Two pieces.
The first is an article in the N&O in which Matt Doherty basically says he has been welcomed back into the Carolina Family following a few years of hard feelings.
Six years after being forced to resign at his alma mater, the starter on UNC’s 1982 national championship team says viewing the artwork is finally more sweet than bitter.
“I felt a little dirty for a little while; I’d see this former [UNC] player, and think, ‘Will he shake my hand? How does he really feel about me?’ ” said Doherty, now in his fourth season at SMU. “…But now, I don’t feel like a black sheep anymore.”
His tiptoe back into the Carolina basketball family, he said, stems from a long-overdue heart-to-heart last September with Roy Williams – an assistant coach when Doherty was a player in from 1980-84, a mentor when Doherty served as his assistant coach at Kansas from 1992-99, and the man who ultimately replaced him in Chapel Hill when Doherty was given the boot with three years left on his contract.
Williams said Doherty has always been a talented coach and Tar Heel in his eyes. After all, he won 117 games playing alongside the likes of Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins; then went 53-43 as UNC’s coach before player complaints, two straight failures to make the NCAA Tournament and questions about his aggressive coaching style led to his resignation.
Doherty said he’s wanted to return to the “family” fold for years, but before he could fully do so, he requested something more.
“There needed to be a conversation … why did this person do this? Why did they say that? What was the timing of this, or did this conversation take place?” Doherty said last week. “We all need to learn how to forgive, and I was struggling with that. I wanted to forgive, but I think in order to forgive, there had to be a conversation first, so I could let go of that.”
The second is an extensive interview given to the N&O where Doherty still expresses some bitterness, mostly over the fact that he recruited the starting lineup of the 2005 title team and no one bothered to thank him:
Hard. It was my team, my starting five. To see them climb the ladder and cut down the nets, [there] were really mixed emotions. And the tough thing was, I was doing TV at the time, for CSTV, which is now CBS College Sports. And I’m sitting in the green room, and we’re taking notes, and it’s a group of about 10 people, and I’m watching this. And I get real quiet, and people are talking, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we need to go on the set.’ And I’m like, ‘I need a minute.’ I just sat there. And the phone rang, and it was [ECU athletics director] Terry Holland, and he just said, ‘I’m thinking about you. Congratulations. You put that team together, and you should feel good about it.’
My assistants that were with me at North Carolina texted me, and called. And it was really weird, because selfishly, it was good – because I was almost like the general manager that put that team together. But emotionally, to see those other coaches climbing the ladder to cut down the nets was really tough, really tough.
And I don’t think we as a staff every got a lot of that recognition. It’s hard when I see the coaches at North Carolina wearing those rings. It’s like, it would have been nice to get a note, it would have been nice to get maybe a picture of the ring. You know, some acknowledgement that ‘you guys put together a heck of a team.’ So that was hard.
Doherty also believes that the shakeup he wrought in the UNC program when he arrived was not his fault because no one told him otherwise. Ultimately I guess this is water under the bridge given he sat down and had the reconciliation conversation with Roy Williams, who as the current head of the Carolina Family, can offer absolution of sorts. Still, it appears Doherty is still not happy with having recruited players only to see them win a title with another coaching staff. It is hard to blame him for feeling that way though let’s not act as though Doherty would have gotten the same results. He might have but he also probably does not bring in Marvin Williams who was a key factor on that team. Not to mention the dissent among the players was real. The general dissatisfaction within the program in general was real as well. So while it sucks for Doherty that a team he recruited pulled down the ultimate prize, he honestly has no one to blame but himself. He made his bed and part of that is watching UNC win a title without him. As for the rest of it? It is what it is. Doherty made huge mistakes and he paid a price. The good news is Doherty is back in the good graces of the powers that be in Chapel Hill as well as the players. Will this ultimately lead to some sort of recognition where the fans can finally make their peace with him? Who knows is such a thing is really necessary or prudent since many UNC fans still have trouble letting go of what happened. For now, it is nice to see the relationship has been restored with the principals running the Tar Heel program and hopefully the reconciliation can proceed from there.
