CHAPEL HILL, N.C. _ Four miles away from the Dean Dome, in a comfortable chair inside a comfortable home decorated with memories from 60 years ago, sits the man who beat Wilt Chamberlain and led North Carolina to the 1957 national championship.
If you want to feel a little better about Tar Heel basketball _ and most fans who wear Carolina blue could use a pick-me-up these days _ take a seat in the other chair, right next to Lennie Rosenbluth.
Rosenbluth is 87 years old now. Since he moved back to Chapel Hill in 2010, he has been a near-constant presence behind the UNC bench for home games. But Rosenbluth has been unable to go to any games at the Smith Center this season due to complications from a fall he took in July (of course, if you're ever going to miss a UNC season, this would be the one).
Rosenbluth's mind is still sharp. His laugh is still strong. And he has a theory he'd like to share with you.
"Our 1957 team was the most important team in Carolina history," Rosenbluth said. "Bar none. It all began there."
That 1957 UNC team remains the only squad from the ACC to ever win a national basketball championship while also going undefeated. Finishing 32-0, that UNC team survived triple overtime twice in an amazing Final Four _ first against Michigan State, then against Chamberlain and Kansas. Rosenbluth scored 20 points in the Tar Heels' 54-53 win over Kansas in the final.
Rosenbluth's "most important team" theory is not just based on the fact that the 1956-57 Tar Heels were the first team to win a men's basketball national championship from the fledgling ACC, which had been established in 1953.
It also has to do with the fact that it was that '57 team that first had some of its games televised in North Carolina by a sports TV pioneer named C.D. Chesley, which helped pave the way for the wall-to-wall college basketball TV coverage we see today.
"We had the fans coming in," Rosenbluth said. "We had the undefeated season. It made North Carolina a basketball state... It legitimized the conference to have a national champion. But most important of all, that team led Frank McGuire to hire a young assistant coach named Dean Smith."
There's some truth to all of that, although you can argue some of the particulars. N.C. State coach Everett Case had engineered a regional basketball dynasty in Raleigh with the Wolfpack long before the 1957 UNC team was formed. And McGuire, UNC's flamboyant head coach at the time, might have met and hired Smith regardless of that undefeated season.
But it is true that McGuire and Smith first met when they roomed together, along with several other coaches, in a large hotel suite at the 1957 Final Four in Kansas City. That made for an awkward situation for Smith, an Air Force assistant coach at the time. He cheered hard for Kansas in the final since that was Smith's alma mater.
McGuire understood school loyalty, though, and was impressed by Smith's basketball acumen that week. He didn't hire Smith immediately, but brought him to Chapel Hill in 1958 to be his lone assistant after ailing assistant coach Buck Freeman left UNC.
In 1961, Smith was promoted to replace McGuire, who had found himself in some trouble with the NCAA and departed for the NBA.
Smith basically begat Roy Williams, and five more UNC national championships have followed since that 1957 squad (two for Smith's teams, three for Williams' squads).
