Power of Caring
  presented by CIGNA

They have the likely Player of the Year, may well be the Team of the Year, have now won the Game of the Year, though their coach hasn't held the job for so much as a year. Why not, then, make Bill Guthridge, the 60-year-old rookie steward of North Carolina's top-ranked Tar Heels, Coach of the Year? Every bit as remarkable as North Carolina forward Antawn Jamison's season and the throwback cohesion of the Tar Heels' six—yes, six—starters and last Thursday's unneighborly 97-73 defeat of Duke has been the absence of trauma following North Carolina patriarch Dean Smith's decision to retire in October, only days before fall practice began.

"Bill, you're killing the rest of us coaches!" said Maryland coach Gary Williams upon encountering Guthridge on the court moments before the Terrapins fixed the Heels with their only loss of the season, 89-83 in overtime on Jan. 14, a defeat for which Guthridge characteristically took the blame. "We all bitch to our athletic director about how tough this job is," Williams said, "and you walk in and go 17-0!"

After Sunday's 107-100 double-overtime victory at Georgia Tech, in which senior guard Shammond Williams scored a career-high 42 points, North Carolina was actually 24-1 and as implacable as it had been through most of Smith's 36 seasons. Three times under Guthridge the Tar Heels have rallied from double-digit deficits to win, most recently after being 17 points in arrears at Wake Forest on Jan. 31. "It was eerie how confident Coach Guthridge was, never having been in that situation," says assistant coach Dave Hanners of the first of those comebacks, against Purdue on Nov. 29. "It was as if Coach Smith was still here."

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Of course, Guthridge had been in similar situations, as Smith's aide-de-camp for three decades. So too had North Carolina's six veteran starters—frontcourtmen Jamison, Makhtar Ndiaye and Ademola Okulaja, and backcourtmen Vince Carter, Ed Cota and Williams, all of whom take their turns, in alphabetical order, sitting on the bench at the beginning of each game. On Dec. 27, with the Tar Heels down by five at Georgia with 1:54 to play, Okulaja, a junior, went up to Jamison, his classmate, as the Heels broke a timeout huddle. "How much do you think we'll win by?" he asked. The record doesn't reflect Jamison's reply, only the result: North Carolina by two in overtime.

The Tar Heels had no hole to dig themselves out of against Duke last week in Chapel Hill. Early in the second half North Carolina built a 20-point lead over the then No. 1 Blue Devils, only to see that lead melt away, largely from heat emanating from the senior Ndiaye's head. After being called for his fifth foul, Ndiaye slammed the ball to the floor, an act for which he was assessed a technical; this led to four Duke points from the free throw line and a basket on the ensuing possession, which left North Carolina's lead at only four with nearly six minutes to play.

Not to worry. Cota, a sophomore, either scored or assisted on five of the next six Tar Heels possessions, and North Carolina closed out the game with a 24-4 run. The crowd at the Dean E. Smith Center left having witnessed more than even the most partisan Heels fan could have hoped for in a single evening: North Carolina blowing out Duke not once, but twice.

As penance for Ndiaye's heedlessness, the Tar Heels had to do extra running at their next practice. A North Carolina rule dating back to the early days of the Smith regime holds that if a player gets a technical, every player has to run; if a coach does, the coaching staff runs. "Every rule Coach Smith set down is still here," says Jamison. "Nothing at all has changed except for the coach. And you really can't tell we have a new coach."

The few outward differences are piddling. Guthridge isn't quite as obsessively diplomatic as Smith was; after the Tar Heels' easy defeats of Middle Tennessee State and Richmond earlier this season, he observed postgame, "We're more talented than they are." Where Smith typically began his workday with midmorning staff meetings and kept late hours, Guthridge convenes his assistants at 8:30 a.m., well after his crack-of-dawn jog.

After a two-month grace period to allow Smith to respond to all the mail he received upon resigning, Guthridge has finally moved into his predecessor's office. The sign reading reserved at all times is gone from the old coach's space in the staff parking lot outside the Dean Dome, with the spot now available to anyone in the athletic department, first-come, first-served. Smith attends only home games that aren't on television, but several times a week he comes into the office, where Guthridge and the players often seek out his counsel. "As an assistant I gave him many suggestions, and now he's giving me suggestions," says Guthridge, who adds that he prefers the old arrangement. "You don't have to live with the consequences of suggestions. You do have to live with the consequences of decisions."