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Doh just doesn’t seem to get it. He recruited the starting five who won the title, but some were going to transfer if he stayed.
He wasn’t fired for making changes to the bball coaches office. Baddour said he had to fire doh because the program was falling apart with the threats of our stars transferring.
Doh seems to believe he was just being tough on kids just like Roy. No one knows exactly what he did or said to the kids, but moeser must have heard some really bad stories. Doh just can’t admit that he screwed up and deserved it
I forgive him. As painful as the 8-20 season was, at least I got to hear every game on the radio
Poor guy. I feel sorry for him, because he got put into the biggest coaching position, and flamed out. You never know what anyone will do in a position like this. How soon we forget there was a mutiny in progress, and the 2005 season would have been a team of walk-ons and juco transfers. At least, unlike Abraham Lincoln’s incompetent Civil War generals trying to run an army, no one got killed.
Let’s let the past be the past. UNC’s image is at stake. (No, this isn’t about you, Coach Doherty!) Warm-fuzzies will sell more merchandise and TV ads than a lingering bitterness over the now-forgotten three-year span. Time, and two national championships, heals all wounds!
In the mean time Kentucky, not UNC, just became the first program to win 2,000 games last night because of the chaos that Doh created. Doh was the classic “bad manager” – yelling at and abusing everyone who worked for him, while thinking that he himself was incapable of making mistakes. But whatever, water under the bridge. Thank goodness that chapter is closed.
Who cares about 2000 games, especially when half of them were won before black players were even allowed to play on either squad?
If I have to hear one more time about the Helms Award or the race to 2000 wins, I think it is about 100 times too many.
I hate that this entire episode occurred, but as some have posted, the last 5 years of UNC b-ball has been it’s greatest.
This has been discussed here previously, but I am of the opinion that the root cause of “8 and 20″ was the appointment of Bill Gutheridge. His “interim” status eventually left he cupboard bare. Doherty had his issues of course, but when Kris Lang is a focus of your offense, and Julius Peppers is your best basketball player, well……….
I thought of the Kentucky issue as well, but UK has had it’s own turmoil as well with last couple of years under Tubby Smith and the Billy Gillespie disaster.
HP,
Agreed, just look at Guthridge’s 3 recruiting classes as compared to Doherty’s…
Guthridge:
1998: Ron Curry, Kris Lang, Jason Capel, Orlando Melendez
1999: Joseph Forte, Will Johnson, Jonathan Holmes
2000: Neil Fingleton, Adam Boone, Brian Morrison
Doherty:
2001: Williams, Scott, Manuel
2002: Felton, May, McCants, Noel, Sanders, Grant
2003: Terry, Justin Bohlander
There is no comparison between the talent brought in by the two (the 2000 class is probably the worst in UNC history), so in terms of adding to the UNC tradition, it could be argued that Doherty did more for advancing UNC’s tradition than Guthridge did. Obviously, getting the players is only (at most) half of it. You still have to coach them and keep them, and this was really were Doherty fell short.
^ C M.
Good work. I do think the real problem with the Guthridge list is the names you don’t see. Who didn’t come to UNC because of the coaching issues? Despite the fact they became Dookies, Battier and Jason Williams come to mind as players we would have loved in Carolina Blue. Anybody ever heard of a guy named Carmelo?
The misses are definitely critical, with Jay Williams being the key, IMO.
The 1998 class as a whole was terrible, so there really isn’t much to knock there. The players they got definitely would have contributed on (but not carried) good teams.
In 1999, not only did they blow it with JWill, but Jason Parker turned out to have all sorts of “issues.” Add both of those players, along with Forte, and the 2001 team probably wins the NCAAT.
The 2000 class was also pretty terrible, but missing out on Omar Cook definitely hurt. As a sophomore, he was a much stronger PG than either Boone or Morrison were.
As for the other players you mentioned, Battier was my class (’97), so he would have been a DES recruit, and Melo was 2002, so he would have been a Doherty recruit, though that class was pretty good as it was!
