Travel World guide

The North Carolina Tar Heels are one of the most successful college basketball programs in the land. There are of course many ways to decipher which program or team is the greatest ever… and the author massages history to present a book that constantly summarizes that North Carolina’s is by far the greatest. To a lot of fans the final crown should be placed on the head of the team that has won the most National Championships and that is by far UCLA with eleven. Kentucky has seven and Indiana and North Carolina have five each. But if the reader can put the championship total discrepancy aside… the more salient subject that the author accurately portrays is the unmatched growth of a “TAR HEEL FAMILY”… that was started by the “dressed-to-the-nines” street wise in life and basketball… inimitable… New York Irishman Frank McGuire. Frank was one of thirteen children who grew up Fatherless when his New York cop Dad died at an early age. His life was built around sports and he became the coach of St. Johns University in New York which became one of the greatest basketball teams in the country. In fact McGuire led them to the NCAA championship game. A point well made in the book is that he also accomplished this with North Carolina when he won it all with his undefeated North Carolina team in 1957. The 1957 championship is still mentioned as one of the greatest upsets in history as Carolina beat the all-time-all-time great Wilt Chamberlain and his Kansas team in triple overtime to win the NCAA Championship. As of this writing there are only two other coaches in history that have led two different schools to the NCAA Championship game… and they are Larry Brown (UCLA & Kansas), Roy Williams (Kansas & North Carolina). Since Larry Brown had played college ball at North Carolina for McGuire and the immortal coach, Dean Smith, who was handpicked (from Kansas) by McGuire as an assistant and an eventual replacement… all three coaches have ties to the North Carolina family… and that is the essence of this book. (It should be noted that Coach McGuire also coached the St. Johns baseball team to the NCAA Championship game.)

The biographical coverage of Coach McGuire is fascinating and how his street moxie created what was known as the “UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” in which he recruited the heart of North Carolina’s teams from New York. One of his best teams starting lineup was known as “Four Catholics and a Jew”… the Jewish ballplayer from New York was Lennie Rosenbluth who not only had the highest individual season scoring average in North Carolina Tar Heel history… but he also holds the career record for highest Carolina scoring average also. The author tells Dean Smith’s life story as well as current coach Roy Williams and current Bobcats coach Larry Brown’s. The method in which the author keeps jumping back and forth between coaches and simultaneously changes time stamps becomes very confusing at times. One second you’re in the middle of 1990′s Carolina history with one coach and then you blink your eyes and you’re back in 1962 with another. This happens constantly throughout the book and makes it hard at times to continue a seamless reading flow.

It’s wonderful for any sports fan to learn of the respect between these different generations of coaches as they always remain in contact and always help out each other… each other’s families… and each other’s players and associates. This is what is most clearly defined without a doubt in this book… that the North Carolina family truly endures. Also covered is the overall growth of the ACC as a powerful organization and the yearly recruiting wars which North Carolina seems to be dominating.

Any basketball fan will enjoy this book… but every basketball fan including even the most fanatical Carolina fan will get confused at times as dates… places… and coaches… overlap… go forward… go back… and forth… at times in an incomprehensible manner.

One of the best college basketball books I’ve read in years — and I’ve read them all. Beginning with the author’s “Ten What-Ifs of Carolina Basketball” I started to wonder if this unlikely dynasty might be based on as much *luck* (or happenstance) as anything else?

The book details the lives of three legendary coaches (Frank McGuire, Dean Smith and Roy Williams) and their uncanny connections that have sustained the most consistently successful college basketball program of the last half century. The author tells all the story of all three coaches factually and, at times, vividly as he melds a timeline of historical events and behind-the-scenes insider accounts of the coaches, players, recruits, and fans.

This book should be on the must-read list for all Tar Heels and serious basketball fans. It’s informative, entertaining, and authoritative (which is not a surprise, really) since the author has been covering Carolina basketball for over thirty years. Highly recommend.

Roy Williams, head coach of the North Carolina Tarheel basketball team since 2003, together with a large cast of some of the Tarheels’ best former players, reflect on their experiences inside one of the nation’s most storied college basketball programs. Together, they provide insight into playing and coaching in the intense world of big time college athletics.

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I thought Scott Fowler had already written the ultimate Carolina Basketball book in North Carolina Tarheels; Where Have You Gone, but this book is a real keeper – one you can read all the way through, or pick your favorites and read about them – What it meant and still means for them to have played basketball for North Carolina, and Scott’s update of what the player is doing now. The layout is super. It begins in the fifties and takes each player’s feeling for being a part of Tar Heel basketball and puts that feeling into words that only Scott can put together. I didn’t know the team started with mostly New Yorkers brought by Frank McGuire to North Carolina. There’s also a chapter on a popular Charlotte pastor who was part of the program. Great rainy-day reading!

I can recommend this book to serious college basketball fans and fans of sports lit, but it is by no means the definitive work on the UNC basketball program; that book has yet to be written. The writing in this one is at times ponderous and meandering, and disappointing. And fans of the history of the game of basketball may wonder how Roy Williams, with his two National Championships but limited impact on the game itself, deserves equal billing with the great Dean Smith, one of the most important coaches and sports figures of the twentieth century. Williams has built on the program that Coach Smith built. Just because they each coached two NCAA champs doesn’t mean they are equal in the eyes of history. Williams is a hugely successful coach but Dean Smith is a legend.

Recommended but there are better basketball books out there to be read.

By far one of the best books I have ever read concerning the Tar Heel Basketball lineage. Very descriptive and detailed in it’s description of collage basketball as a whole. Good Reading.