If you’re a young college basketball player today, would you rather win a National Championship in front of millions or run the break with President Obama?
Obviously you take the championship, but the choice might give you a surprising amount of pause. After all, we’re not talking about Dick Nixon here. This is Barack, America’s first black President and arguably the nation’s most inspiring politician in forty years. Wouldn’t the opportunity to play pick-up against a world leader with a jump shot hold some allure?
Well, if you’re the North Carolina Tar Heels, you’ll never have to worry about a choice like this. You can just have your cake and eat it too.
Late last April, with vitally important primaries in hoops-obsessed North Carolina and Indiana on the horizon, President Obama received a much needed boost in the press by getting in some high-profile run with the Tar Heels. Of course, back then the President was still a Senator, and the Heels were still smarting from a disappointing Final Four exit, resigned to the notion that half their starting line-up would be playing in NBA uniforms in 2009.
A year later, everybody from that pick-up game is feeling pretty damn good.
On Monday night, Roy Williams’s ball club ended their season exactly where they started it: as the consensus best team in the land. Carolina dismantled Michigan State from the game’s opening whistle. They went straight at the Trojan big men, banging the ball inside to Tyler Hansborough and Deon Thompson. Wayne Ellington rained high-arching jumpers from beyond the arc. Carolina even got an impressive performance the baby-faced freshman Ed Davis, who notched eleven points in 14 minutes and offered a tantalizing view of what future might hold in Chapel Hill.
The game’s most important performance, however, came from Ty Lawson, who demonstrated once again just how dominant a superior guard can be at the college level. The lightning-quick junior dictated the pace of play at will, turning the national championship game into a frenetic, forty-minute track meet. Once Lawson got going, Michigan State never had a chance.
Carolina won because they played their game effectively. They dominated because they took a page out of President Obama’s playbook and turned their supposed greatest weakness into a strength.
Having heard all week that their defense was inconsistent and even lazy, the Tar Heels applied suffocating pressure to the Spartan backcourt. Lawson had seven steals in the first half. Seven. He picked up one more in the second half to set a championship-game record.
The Tar Heels also gave the President another boost on Monday: Obama was on record picking them to win in his ESPN-televised bracket.
Hoops has often had a slightly political shading at ‘The People’s University’. Dean Smith is revered in the Old North State for his two NCAA championships and his eleven Final Four appearances. But North Carolinians also remember him for the courageous stand he took on integration in the state. They remember Charlie Scott and when the coach spoke out against the death penalty and the war in Vietnam. Some of them even still hold out hope that Dean will run for office himself.
The Tar Heels are a cultural obsession in a state with a complicated history. In March of 1995, North Carolinians fell in love with Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, and a UNC team that came damn close to earning Smith a third title just before his tearful retirement. Two years later, they re-elected Jesse Helms to a fifth term in the US Senate.
This past November, Barack Obama carried that same state with the complicated history by less than one percentage point of the vote. Along with Virginia and perhaps Indiana, North Carolina was the most impressive pick-up in the candidate’s electoral landslide. The state now has a Democratic governor, eight Democratic congressmen in Washington, and clear Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature. As for Mr. Helms’s old seat? Despite a costly and bitter campaign from her incumbent opponent, a Democrat picked that up too.
As the political landscape of North Carolina changes, it is the enduring success of Tar Heel basketball that remains a constant.
Just another one of those ‘have your cake and eat it too’ situations.
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