Jay Williams would be a great example of players we missed out on due to coaching/recruiting decisions. Bad mistake, and there even should have been some foresight on it. I know you could make the case of how good Ronald Curry was, but my goodness!
HP, thanks for pointing that out, and those are my thoughts articulated via you. We should have a better grip on what not to do if this circumstance, God forbid, ever is encountered again.
We should also thank our lucky stars that the UNC team led by Lang, Peppers, and Jason Capel made it to a competetive final 4 with Florida. This is no knock to those guys though. It really made that era, for me, not seem so gloomy. When this year is completed, and we look over this decade’s accomplishments and evaluate, it is definately nice to add that extra final 4 to the tally.
I agree with CM and HP about the interim coach effect. Have you looked at the head-to-head comparison of JWill and PsychoT in the SI all decade team? … how quickly we forget.
Question about Curry on that recruiting list: wasn’t he the top rated PG if not the top rated player?
I’m glad to see the fogs beginning to lift. I thing the Heel Nation is better for what happened. We’d become so assuming of being in the thick of the national battle that it takes a traumatic event like that to remind, even humble, us not to take the year-in-year-out success for granted.
Victim complex much?
“I’m still not sending Christmas cards to everybody,” he said, smiling. “… But I have forgiven the people who really matter to me.”
boulderHeel,
Curry won the Dial Award for the HS scholar/athlete of the year and was the the top-rated PG that year. He was #6 overall behind, Al Harrington, Rashard Lewis, Korleone Young, Dan Gadzuric, and Stromile Swift.
Capel was 10. Lang was 22.
Kentucky has been playing basketball for 107 years. UNC will reach 2,000 wins later this year — in its 100th year. I’ll leave the debate as to which is the better program to others.
PRGuy – My thoughts exactly.
I will also assume at some point, at least one season will be taken away from the Kentucky record books just like it was at Mass. and Memphis.
Agreed that Gut is the guy on whose watch the seeds of 8-20 were planted. After those recruiting years, his assistants deserved to be canned. The ridiculous elevations of Gut and Torbush were both the responsibility of our AD–yet another guy who got an unmerited battlefield promotion. Pretty amazing that it has ultimately turned out well.
The promotion of Coach Gut was Coach Smith’s idea and I’m not sure any A.D., particularly Mr. Baddour, could have stopped Coach Smith when he wanted something. Coach Smith was much more powerful than the A.D.
I am not sure why anyone would be interested in how many games UNC won before 1938, given that the rules of the game were so different as to scarely resemble modern basketball. Until 1939, there was a jumb ball after every single made basket, which put an incredible premium on winning jump balls as a measure of success. This is scarcely even taught as a basketball skill anymore.
I reiterate also about the basic racism of people making reference to UNC’s basketball success before the University of North Carolina agreed to integrate and allow black students both to matriculate and play. This began occurring in 1952. Shortly thereafter, UNC joined the ACC and attempted to recruit its first black player, Wilt Chamberlain. This is the period where it is legitimate to begin to look at victory totals for UNC.
As far as I know, Frank McGuire was both the first ACC coach to recruit a black player and the first to coach a black player as a coach, which took place at St. John’s before he started at UNC.
I think it is utterly racist for schools like Kentucky and UNC, who deprived African-Americans of their basic right to an equal education, to be quoting win records from that abhorrent past to try to show somehow that they are the best program in the country. It really should stop now.
