If there is anyone who understands what it feels like to coach a losing North Carolina basketball team, it's Matt Doherty.
"Listen, I can relate to this," Doherty said when we spoke Saturday by phone. "I was 8-20 as a head coach there _ the worst record in the history of Carolina."
Doherty was talking about the 2001-02 season, when his second Tar Heel team had a similar year to the one UNC is now having.
The current Tar Heels were picked to finish second in the conference in the ACC media's preseason poll. Instead, UNC enters this week's ACC tournament with a 13-18 overall record and seeded dead last _ 14th out of the 14 participating teams.
The Tar Heels play No. 11 seed Virginia Tech at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Greensboro in a first-round ACC tourney game. Their only chance at making the NCAA tournament: Win five games in five days.
Doherty, 58, lives in Mooresville, about a 30-minute drive north of Charlotte. He speaks frequently about leadership to corporations, occasionally serves as a TV analyst for the ACC Network and has a couple of regular local radio gigs in Charlotte. While no longer a college basketball coach, he is the father of two college athletes _ a son on the Bellarmine lacrosse team in Louisville, Ky., and a daughter who attends UNC and competes on the rowing team.
Doherty started for UNC's 1982 national championship basketball team alongside Michael Jordan and coached the Tar Heels from 2000-03, taking the job after Roy Williams, then at Kansas, initially turned it down. Doherty resigned under pressure at UNC after going 19-16 in his third season. But the freshmen he recruited to that squad (Raymond Felton, Sean May, Rashad McCants) were the core of UNC's 2005 national championship team under Williams, who accepted the job the second time around and has been the Tar Heels' head coach since.
Here are excerpts from our interview, when Doherty talked about everything from Williams' "least gifted" comment this season to the opponent that used to make him most nervous when he was UNC's head coach. I've lightly edited Doherty's comments for clarity and brevity.
