I am proud to say my university hired an African American coach.
When Roy Williams retired, I knew Hubert Davis would be a strong candidate to succeed him but wasn’t sure the former Carolina shooting star wanted the head job. Look at his recent past.
Davis’ love for everything UNC began when he was four years old and carried through his Uncle Walter’s All-American career under Dean Smith and his own sales job to Smith about proving he could play here. Smith doubted it but gave him a chance because he was sort of “in the family.”
I ran into assistant coach Bill Guthridge after the first practice in October of 1988, when Davis officially put on his Tar Heel togs. I asked Coach Gut how it went and if there were any surprises. He said, “Hubert is a lot better than we thought.” After one day.
It took Hubert several years to become a star. But in his last regular-season game on Christian Laettner’s Senior Day at Duke, Davis hit 13 of 19 shots including 6 of 8 three-pointers and had the usually crazy Duke students actually going bonkers over his 35 points.
Davis had proven Smith so wrong that he was the 20th pick in the NBA draft by the Knicks and wound up playing 12 years in the pros and making friends all over the league, sopping everything up like a sponge. When he finally retired in 2004, he and Leslie and their three kids settled in Chapel Hill and Hubert became a College GameDay star on ESPN.
He has said he always wanted to be a head coach, but he spent eight years in town before having a serious conversation with Williams about joining his staff. One who aspired to run his own program, you would think, might have gotten into the profession a little sooner. That’s why some people questioned whether he wanted it.
He’s not an introvert – catch him on TV some time cutting up with his ESPN guys – but he understood his place on the bench. And when the time came, he blew away Kevin Guskiewicz and Bubba Cunningham in his personal interview to climb the list of candidates.
The sorry statistics show that qualified African Americans usually don’t get the job. At the university of social justice champions Dean Smith and Roy Williams that is becoming more about diversity by the day, the fact that Hubert Davis is Black might have helped him get this job. If so, I’m prouder than ever of being a Tar Heel.
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