That’s very well said, william. I think it’s more self serving than racist to try to consider the win totals without context, but in doing so both programs are highlighting eras that represent the worst of their institutions, not the best.
i’m glad people here don’t all harbor as much ill will towards doherty as the media would portray. i know he shook things up, made some big f-ups, and has been a little oversensitive, but the unc administration put him there, so we can’t blame him. we allowed gut to linger on for two years too many, bringing in joe forte and 5 glorified walk-ons and most likely hamstringing our efforts for the jackie/jawad class. his extended stay cost us an earlier chance go get roy. our admin hired a guy w/ ONE year of coaching experience, and then we bounced on him at the first sign of troubles. This was not a seasoned vet coming to town, it was a newbie, and i for one was excited to hear that we’d have a guy who was going to be there for 30 years (possibly) versus a bandaid like a Larry Brown or a George Karl.
so anyways, i hope doherty gets over the fact that yes he probably got set up to fail but oh well, it’s the games’ biggest spotlight and the timing just wasn’t right for him.
and that’s an interesting topic maybe for another arena william, b/c i’m sure historians would love to celebrate james naismith and the invention of basketball and the development of the game to what it is today. but how do you do so w/o acknowledging the ills of the country and society around the game?
A couple of things.
One, Roy explicitly thanked Matt Doherty in his press conference after the Illinois game saying “Matt Doherty needs to be back in coaching,” so I am a little perplexed by what he said in the interview earlier this week.
Second, and more importantly, this complaining about Guthridge should not stand. Even going beyond the fact that we should be loyal to such a great Tar Heel, he did a great job as head coach. The job he did in 1999, with only one player (a very raw sophomore Brendan Haywood) who played a day in the NBA should not be forgotten. That team had no business being good enough to get #3 seed in the tourney and being the only team who even tested Dook during the regular season (the game was in doubt late in Cameron).
Yes, I believe he missed out on some recruits in that 2000 class but remember all along the plan was for Roy to come back after that year. Get mad at Roy not Guthridge.
Oh one more thing. Doherty lost me when I heard Adam Boone was transferring. No way that kid transfers if Roy, Dean or Gut was coach. Hew would have been a valuable back up on the 03 and 04 teams–he may not have been an ACC starting point guard but I think he compares pretty favorably to Q for instance. He went for 28 points twice in 02.
Ed, in terms of history, i totally agree with you that Gut has accrued more loyalty points as a tarheel than Matt Doherty, who did play for us on a title team and he assisted under Roy who was a Dean disciple, but nothing in compared with the years Gut logged in as a tar heel. That being said i don’t think we toss one guy under the bus b/c the other guy has more seniority. The 99 team was not that good, but Haywood and Forte were top 20 picks in the first round of the nba draft, Capel and Lang were all americans, and Cota was a senior experienced PG w/ guys like Max Owens and Newby (wow, did i really just refer positively to newby?) were both seniors. They were I thought the 8 or 9 seed that year. so great job, no hands down. but maybe the problem is doherty’s and gut’s weaknesses and strengths were perfect inverses…b/c being the head of a program is coaching AND recruiting. I don’t really care if Gut coached a team that should have went 0-33 to an 8 win season, it’s still an 8 win season.
I might be wrong but from what i read on this blog, Roy couldn’t keep waiting around for Gut to step down so he made the comitment to stay for the length of his latest recruiting class of heinrich collison and gooden when yet again he was put on hold by the powers that be at carolina. so for that i’d blame UNC, not roy or gut.
and doherty did NOT lose me when boone transferred and he then proceeded to bring in Raymond FELTON. if boone wanted to be a starter that’s his prerogative. i’ll take felton mccants and may over boone morrison and fingelton any day.
but seriously no offense to the loyalty and time and effort gut put into the program, he has truly helped build what we know today as carolina basketball.
I think it is legit to look at the accomplishments of individual players since no one of them caused the policy, but it seems hypocritical for an institution that kept black players out to be harkening back to a period where this was the policy. CCNY once had a program as great as Kentucky’s but closed down shop after scandals. I would like to hear someone in the media knock back these constant references by Kentucky to their 2000 victories by asking how many involved black players.
Jordan–you are conflating the 99 and the 2000 teams. Forte was not on the 1999 team. Haywood was the only NBA player on the 1999 team.
