George Karl is ready for his day as UNC’s 12th Hall of Famer.
Karl will be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame Saturday night in Springfield, presented by other Tar Heel legends Bobby Jones and Roy Williams, and it will be for his NBA coaching career with six teams that yielded 1,997 regular-season and playoff wins.
But we remember No. 22 for long before that, he of the floppy sox and blond hair and, of course, those headlong dives for loose balls.
Karl entered Carolina in 1969 as a heralded recruit from Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a pepper pot point guard whose performance on Bill Guthridge’s 1970 freshman team gave hope to fans mourning the graduation of Charlie Scott and, a year before, the departure of the Bill Bunting-Rusty Clark-Dick Grubar class of 1969.
And Karl delivered, leading the Tar Heels to the 1971 NIT championship in New York, where Dean Smith’s team (without injured All-ACC forward Dennis Wuycik) defeated UMass (and Julius Erving before he was Dr. J), Providence (with Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin “Bad News” Barnes), Duke (with Randy Denton and Dick DeVenzio) for a third time that season, and Georgia Tech (with All-American Rich Yunkus) in a blowout, at Madison Square Garden.
Those were the days when the 32-team NIT was as prestigious as the 25-team NCAA tournament, and schools actually turned down an invite to the not-so-big dance to play in the Big Apple.
With Wuycik back for his senior year in 1972, Karl also directed the Tar Heels to the ACC championship (beating Maryland and Tom McMillen) in the title game and advanced to the Final Four before losing to then-unknown Florida State in the national semifinals.
Karl played five seasons for the San Antonio Spurs in the old ABA before taking his innate savvy for the game and what he learned from Smith into coaching that, literally, sent him around the world (two stints with Real Madrid). His best of 16 years came with the Seattle SuperSonics, Milwaukee Bucks and Denver Nuggets, but he might have left Milwaukee for the Carolina job (following Guthridge’s retirement) in 2000 had Bucks owner Herb Kohl let Karl interview.
As we all remember, the position went to Matt Doherty.
Of George’s victories, his greatest were as a four-time survivor of prostate, head, throat and eye cancer. We love you, Hall of Famer, for all time!
Featured image via UNC Yackety Yack
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