In essence, Leaky Black was recruited to UNC twice.
The first time brought Black to Chapel Hill in the fall of 2018.
The second time retained him for a fifth year — this year. It’s the season guaranteed to all NCAA student-athletes who endured the tumultuous 2020-21 athletic year. That year, and the additional season guaranteed because of it, will forever be known as the “COVID year.”
The Tar Heels weren’t about to let Leaky Black leave without his COVID year.
Passing by head coach Hubert Davis in the hall: “You’re coming back, right?”
Diving for a loose ball in practice in front of assistant coach Sean May: “You’re coming back, right?”
The poking and prodding worked: Carolina basketball is Back in Black. For the versatile wing and ace defender from Concord, N.C., the decision was an easy one.
“Everyone just wants to feel wanted,” he said.
The 2022-23 season will be Black’s fifth with the program and fourth as a starter. To some within the program, his days as a freshman in the 2018-19 campaign feel like a lifetime ago. To Black, it might as well have been the blink of an eye.
“To look up, and it’s already been four years, it’s crazy, man,” Black told Chapelboro while wearing rainbow Crocs and a hoodie featuring his likeness.
That there is an entire line of merchandise bearing his name, including a chicken strip basket, speaks to how far Black has come. His team is now poised to stand somewhere it hasn’t been in seven years: No. 1 in the preseason polls. Two and a half years earlier, inside an emptying Greensboro Coliseum, Black and the Tar Heels played perhaps the most bizarre college basketball game in memory: a blowout loss to end a wretched Carolina season, playing out as the world outside changed forever.
“I was very ignorant at the time,” Black admits now. “I didn’t think COVID was that big of a deal to be shutting down everything. Learning more about it, I realized what we were dealing with. At that point, I realized we might not play for another two years.”
Against all odds, college basketball returned just eight months after that surreal night. But the 2020-21 season brought its own difficulties: empty arenas, new rules and regulations and another humbling finish for Carolina. The Tar Heels bowed out in the first round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time under head coach Roy Williams. Between his career at Kansas at UNC, the Tar Heels were the first Williams-led team ever to earn that dubious honor.
Black slept in late the morning of April 1, roughly two weeks after that terrible loss. He awoke to a phone flooded with messages: coaches and players checking to see where he was.
“I woke up, I’m trying to figure everything out, I slide through some messages and I see a Zoom link,” Black said of that fateful afternoon. “I click on the Zoom link. Everyone’s on there. I see Coach Williams crying. I’m like, ‘What in the world is going on?’”
Like many of the rest of us, Black initially thought Roy Williams’ retirement was some elaborate, slightly off-color prank.
“I really thought it was the biggest April Fool’s joke of all time,” he said. “Until April 2 came and it was still a thing. And I was like, ‘Well dang.’”
In the wake of that seismic announcement, Black had a decision of his own to make. The head coach who recruited him out of high school, signed him to the roster and guided him through three seasons was suddenly gone. Black freely admits to considering other options for the following season, but also stated those options vanished when Hubert Davis was named UNC’s head coach just four days later.
“Me and him share the same passion for this university,” Black said. “He cares about us as humans, young men, so much. Playing for a guy like that is what you’d want your kid to do. Me and my family, we felt like it was a no-brainer to stay.”
With a revamped system, roster and coaching staff, Carolina entered the 2021-22 season as an intriguing team, but perhaps not a contender for any hardware. The Tar Heels quickly fell out of the preseason top 25 after some early losses and slogged through a challenging middle portion of the season, enduring humiliating blowouts at Miami and Wake Forest by a combined 50 points.
It was during this challenging stretch that Black sought out his former teammate and classmate from the 2018-19 season: Nassir Little, now playing with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. Little, who was born in Pensacola, FL and went to high school in Orlando, was in Miami for Carolina’s game with the Hurricanes, an 85-57 loss.
“We had a heart-to-heart, and that really changed a lot,” Black said. “The next game, I was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna do it.’”
The next game at Wake Forest didn’t provide the breakthrough Black was looking for. The Demon Deacons won, 98-76.
“I got in foul trouble, stuff worked out the way it worked out,” said Black. “I felt like I missed my opportunity. Then the next game [at home against Virginia Tech, a 78-68 win], I was like, ‘I know I’m not gonna miss this opportunity. And that’s when we went on a little run.”
The Tar Heels won 11 of their final 13 games to end the regular season. It was after one of those wins, a thriller at Louisville in which Black played 43 minutes and hit a key three-pointer in overtime, that he opened up, unprompted, about his struggles with mental health.
