CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — For a brief instant Hubert Davis and his father were alone in a crowd, the moment to themselves. It was Tuesday afternoon, a few minutes after the news conference at the Smith Center where Davis was introduced as North Carolina’s head men’s basketball coach.
Up above, in the corners of the arena, the large video boards displayed a bright message: “Congratulations, Hubert Davis, head coach.” His uncle’s No. 24 jersey hung in the Carolina blue rafters, a reminder of the family legacy, and in many ways a straight line could connect Walter Davis’ time at UNC in the mid-1970s to Hubert’s coronation earlier last week.
That was part of the reason why Hubert Davis feared he might not be able to keep it together. He’d told Bubba Cunningham, the university’s athletic director, that he wouldn’t need a tissue to wipe his tears while he spoke, but instead a beach towel.
“I’m an emotional guy,” Davis said, and that was especially true on a day of full-circle catharsis. He was living a dream that for the longest time he didn’t know he’d had, and over Davis’ right shoulder was the tunnel some doubted he’d ever be good enough to run out of.
By now, parts of the Hubert Davis story have become well-documented, a chapter of Tar Heels basketball lore. How, despite his bloodlines, Dean Smith once questioned whether Davis could play at UNC; how he suggested that maybe he should go to a smaller school. How Davis asked for a chance, and earned one, and committed on the spot once Smith relented and offered a scholarship.
How Davis went from playing about seven minutes per game as a freshman to a star by his senior season, a prolific scorer who still holds the school record for 3-point percentage. How he went from there to a 12-year NBA career, and then an ESPN college basketball analyst and then, in 2012, a surprise addition to Roy Williams’ coaching staff.
On the surface, Davis’ journey appears linear, as if he followed one stepping-stone to the next, each one leading to a natural transition: From the young nephew of a UNC All-American to a UNC player; from UNC player to the NBA; from the NBA to TV; from TV to coaching. In reality, though, nothing about Davis’ path has been easy or all that straightforward.
Again and again, he has had to prove himself, and at times rebuild himself, and now comes his greatest professional challenge. Davis, 51, is the Tar Heels’ 20th head coach, and if that number sounds high it’s because for 60 years two men most defined UNC basketball. Smith led the program for 36 years, starting in 1961. Williams, whom Smith mentored, just retired after 18 seasons.
Williams sat in the front row on Tuesday during Davis’ formal introduction, and he sat next to Davis’ father, Hubert Sr. In different ways, they are both security blankets for Davis, who learned about coaching and leading from Williams, and about life and toughness and perseverance from his father, who played basketball at Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte and taught his son the game.
Hubert Sr. and Hubert Jr. hadn’t seen each other in more than a year because of the pandemic, but the elder Davis recently received his second vaccine shot and told his son he’d be there to see him become the Tar Heels’ head coach. And so Hubert Sr. made the four-hour drive from Burke, Virginia, where his son spent most of his childhood.
During his playing days, the younger Davis said, he always had to find his father in the stands because “it was just comforting for me to know” where he was. This time, on Tuesday, Hubert Jr. didn’t have to look far. Now his news conference was over and he made his way through a crowd of well-wishers, a face mask hiding his contagious smile.
Finally, he made his way to his father. There were people all around, but the Davis men managed a quiet moment, a father putting his arm around his son and leaning in to tell him he was proud.
“Unbelievable,” Hubert Sr. said, before repeating the word, during a brief interview in which he attempted to describe the moment. His mind flashed back to the day Smith and Williams sat in his living room years ago and questioned whether Hubert Jr. could play at Carolina, and the elder Davis thought, too, about the time he played his son one-on-one in the backyard and taught him a lesson in the form of a blocked shot that drew the ire of Davis’ mom.
“His mother got on me,” Hubert Sr. said, “ ‘You can’t do that to him, don’t you ever do that to him again.’ But I told him, ‘You’ve got to want it, and you’ve got to practice, practice, practice.’ ”
Moments later Hubert Sr. needed a minute, himself. He believed he passed his emotional side onto his son, and one moment in particular on Tuesday challenged Hubert Sr.’s composure.
“When he was describing his mother,” he said, almost crying. “That really got to me.”
FINDING FAITH
Davis enters his position at North Carolina after nine seasons on Williams’ staff, and after spending seven of those as the head coach of the Tar Heels’ junior varsity program. It’s a relic of a different era, when freshmen were ineligible, and while other schools long ago stopped offering a JV team, UNC has kept one because Smith and Williams always believed in its value.
