Terry Holland’s team had faced one battle after another heading down the backstretch of the schedule, including tight victories against Clemson and Wake Forest in the tournament that sidelined starting guard Othell Wilson. Both coaches knew that the winner of the conference tournament would receive the top seed in the NCAA tournament’s east regional. The loser would have to travel to another region, usually a losing proposition.
These were two splendid college teams, and well matched. Both had finished 12–2 in the ACC. Carolina surprisingly controlled the opening tip over Sampson, which resulted in a slam dunk for Worthy. From there, the Tar Heels vaulted to an 8–0 lead, then 24–12. In an early time-out, Smith told his players that Virginia would rebound from the deficit and to be ready for their run. On cue, the Cavaliers cut the lead and gained further advantage when Jordan picked up his third foul with less than three minutes left in the first half. North Carolina managed to hold a 3-point edge at the intermission, but Virginia scored the first six buckets of the second half and forced Smith to take an early time-out as he expected Holland to drop his players into a tight zone.
The Cavaliers had the lead and were surging. It was in that stretch, as the pressure soared, that Jordan stepped up to make four straight jump shots to seize back the momentum. His first shot out of the left corner cut the deficit to one. Holland took a time-out, but his team missed its first shot of the second half, which allowed Jordan to work from the right for another eighteen-footer. With a 1-point lead, Smith signaled for a spread floor in an effort to pull Virginia out of its zone. Holland, though, declined. Instead, he had his guards loosely defend the perimeter, just enough to avoid a ten-second call. The game then crawled through three minutes of Carolina’s spread stall until finally Jordan came off two screens at the key and hit his third jumper.
Sampson then scored to trim Carolina’s lead back to one, but Smith called for a repeat of the previous play, with Jordan popping off the screens to hit his fourth straight shot for a 44–41 lead. “Michael made some unbelievably clutch shots against Virginia in the ACC championship game,” Art Chansky recalled. “If he hadn’t made those shots, gutsy, ballsy shots from the elbow, where Sampson wouldn’t come out… that’s as close to the basket as you could get. If he didn’t make those shots, they wouldn’t have won that game. That was where you could see he was starting to get assertive.”
“He had that penchant for making big shots even back then,” agreed veteran basketball writer Dick Weiss.
There remained almost nine minutes on the clock. Carolina went into a tight zone, and Virginia’s Jeff Lamp answered with a twenty-footer that cut the lead back to one.
Without hesitation, Smith put up his four fingers and sent his team into the four corners, a move that enraged quite a broad array of spectators, media, and even league officials. But it worked. Virginia would not take another shot in the half until the very end, after the Tar Heels had drained the clock. Holland declined to foul Carolina until twenty-eight seconds remained. Doherty made one of two free throws, but Virginia couldn’t capitalize. Jimmy Black made two late free throws, and Sampson slammed a final bucket at the buzzer. It didn’t matter. Carolina took the top seed in the East, 45–43.
Broadcast on NBC nationwide, the game stirred wide protest among media and fans. It is viewed as the contest that drove officials to adopt a shot clock, which the ACC added, along with a three-point shot, on an experimental basis the next season.
Lost in the ruckus was a coronation of sorts. James Worthy saw it, however. “Michael Jordan emerged from the ACC tournament that year,” the forward recalled. “To watch him say, ‘This is my ball, this is my court’ was amazing.” Jordan’s confidence had grown over the close of the schedule. Secure in the context of the veteran team, he was now free to dream about bigger things.
The Tar Heels entered the NCAA tournament ranked number one and maintained that status despite a close call or two. It didn’t hurt that every game of the regional would be played in their home state. The Heels struggled in their first game in Charlotte, against Virginia’s little James Madison University, but Carolina fought to a 52–50 victory. In the regional semifinals in Raleigh, Alabama served Smith’s team its next round of troubles before succumbing, 74–69. The regional final brought Rollie Massimino’s Villanova with Ed Pinckney. Carolina again proved too strong that day, but a throwaway moment in the contest proved revealing. The Tar Heels forced a turnover, then threw the ball ahead to a streaking Jordan. Villanova’s big center John Pinone had retreated to protect the basket.