And Boone didn’t leave because he wanted to be a starter–I think it is clear from comments made then and later he left because of Doherty. Boone was a great kid maybe not that good of a basketball player but the type of role player that teams need to go far. Incidentally, he is exactly the type of player that K keeps on losing and Dook apologists keep on saying don’t matter. (And by no means am I attempting to compare you with a Dook fan).
aha, you are correct, even though conflating is probably 3 levels above my vocabulary pay grade
i read it and was thinking you were referencing the great final four run, which the season was 99-00 not 98-99…but that’s the team that lost to weber st right? not sure if we can call that a great coaching job but i digress b/c my intent really isn’t to knock gut just to say i’m glad others don’t blame doh for single handedly diminishing the value of the unc bball brand.
yeah tough to say on boone, no doubt it would have been good to have solid experienced play at the backup pg spot in the early days of felton, i can’t comment on why he left b/c i am too lazy to really look into it, but i can only compare it to the innocent by stander status. like when an nfl team brings in a new coach, they get players who fit their system/style of play and other quality guys just don’t work out. that’s what i assumed happened w/ boone..oh well…past is past and present is present, and presently we’re looking nice.
go heels!
Not to bring this up, because I liked Matt Doherty as a player at UNC and I thought he did a good job as an assistant to Roy Williams at Kansas…
But, Doherty left a lot to be desired in the head coaching department… He did not relate well with other players…The rumors about this go back to when he coached Notre Dame…It is said this is why Notre Dame did not shed any tears when they let him go… Players there had a problem with him..
Players said he was two-faced to them for the most part and had a helter-skelter personality that rubbed players off the wrong way…
For example, his lone good team of 2000-01…Ever wonder why Carolina lost every Sunday game after upsetting Duke at Duke and obtaining the No. 1 spot… At halftime of the Clemson game he goes on a tirade that would make Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski blush…He also calls Joe Forte a female body part during a timeout in front of the other players and goes on another tirade in a practice…
Also, according to players on that team, he basically told them they needed to learn how to play basketball, even though this was a team that had been to the Final Four the previous year…
Things get so bad that Julius Peppers, Joe Forte and Ronald Curry hate playing for the guy and decide 00-01 is it… If Gut is back or Roy is in place, Peppers, Forte and Curry all play in 01-02…
I know a walk-on who was on these teams, and he has pretty much told me that even the walk-ons couldn’t stand him…He burns one big bridge that isn’t mentioned when he refused to play Will Johnson in what was supposed to be his hometown game against Indiana…
So, we have Forte, who decides to go pro, Curry and Peppers who stay away from basketball to focus on the draft, Brian Morrison and Adam Boone transfer, and at least 3-to-4 other players threatened to transfer if Doherty remained the coach…
Also, the parents of the players couldn’t stand him…They also were in Moeser’s and Baddour’s ear during his tenure…
Now in regards to the recruitment of Felton, May and McCants… Two of them were basically locks from the start in Felton and McCants, both were lifelong Tar Heels fans and both loved Carolina…McCants even tells Roy this when Roy recruited him for Kansas… May, was basically a done deal for Carolina when both his Dad and Bobby Knight both told him not to go to Indiana. There were concerns by Scott May about Doherty, but Dean promised Scott May that he would look after his son…
So, it is not like Doherty was some recruiting guru…
So, I’m glad both sides have agreed to let bygones be bygones. But I have always had a problem with the media portraying Doherty as an innocent victim…He made a LOT of mistakes and should have never been hired in the first place to be Carolina’s coach, in my opinion…
Over and over the same stuff.
UNC, Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams created this whole tsunami and then all ran for cover when it occurred. I think Dean Smith is a very decent person but the deification process among some UNC fans is not much different from that of Bear Bryant at Alabama.
Doherty may have been a mediocre coach. He might have been a jerk at times, but it is the height of presumption to lay everything at his feet. He left one of the top 30 or so basketball jobs in the country, one where he probably was a much better fit, to go back to Chapel Hill because the University asked him to.