One of the main questions Davis had to answer in recent days, whether from reporters or from Cunningham during the interview process, has been about his relative inexperience. And yet he’s experienced challenges, both related to basketball and not, that have forged him.
He was but a teenager when he’d drive his mom to her chemotherapy appointments. She died two days before the start of his junior year at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke. Bobbie Davis had been a woman of strong faith, and she’d always encouraged her son, the oldest of two children, to attend church. But in his younger years, Davis said, “I wasn’t interested in it.”
For years after the death of his mother, Davis attempted to grieve through quiet bitterness.
“I grew a tremendous hate toward God,” he said, and he questioned why, of all people, someone of such faith could be gone so soon, and when he most needed his mom. Davis had still not found peace when he arrived at UNC, where Dean Smith always made his freshmen go to church. Davis went, and for a while expected a kind of epiphany that never materialized.
“In Hubert’s understanding at the time, he really thought he would go to a church service — and he went to a bunch of different types of churches around Chapel Hill — and he felt like somebody was going to just be up there preaching one day and open up the Bible and say, ‘Hubert this is why your mom died — it’s written right here,’ ” Leslie Davis, Hubert’s wife, said.
“And he was looking for that kind of an explanation. And instead he found a completely different one — just an understanding that he was loved, and he understood the words his mom had put together before and he was able to understand that Jesus loved him, personally, and that his mom had been a gift to him.”
Throughout most of his first two years at UNC, Davis was adrift spiritually. His roommate his sophomore year was Justin Kuralt, a basketball team manager and the nephew of Charles Kuralt, the famous journalist and UNC alum. The younger Kuralt at the time drove some of the basketball players to worship services, and Davis found healing at the Chapel Hill Bible Church.
He and Leslie began to become closer then, too, and they prayed together. In some ways they’d grown up together and attended the same high school in Virginia, but “it took us a while to figure it out,” she said of their relationship. She was a year younger, and got to know Davis at first when he’d pop into the Baskin-Robbins where she worked in high school.
When she visited UNC, deciding where to attend college, he left her and her father tickets to a UNC exhibition game. They remained close friends throughout their college years, through study sessions and lunches at Granville Towers and meals at the Rathskeller on Franklin Street and late nights at Players, now a long-closed upstairs club where college kids went to dance.
Davis even cooked for her.
“He learned to cook early” after the death of his mother, Leslie said, “and he used to just lather everything in teriyaki sauce.”
In many ways, Leslie helped Hubert come to terms with the loss of his mom. Leslie and Hubert attended church together and their faith grew, and there was poetic symmetry in some of the timing: Davis lost his mother days before the start of his junior year of high school, and he became a Christian days before his junior year of college.
In the four intervening years, basketball became more of a salvation than a game.
“The gym and basketball was always where he escaped,” Leslie said. “And it’s where he felt comfortable.”
ROAD TO CHAPEL HILL
Basketball has undergone a metamorphosis during the past decade, one that now has schoolkids in playgrounds all over the country throwing up 25-footers, pretending they’re Steph Curry. Even so, coming up on 20 years after Davis retired, his name remains near the top of career 3-point shooting percentage, right behind Steve Kerr, one of his contemporaries who also played in the 1990s.
Players focus on perimeter shooting as much as they do anything these days but, when Davis was in high school, the 3-point shot had just been introduced. It was so new in Virginia that Davis’ senior year, he made but two 3-pointers the entire season. He entered that year with offers from George Mason and George Washington, and with that lifelong dream of playing at UNC, like his uncle.
Once, Hubert Sr. recalled, his son came home crying when someone told him it’d never happen.
Walter Davis made sure that Hubert attended Dean Smith’s summer basketball camp at UNC every year, and those trips fed Hubert’s vision. Yet there were no favors. To the contrary, Smith was reluctant to offer Hubert a scholarship because Smith didn’t want to ruin his relationship with the family if Hubert came to Chapel Hill and rarely left the bench.
“He didn’t want anybody’s feelings to get hurt,” Walter Davis said earlier this week.
During Hubert’s junior season at Lake Braddock, he skipped out on a practice so he could go to UNC’s game at Maryland, at Cole Field House, to sneak in some facetime with Smith. Hubert’s high school coach, Mike Wells, had a rule that if you missed a practice, you didn’t start — and Hubert began the next game on the bench for the first and only time at Braddock.