“Our coach always taught us if you’re in a bad way, wrap a guy up and don’t let him get an easy layup,” Pinckney explained. “I knew John was going to foul him. So he jumps, and John, whose nickname was ‘The Bear’—he was a pretty strong guy—grabs him. In midair, Jordan like spins out of his arms and the ref calls the foul. It was like an impossible play to make but he did it anyway.… We were losing to them. And we all shook our heads like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ He couldn’t dunk because Pinone grabbed him with two arms around his waist. He literally had to lift up a 240-pound guy and dunk. To us Pinone was like the strongest guy ever. But he spun out of his arms. Jordan should have fallen on the ground. He shouldn’t have been able to maintain his balance and get free to complete a shot. It was like a freakish, freakish play.”
Having cut his teeth against Kenny Gattison, Clyde Simmons, and Anthony Teachey back on the Coastal Plain, Jordan had no hesitation, no fear, in attacking the rim, regardless of who was guarding it.
After a 10-point win over Villanova in the regional finals, the Heels began to sense that they were about to give Smith his much-wanted prize. Held at the Superdome in New Orleans, the Final Four offered a fascinating field. North Carolina. Georgetown. Louisville (with four starters off its 1980 championship team). And Houston. All dominant teams of the decade, with eleven Final Four appearances between them, and rosters studded with some of the modern game’s best players: Michael Jordan. James Worthy. Hakeem Olajuwon. Patrick Ewing. Sam Perkins. Clyde Drexler.
The assembled media were ready with a big question for Smith: How did it feel to make six Final Fours and never win? “I’ve handled it well,” he replied. “I don’t feel the emptiness.”
In the semifinals, North Carolina faced Houston. By 1983, the Cougars would become known as Phi Slama Jama, the dunking fraternity. For 1982, however, they were just another Cinderella.
Undaunted by the noise or the crowd of the cavernous Superdome, Jordan scored the first two baskets for his team against Houston. From there, Perkins took charge for the Heels with 25 points and 10 rebounds, while the Carolina defense held Houston’s Rob Williams scoreless from the floor. North Carolina never trailed, and advanced to the championship round, 68–63. “I remember what a great game Sam Perkins had in the semifinals against Hakeem Olajuwon,” Bill Guthridge recalled on the game’s twentieth anniversary. “If Sam doesn’t play that way against Houston, there’s a chance we wouldn’t have gotten to the championship game.”
The Georgetown Hoyas, with freshman center Patrick Ewing and All-American guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, had defeated twentieth-ranked Louisville, 50–46, in the other semifinal, setting up a sportswriter’s dream for the finals: Dean Smith versus John Thompson. Two friends and America’s Olympic coaches from 1976 facing each other for the championship both wanted dearly. Both Smith and Thompson played down their involvement. They weren’t playing, they said, their teams were. Regardless, North Carolina’s contest with Georgetown in the 1982 NCAA finals is considered by many to be the most dramatic ever. Veteran broadcaster Curt Gowdy thought it was the game, more than any other, to lift the Final Four to the entertainment level of the World Series and Super Bowl. The Louisiana Superdome crowd shattered college basketball’s attendance record with 61,612 spectators. Another 17 million watched on television.
“I had mixed emotions about playing against Dean because I have a great deal of respect and affection for him,” Thompson
later said. Then he admitted, “Because it was Dean, it caused me to be even more fired up.” As close friends, they were aware of each other’s tricks. The media seized the drama and squeezed, though there were other plums in the story line. For instance, Worthy and Georgetown’s Floyd were both All-Americans, both from little Gastonia, North Carolina, both the stalwarts of their teams. The pregame tension was thick despite the vast open space. “Choke, Dean, choke,” the Georgetown student section chanted.
The nineteen-year-old Ewing opened the game by swatting away four Carolina shots, two of them by Worthy. All four were ruled goaltending, as was a fifth Ewing block later in the first half. The Heels scored their first 8 points without putting the ball through the hoop.
“Patrick was an excellent shot-blocker,” Thompson told Packer in an interview five years later. “We wanted to establish ourselves inside as much as we possibly could. I still question some of the goaltending calls.”