The idea that recruits just fell into Doherty’s lap because he was at UNC seems ludicrous given that recruits were actually doing the opposite during the Guthridge years and falling out of our laps. He has also recruited well at Notre Dame and SMU. I also think that Doherty was willing to recruit a wider range of players. From what I have read, I don’t think Roy Williams would have recruited Rashad McCants at all and apparently viewed McCants similarly to how he may have viewed John Wall.
Yes, there were transfers and carping. I seem to recall transfers and carping at Duke and Indiana, both successful programs. This type of bellyaching often springs up when there is a coaching change, particularly from someone passive like Guthridge to someone emotional like Doherty, but it is normally kept under control when a coach is not chopped off at the kneecaps. Once players sniff blood in the water, however, certainly such things can become untenable. Just let any 18 year old kid critique his parents and see what you end up with, but it rarely means a whole lot. Kids complain. That is their nature. Roy Williams had plenty of problems with the same parents that Doherty had problems with, but he was Roy Williams and he still had his knee caps. Problem solved–the parents shut up.
Dean Smith was primarily to blame for the problems UNC had in 2002, and who cares? I forgive Smith for retiring way too early, right with the program on the brink of a return to the sustained success of the early 1980′s, and for the way he set up Guthridge–someone apparently with little or no desire for the job–as head coach via palace intrigue. I forgive him for undercutting Doherty from the very instant that Doherty was interviewed. I forgive him for tryng to act as though he still supported Doherty right up to the end.
Dean Smith was/is a very good man, who simply lost his footing once he gave up the job that he spent his life being great at. I think it is especially lamentable for Smith that he sacrificed the close relationship he had with his own alma mater during this process and ended up becoming a persona non gratis to many of his fellow alumni at Kansas. Dean’s reputation ended up taking the same kind of hit in Kansas that Doherty’s took in North Carolina.
The fact of the matter is that all of that Guthridge/Williams/Brown/Doherty/Williams imbroglio played out over 5 years was Dean’s last hurrah. He no longer seems to have much pull or influence in the program. This is Roy Williams’ show now and for the most part, he is running it as well or better than Dean did.
It is not that big of a deal that UNC had one terrible season (actually not even all that terrible in the ACC, compared to Duke in 1995). What is unforgivable is the way that Doherty was treated financially in the aftermath, and some of the constant blowhards who continue to place all the blame on Doherty, rather than on Smith and the administration where it belongs. If this is a rapproachement between Doherty and the University, then let it happen, but bashing Doherty for being a bad recruiter is really grasping at straws….
William,
I’m not bashing Doherty for being a bad recruiter, I’m saying the credit he gets for the Felton, McCants and May class is overstated…I’m bashing him for not being a good head coach and being a bad people person…
And it certainly isn’t the media who is placing blame on Doherty, according to them Carolina Basketball was a veritable Animal Farm with the inmates running the asylum.
If, what you say about the players is true, what say you about the good kids like Adam Boone and Will Johnson, who didn’t like Doherty…Are they malcontents??? Are ALL the players that wanted to transfer at fault??? Doesn’t Doherty get some of the blame for not being able to connect with players and losing their trust??? Like when he made an appointment with a psychologist for McCants without his consent…
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one… I, for one, didn’t think Doherty should have been offered the job in the first place. There were plenty of other more viable and better options than Matt Doherty…The only hires that Carolina has done worse were hiring Carl Torbush and John Bunting for football…
And how was Doherty treated bad financially??? He was paid the remainder of his salary…What is unforgivable is the laughing stock Doherty left Carolina Basketball…It had gotten so bad, Roy Williams HAD to come back, even if he didn’t want to, just save his alma mater from the vertiable trash heap Doherty had taken the program to…
And Gut might have swung and missed on some recruits…But, the only time in his career Doherty has made it to the Big Dance is with Gut’s recruits… And he was set up pretty good for 01-02 if he doesn’t run Forte, Peppers and Curry out of the program…
And if anybody in their right mind thinks Doherty would have won the National Championship in 2005 they are definitely smoking some illegal stuff…
Is Doherty a bad person??? No… I just think he was in over his head as a head coach and he doesn’t relate to players well…