Those North Carolina basketball bandits couldn’t kidnap our guy Roy Williams, but the Chapel Hill program still has a distinct Kansas flavor with Matt Doherty, Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and now Jim Moeser on the premises.
People around here remain far more favorable about the Tar Heels than they would have been if Williams had been purloined. We would have seen many new converts to ABC (anybody but Carolina), Sunflower roots be damned.
New UNC coach Doherty assisted seven years at Kansas; coaching legend Smith is a Jayhawk alum; Parsons-bred Guthridge played and assisted at Kansas State; new UNC chancellor Moeser was at KU 20 years before going to Penn State, South Carolina, Nebraska and now Carolina. They’ve all been caught up in the rumor mills so prevalent in modern sports.
Even acid-head Timothy Leary, on his best day, couldn’t have hallucinated nuttier rumors than you find via today’s internet, e-mails, chat rooms and such. The communication business has become the equivalent of the Wild West, with airheads and attention-starved misfits using keyboards the way renegades wielded six-guns before Clint Eastwood rode in to hare-lip ’em. It’s like anonymous letters nobody has to be held accountable for anything.
There could be some substance, however, to a few items making the rounds about North Carolina.
First off, we hear that the retired Dean Smith preferred former Kansas coach Larry Brown for the job after Williams declined but that athletic director Dick Baddour wanted Notre Dame’s Doherty. The talk is that new chancellor Moeser also preferred Doherty over Philadelphia pro coach Brown.
Does that signal a lessening of Smith’s influence in UNC athletic affairs? Dean reportedly favored Carl Torbush for the UNC football job when Mack Brown left for Texas; Torbush was hired. Torbush didn’t pan out too well and was about to get sacked before his Tar Heels upset North Carolina State. Is there some push-and-pull going on?
I can’t believe Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge who have done so much for so long at UNC are in danger of becoming persona non grata. But not everyone’s as loyal to others as Williams is to his Jayhawk kids. The “what have you done for me lately?” approach dominates many a sports scene. Since Guthridge resigned ahead of schedule and Dean backed Torbush and couldn’t deliver Roy . . .
What about Moeser, the new chancellor who spent 20 years at KU before leaving the dean of fine arts office for Penn State in 1986? Moeser, an inventive guy with a vast number of interests and talents, was at KU during the first three years of the Larry Brown tenure and saw Larry take the 1986 Jayhawks to the Final Four.
Did the new chancellor note that Larry is 59 and might be considered a stop-gap coach, as opposed to the 38-year-old Doherty, onetime Tar Heel player? Or did Moeser see something he didn’t like during the Larry span at Kansas? If he did indeed favor Doherty over Brown, his reasons would be intriguing. Moeser, of course, would have ratified Williams in a New York nanosecond. Jim saw Roy manhandle his Huskers close-up in the four recent years as Nebraska chancellor.
Perhaps Brown withdrew from UNC consideration after he learned that Baddour and Moeser were not in his corner, even if Dean Smith was. Of course, taking a pay cut from $5 million to under $2 million a year, at age 59, could have been a rather significant factor, even if Larry has to keep battling with the incorrigible Allen Iverson at Philly.
Chancellor Moeser has been gone from Lawrence long enough that a lot of folks don’t recall, or never knew, that he was a world-class organ recitalist with a Texas University background. While here, he was minister of music at Plymouth Congregational Church and had an impish friendly rivalry with pastor Butch Henderson, a Southern Methodist product and a counselor-confessor for KU jocks.
Some Sundays at Plymouth, Moeser would be whooshing along on the organ and suddenly a faint strain of “The Eyes of Texas” would creep out of the pipes. Henderson would grin and the look on his face indicated he already was thinking up some kind of Mustang retaliation.
We Plymouthites didn’t call Moeser “Jungle Jim” without reason. When he unlimbered his expressive muscles on that huge collection of keys and pipes, the windows rattled and your chest thumped. His July 4 patriotic offerings were wondrously chilling; one Easter, Jim was whaling away so effectively that I expected the roof of the sanctuary to part and Jesus to descend in a helicopter like that scene from “Miss Saigon.”
But academic administration’s gain is organ performance’s loss. Moeser’s last big show was a concerto with the Lincoln, Neb., Symphony Orchestra about a year ago. He’ll have even less time for the keyboard in his demanding new job at UNC.
Friends here wish the versatile Moeser the best of luck, but that wouldn’t be quite as true if Moeser, Smith, Guthridge, Baddour and all had been able to spirit away Roy Williams.
So we’re blessed with a bright future at Kansas while hoping for good things for the Sunflower contingent at UNC. But if that doesn’t work out, now that we still have Roy here, frankly, folks, I don’t give a damn.