Some coaches might have worried that the blocked shots would flatten Worthy’s confidence, but not Smith. “I knew that didn’t bother James in the least,” the Carolina coach said. “Some guys hate to see their shots blocked, but James was so sky-high.”
From there, the game settled into the coaches’ cat-and-mouse. The Hoyas grabbed a lead, then Carolina evened it at 18. Worthy came alive with 18 first-half points. The lead became a pendulum. Georgetown held it at the half, 32–31.
“Georgetown was relentless,” Worthy recalled. “They were intent to make us crack with their defense, and they nearly did. There was a point they had gone up three or four, and back then that was a big number. So Jimmy Black misses a layup and Michael flies in and tips it back in—an ‘Ice’ Gervin finger-roll tip-in over Ewing.” The swinging momentum continued throughout the final twenty minutes. At the six-minute mark, Carolina eased ahead, 57–56, on a pair of Worthy free throws. The pace became agony after that.
Jordan, of course, would become best known for “the shot” at the end, but for the Carolina coaches, the key moment came on another Jordan left-handed basket with 3:26 left in the game. “One of the best shots of the game,” Bill Guthridge recalled, “was a driving layup a few minutes earlier when he laid it almost off the top of the backboard to get it over Ewing.”
“I thought it was a great drive,” Smith said on the game’s twentieth anniversary, “and then I saw Patrick come in and it flashed through my mind that it was going to be blocked. That was a sensational shot.”
“I don’t know why I threw a left-handed layup,” Jordan told Tar Heel Monthly in 2002. “I hate using my left hand. My left hand is the weakest part of my game. But I used it that one particular time. Couldn’t believe it. It turned it around. Threw a shot that was totally unbelievable, almost hit the top of the backboard and went in, over Ewing.”
The basket gave North Carolina a 61–58 lead, but the Hoyas pushed back. With 2:37 left, Georgetown pulled to 61–60 when Ewing lofted a thirteen-foot shot. When Carolina missed a key free throw on its next possession, the young Georgetown center rebounded. Sleepy Floyd scored on a short jumper, and the Hoyas had the lead, 62–61, with less than a minute left.
With thirty-two seconds left, Smith called a time-out to set up a play to counter Georgetown’s anticipated move back to a zone. “Usually, I don’t like to take a time-out there,” Smith said. “We should know what to do. But I expected Georgetown to come back to the zone and jam it in. I said, ‘Doherty, take a look for James or Sam, and, Jimmy, the cross-court pass will be there to Michael.’ As it turned out, Michael’s whole side of the court was wide open because they were chasing James. If Michael had missed, Sam would’ve been the hero because he’d have had the rebound.”
Smith was at his best in that huddle, so calming that assistant Roy Williams recalled glancing at the scoreboard, thinking surely he must have misread it. The way Smith was talking, Carolina must have the lead, Williams remembered thinking. As the team broke from the huddle, Smith gave Jordan a pat and said, “Knock it in, Michael.”
Thirty years later, Packer, who called the game courtside for CBS, still expressed doubt about the circumstances as described by the Carolina contingent. “I always felt a shot like that couldn’t have been designed by Dean Smith, although he says to this day that it was designed to go over there,” the broadcaster offered. “You’ve got Worthy and Perkins and you’ve got them inside. What are we talking about? We’re going to rotate the ball to Michael? Now everybody these days says, ‘Sure you would.’ But back then you wouldn’t. You’d get the ball to Worthy first, Perkins second, and then maybe a penetration and then kick it over there. I’m not going to question Dean’s basketball knowledge. Certainly when I was broadcasting that game, that wasn’t an option I had in mind for one, two, or three.”
Carolina worked for a good shot, and, with 15 seconds to go, Black passed to Jordan for a sixteen-foot jumper from near the left sideline.
“It was an open shot, relatively speaking,” Packer said. “But the thing now that you look back, I don’t care who was planning on getting the ball, Michael wanted the ball and Michael knew he would make the shot. That was the beginning of one of the great things in our lifetime. Certain guys get open shots, they can’t make them. Certain guys get open shots, they don’t want to take them. Michael wanted the shot, and that you saw. There was no hesitation, no extra faking. It was, ‘Hey, give me the ball and I’m going to put this in the basket.’ That’s that level of competitive nature that he had.”