At the time, Hubert practiced plenty enough on his own. There were those backyard sessions with his father. And late nights and early mornings alone in the school gym, after the athletic director would let him in for extra work. For a while in high school, Davis was light-pole skinny — about 150 pounds, Leslie said.
“I don’t think anybody in our high school thought, ‘Oh, yeah — he’s going to go kill it at North Carolina,’ ” she said.
When he finally did earn an offer, some critics back home scoffed.
“When Hubert left Northern Virginia, all the know-it-all coaches said he would never succeed at Carolina,” said Wells, Davis’ coach at Braddock. “And my answer was, ‘Hubert will do whatever it takes to be successful.’ ”
Walter Davis told his nephew to run a lot before he left for college, to be prepared for the grueling conditioning tests that awaited every UNC player before practice commenced in the fall.
“If you made your mile time, you got out of sprints for the first week,” said Walter, a six-time NBA All-Star who still lives in Denver, where he played for the Nuggets. “You could sit there and watch the other guys run. And so we always got a kick out of that. I just said, ‘Listen to coach, go to school, play hard. And you won’t have any problems.’ And he didn’t.”
Smith’s concerns about playing time proved correct early on. Davis didn’t play much as a freshman. His minutes tripled as a sophomore, though, and by his junior season, when Davis felt more grounded off the court, he’d become a regular starter. By then he was at times making it look easy.
FIGHTING THROUGH THE FEAR
UNC announced Davis as its next head coach on Monday and, that night, before the national championship game between Baylor and Gonzaga, he went on ESPN and did a short interview segment. Quickly, rave reviews began circulating Twitter, Davis earning praise for his presence and sense of humor, his large personality coming through.
He always seemed like a television natural during his seven years as a broadcaster at ESPN, too, and yet his successful transition from the court to the studio belied a secret: “He hates to do public speaking,” Leslie said.
Her husband’s fear of it has roots in a speech impediment that challenged him throughout his childhood. As Leslie described it, Hubert at times struggled to find the right words growing up, and also had difficulty with pronunciation.
During the NBA lockout that interrupted the 1998-99 season, she recalled, the league set up internship-like opportunities for players to explore careers beyond basketball. Hubert tried his hand at broadcasting, Leslie said, “And they sent him home early.”
“They were like, ‘You’re terrible at this,’ ” she said, “ ‘You’re never going to be on radio or TV.’ ”
During his final NBA season, with the New Jersey Nets, Hubert did a postgame interview that caught the eye of a television agent who was watching at home. Soon enough, the agent contacted Hubert about pursuing a broadcasting career after his retirement.
At first, Davis was not interested in becoming a talking head. But coaching then was nowhere on his radar, and he wanted to remain connected to the game.
“We talk all the time about what a special feeling it is to walk into a gym,” Leslie said, and take in the atmosphere, and even the smell of an arena. And so Davis gave TV another try, and worked at it and, before he knew it, he’d spent seven years at ESPN and became one of the networks leading authorities on college basketball.
The dislike of public speaking did not disappear. Davis simply worked through it, like he worked through his limitations on the basketball court, and the way he worked through the grieving process after losing his mom.
“He used to keep a notebook of words he could not say on air,” Leslie said, “because the pronunciation tripped him up too much, and he just needed to stay away from them.”
His colleagues at the time, guys like Rece Davis and Jay Bilas, used to playfully rib Davis about how much time he spent preparing, how much time he poured over his notes and thought about what he wanted to say. It was because he knew he had to put in the work.
Davis could have remained at ESPN, in theory, as long as he wanted. He had stability there, and a connection to the sport, and he and his Leslie had moved back to Chapel Hill after he’d retired from the NBA. The disinclination for public speaking aside, the broadcasting life wasn’t so bad — and it was certainly less stressful than the lives of the coaches Davis was often paid to talk about.
Then Roy Williams called Davis into his office one day in 2012, and Davis thought it was to catch up, or that maybe Williams wanted him to reschedule his Christian-themed summer basketball camp that he’d held at the Smith Center for 17 years. But it was not that. Instead, Williams told Davis, “I want you to be one of my assistant coaches.”
“And I don’t remember anything else he said,” Davis said.