“Before every game, my guy [Director of Player and Team Development] Jackie Manuel, he prays with me,” Black said at the time. “I have really bad anxiety. I never really knew until last summer what it was. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s anxiety that I’m feeling.’”
Here's the full clip featuring @adam_smithTN and Leaky Black where Leaky discusses his anxiety. https://t.co/cDWX3wUsf9 pic.twitter.com/oIiEBsd2PI
— Michael Koh (@michaelkohwchl) February 2, 2022
Manuel, the defensive stalwart and co-captain from UNC’s 2005 national championship team who resembles Black in so many ways, has become one of the most important figures in Black’s life, so much so that he describes Manuel as “my best friend here.”
The 2021-22 season was Manuel’s first with the men’s basketball program. He’d spent the previous season working with head coach Courtney Banghart and the women’s program in a similar role, with earlier stops at UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Wilmington. Watching his Tar Heels during those years, Manuel had told his wife about Leaky. If he could get closer to him, he could help him out.
After joining the men’s program, Manuel gravitated toward Black. The two began to conduct early-morning workouts during the summer, until Black had to stop. An old problem, first noticed during his freshman year, had flared up again.
“It would be some days, my anxiety would literally take control,” Black said. “And I’m like, ‘I can’t feel my arms.’ I literally could not feel my arms. In a shooting workout.
“I felt like I was there for no reason,” Black went on to say. “But Jackie was like, ‘Nah, keep going. Keep going. Keep going.’ And then after the workout, we just sat and talked for probably two hours. That’s when he explained to me what was going on.”
Manuel stayed close by Black’s side for the entire season, providing guidance and a shoulder to lean on. On occasion, specifically on a Saturday night in New Orleans, Manuel even had to bring Black down from a pregame high.
“Me and Jackie just prayed, because he’d seen how pumped up I was,” Black said. “He was like, ‘You might be a little too pumped up.’ So we prayed.”
In the historic Final Four clash between Carolina and rival Duke, the first NCAA Tournament meeting ever between the two programs, it was Black who opened the scoring with a three-pointer.
“No one expected that at all,” he said with a smile. “In my head, I was like, ‘I’m shooting that regardless.’ But… come on now. I know how it is. No one expected me to do that.”
Leaky Black shoots in UNC’s Final Four game against Duke on April 2, 2022.
Black would hit another three-pointer in the second half, part of an eight-point, nine-rebound performance in the 81-77 win. Tar Heel stars past and present were in attendance that night at the Superdome. Among the notable guests: Antawn Jamison, Cameron Johnson and, of course, Roy Williams.
As the buzzer sounded and the on-court celebration unfolded, Black popped his jersey and skipped toward the UNC cheering section. It was there he found another alumnus of the basketball program: his old teammate.
Nassir Little had been with the Tar Heels during their lowest moment of the season. Now he was there for the highest.
“I just really wanted to go out there and grab him and bring him up on the court with me,” Black said. “I wanted Nas to know how much I appreciated that.”
As far as expressions of gratitude go, a win in the Final Four pretty much sets the bar.
Now, entering a 2022-23 season overflowing with hype, Black still has plenty he wants to accomplish. At the forefront: the national championship that just eluded his team in April. But there are other things, too. Black wants to leave a legacy with the Tar Heels; a legacy as “the greatest defender to ever come through Chapel Hill.”
“I’m not saying I am, I’m not saying I’m not,” Black said. “That’s what I’m striving to be… I want to put my name up there with Jackie Manuel’s.”
You can hardly talk to Black without hearing Manuel’s name every few minutes or so. Manuel’s presence has injected a new fire into the fifth-year wing, who now stands within striking distance of Deon Thompson’s school record of 152 games played. Black, who has 122 under his belt, will likely surpass that mark if he stays healthy. His name would go into the UNC record book as the most veteran Tar Heel of all time.
Thompson participated in some of the most successful Carolina basketball seasons of all time. But, respectfully, his career isn’t nearly as interesting as Black’s.
Leaky has truly seen it all: one of the most exciting years in school history promptly giving way to one of the worst. An offseason of isolation ushering in the most unique college basketball season in the history of the game. His Hall of Fame coach retiring. And then, maybe the most thrilling NCAA Tournament run in the history of a school with more Final Fours than any other.
When asked what words come to mind when thinking of his UNC career thus far, Black listed a few off the top of his head:
“Resilience. Persistence. Toughness.”
He paused, then added one more, no doubt with Jackie Manuel on his mind.
“Family.”
Featured image via Associated Press/Chris Szagola
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