Most players run from such moments, but a select few run toward them, Packer said. “He wasn’t hiding in the corner. He was wanting that ball over there.” Jordan would later reveal that he had visualized just such a moment on the team bus ride over to the event.
At the far end of the court, the figures on the Georgetown bench twisted in agony. Just feet away as Jordan elevated for the shot, the Carolina coaching staff all sat stoically. Smith merely pursed his lips and flinched his eyebrows into the slightest grimace. Such Final Four moments of the past had rendered no good for him.
Jordan rose up, his tongue instinctively sampling the Superdome air. At the apex, the ball graced his right fingertips as he pulled his left away and let fly.
The swish blew a heavenly light blue breeze across Tar Heel Land and stirred a thunderous roar in the building.
“There we were in the Superdome, and Michael hit that shot,” Deloris Jordan recalled. She looked around for her husband and daughter Roslyn, but they had already bolted for the floor. “I could only think, ‘No, not a freshman.’ ”
Dick Weiss recalled in a 2011 interview that he was stunned by the move, by the fact that Dean Smith would trust the last shot to a freshman. “That was the biggest game of Dean’s career to that point,” Weiss marveled.
“It was predestined,” Jordan said in 2002. “It was destiny. Ever since I made that shot, everything has just fallen into place for me. If that shot hadn’t gone in I don’t think I would be where I am today.”
Actually, one final, unforgettable sequence remained to seal that fate. Down 63–62 with adequate time, Georgetown attacked immediately with guard Fred Brown working the ball at the edge of the Carolina defense. He thought he saw Sleepy Floyd out of the corner of his eye, but the shadowy form in white was Carolina’s Worthy. Worthy was stunned when Brown mistakenly passed him the ball. The Carolina forward grabbed it and streaked downcourt, where he was fouled.
Thompson drew criticism immediately for not having taken a time-out before the possession. But Smith agreed with Thompson’s approach. “John was wise not to take the time-out,” he said, pointing out that Jordan’s defense had made Brown decide to reverse the ball. “Michael makes a heck of a play to cover Floyd, and James goes for a steal and doesn’t get back in. To this day, I think that if Georgetown had been in their white uniforms that they had worn all during the tournament instead of wearing their dark uniforms, Brown would not have thrown the ball to James. James had gone for a steal on a fake moments earlier and was out of pos
ition. He shouldn’t have been where he was on the court, and it fooled Brown.”
Thompson saw the pass as a reflex action by Brown. Attempting to make a steal, Worthy had run out of the defense and was out of position. “We were playing five against four,” Thompson said. “Worthy was coming from the direction an offensive player normally would come from, and I think Freddie reacted reflexively. It was like the old playground thing where the defensive player stands out where the offensive player should be and calls for the ball. But Worthy didn’t call for it, he was just coming from the other side and by reflex Freddie threw him the ball.”
Worthy missed both free throws with two seconds left, but it didn’t matter. The Tar Heels had their blue nirvana, 63–62. There was much more to Carolina’s victory than Jordan’s shot, Thompson said. “We thought that Worthy hurt us more than anybody. You hear a lot about Michael Jordan’s shot. That certainly broke our backs, but we were having a lot of difficulty with Worthy. He was quick enough to create problems for our big people and strong enough to create problems for our little people.”
The usually impassive Worthy, named the tournament’s outstanding player, dropped his stoic countenance to celebrate deliriously. Smith and Carolina had reached the top.
“I’m especially happy for coach,” Jimmy Black said afterward. “Now I won’t have to read any more articles from you sportswriters about how he chokes in the big games.”
“I don’t think I’m a better coach now that we’ve won the national championship,” Smith told the reporters who crowded around him in the interview room. “I’m still the same coach.”
Afterward, Jordan shed his shoes and sat quietly in front of his dressing space, answering questions from a single NBC reporter. James Jordan, in a three-piece suit, sat beside him and leaned slightly into the klieg lights as his son tightened his lips and waited for the reporter to form a question about the moment.
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