He went home and he and Leslie cried, overwhelmed by the opportunity. She said it was like that for two days, the both of them unable to talk about it without tearing up. They thought that maybe Hubert could coach high school one day, or volunteer at the Y. And now Hubert was joining Williams’ staff, and in some ways he was going home.
‘AN OVERACHIEVER’
Before Roy Williams was Roy Williams, Hall of Fame coach, he was one of Smith’s assistants for 10 years. Kansas took a chance on him in 1988 in a similar kind of way to how UNC is taking a chance now on Davis, who, given his time in the NBA, arguably has a more impressive resume than Williams did at the same point in their coaching careers.
Williams endorsed Davis in much the same way as Smith endorsed Bill Guthridge when Smith retired in 1997. The main difference is that Smith retired so close to the season that UNC was all but forced to promote Guthridge, who guided the Tar Heels to the Final Four in two of his three seasons. This time, the university had plenty of time for an extended coaching search.
Instead, it lasted about three days, and Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director, kept coming back to Davis. When Cunningham spoke with former players and people long connected to Davis and UNC, the same themes kept emerging.
“Whether it’s character, integrity, passion, enthusiasm,” Cunningham said. “Willingness to work. Willingness to serve. ... I mean, all of those things that were evident.
“I kept hearing that from multiple sources.”
Cunningham during the news conference described Davis as an “overachiever,” and the description resonated with what Hubert Sr. knew of his son. He could remember the beginning of his journey, and a road trip after the 1976 Olympics had become as good of a starting point as any.
Smith that year coached Team USA to the gold medal in men’s basketball, and the team featured several UNC players — Walter Davis and Phil Ford among them. Hubert Sr. drove from Virginia to Montreal to watch his brother, and he took along young Hubert Jr., then 6 years old. After the championship game, Walter and Ford rode back to Virginia with Hubert Sr. and Jr.
During that road trip and the time together that followed, “He did everything Phil and I did,” Walter Davis said of his nephew. “When we slept, he slept. When we were playing ball, or whatever, he did what we did — he looked at us and tried to emulate, copy everything we did.”
About a decade later, Smith shared his doubts about the younger Hubert with his father.
“And I said, ‘Coach, don’t you worry about that,’ ” Hubert Sr. said. “I said, if you allow Hubert to come, he will work his butt off. And I said even if he does not earn playing time, he’s going to help that program. And Coach Smith said, ‘OK, I’ll give him a scholarship.’ ”
Hubert Jr. recounted his own version of that story more than seven years ago now, at the start of his tenure as the junior varsity coach at UNC. About 40 students had come to the Smith Center for two days of tryouts in October 2013, and Davis only had seven spots to offer. Davis told those gathered that day that he knew what it was like to be doubted, to be counted out — that he’d never given up and neither should the dozens of college kids he was going to have to cut.
It was something of an unglamorous scene, Davis giving a pep talk to a bunch of guys who, at best, could only hope to become an end-of-the-bench varsity walk-ons one day. And yet Davis shared something in common with them all because, like him 30 years earlier, they were dreamers who only wanted to be a part of the program.
“He really cared about us as people,” Justin Coleman, one of Davis’ first JV players, said recently. Coleman said that, “I know for a fact he has a big heart,” and in time, Coleman became the first of Davis’ JV guys to get the call up to varsity, where he was a part of UNC’s 2016 Final Four team.
When Coleman received the promotion, “I told him how much of a role model he is and he said, ‘You know, it has to be bigger than basketball.’ I’ll never forget him telling me that: ‘It has to be bigger than basketball.’”
That philosophy was, in many ways, why Davis became the choice to follow Williams, and it was why a lot of people from his past came to watch his introduction. There were former teammates. Williams. Linda Woods, one of Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge’s old secretaries, was there and years ago she’d been like a mom to Hubert, Leslie said.
She watched her husband from the front row on Tuesday, their three children next to her. They were sitting inside of a building where Davis had created a lot of memories, on a campus where he’d found himself as a younger man, in a town that beckoned him home after basketball took him to New York and Dallas and Detroit. Davis first arrived in Chapel Hill with his share of doubters, and in a similar way, he has his skeptics now, seven months before his first game.
“I’m ready to go,” he said at one point Tuesday, and when his obligation was over, he stepped down from the makeshift stage, stopped for some hugs and a short embrace with his father and went to work.
