spot on the team, but believed Davis wouldn't ever be more than a bit player who came off the bench.
And then, Davis told the hopefuls in front of him, he'd outworked those meager expectations.
'Positivity' and belief pay off
Eight years later, it wasn't all easy for Davis during his first season as the varsity head coach. The Tar Heels endured blowout defeats against Kentucky and Miami and Wake Forest and at home against Duke — losses that incited a fan base long spoiled by success to fill Twitter and internet message boards with attacks and doom and gloom prognostications. And yet through it all, Davis said here on Thursday, he maintained the belief that the Tar Heels were going to be OK.
That maybe they had this sort of thing in them, to make it all the way to New Orleans. Davis had, after all, placed a photo of the Superdome in all of his players' lockers before the start of the season, and even in the dark moments that followed he usually found a way to focus on the positive.
"You just can't disconnect from that level of positivity," Dalton said, looking back to those days when only he and his JV teammates knew Davis as a head coach. "Big smile. Always just a fantastic demeanor about him. It's hard not to feel good about yourself when you're in the presence of someone who's like that."
When Davis arrived for his NCAA-mandated press conference here on Thursday, he walked up the stairs and onto a makeshift stage and flashed a large grin as he sat down. He smiled widely at times while reporters asked their questions. When the presser ended and the moderator told Davis he'd see him tomorrow — on Friday — Davis expressed surprise that he had to come back for even more interviews. This was his first Final Four, after all, and Davis didn't know the routine.
"Yipee," Davis said at the thought of more press conference time, and he laughed. And even though it was sarcasm, he still managed to sound authentic and look happy.
It was the smile, bright and wide, and soon he was riding in the back of a cart to another one of his many media and television responsibilities. His team had made it to New Orleans. The positivity and belief had paid off. He'd made the ultimate ascent from the JV to the Final Four in his first year as the varsity head coach.