When Smith met Guthridge and Seattle SuperSonics coach and Tar Heels alumnus George Karl for lunch at the Carolina Alumni Center on the day of the game against Duke, there were no X's and O's being scratched out on cocktail napkins. "Oh, Dean'll be there," Blue Devils coach Mike Krzyzewski nonetheless said before the game, despite all the protestations to the contrary. "It's going to be like one of those Alfred Hitchcock movies. You're going to have to find Dean."

Krzyzewski was right, in a sense: Smith was there, in the sound way that North Carolina dispensed with Duke. As early departures for the NBA render college basketball an increasingly adolescent sport, the average Tar Heels starter is a wave-him-through-the-door 21.7 years old. (Though still a sophomore, Cota is only three months younger than Blue Devils counterpart Steve Wojciechowski, a senior.) Even more unusual in this era of tricked-up, three-point offenses is North Carolina's old-fashioned dedication to getting the ball inside. The Heels are so inside-oriented that, in the second half against Duke, Jamison set a low screen for Carter, and the Tar Heels' rubber-legged junior swingman came off it not for a jump shot but for a dunk.

North Carolina's ability to get inside and draw fouls creates stoppages of play that allow the six starters—7-foot freshman Brendan Haywood is the only other Tar Heel who gets regular minutes—to catch their breath. In late-January victories over Clemson and Wake Forest, the Tar Heels outshot their opponents 86-19 from the line. Through Sunday, North Carolina had made 135 more free throws than its opponents had even attempted.

Not that Guthridge believes that rest at the free throw line is necessary. "Some of our fans think our depth is a problem," he says. "I don't. Divide six into 200 possible minutes in a game, and you get 33. That's about how many minutes a player in good shape likes to play."

This season those trips to the line are more likely to pay off. For the first time since 1992-93, North Carolina is making more than 70% of its foul shots. No Tar Heel worked harder on his free throws over the summer than the 6'9', 223-pound Jamison, who after deciding last spring to pass up the pros has improved his free throw percentage by eight points, to 70.6.

Jamison may be the only favor Hurricane Hugo did for the Tar Heel State. In 1989 his father, Albert, was a 32-year-old carpenter in Shreveport, La., struggling to support his wife, Kathy, and their three children. He read a newspaper story about construction jobs in Charlotte, which was still recovering from Hugo's visit a year earlier. Albert began commuting to North Carolina for a month at a time, returning home for weeklong breaks between each stint. After 18 months he moved his family to Charlotte, and Antawn, then 12, came into the pale of the pale blue. "If the hurricane hadn't come through, I probably wouldn't be in a Carolina uniform," he says.

Jamison's father and mother were 20 and 17, respectively, when he was born. At that time, Albert's job often required him to travel, and with Kathy putting in 12- to 14-hour shifts as a cashier at a grocery store, much of the parenting duties fell to Antawn's paternal grandmother, Annie Lee Jamison. She died when he was a junior at Charlotte's Providence High, and ever since, in the locker room before each game, he has said a prayer while clutching a ring that belonged to her. Before he takes the floor, he'll point at the arena roof, indicating the woman he called Mama. But Annie Lee's son and daughter-in-law long ago assumed full parental responsibilities and still lay chores on their eldest child whenever he comes home. "I buy the food and his mother cooks," says Albert. "Someone has to clean the kitchen."

If you hear a man behind the Tar Heels' bench yelling, "They're beating up my boy," that would be Albert. Three times at North Carolina State on Jan. 21, Antawn hit the floor hard, one time bruising his left hip and elbow; still he scored a career-high 36 points. Clemson fouled so systematically on Jan. 28, committing an ACC record 41—Jamison attempted a game-high 14 free throws—that the Tigers finished the game with only four players on the floor. ("They outscored us when we had the man advantage," Guthridge says. "Rookie coach needs to work on his five-on-four offense.")

Like his first name, which is pronounced AN-twon, Jamison's game leaves people misdirected. He leads the ACC in rebounding in part because, after jumping once, he doesn't seem to need time to gather himself to jump again. "When everybody else comes down, he's already back up at the rim," says Okulaja. He leads the conference in scoring because he's ceaselessly traversing the lane or spinning off his man. "Once you think you have him defensively, he'll move, find a new spot and catch the ball," said Duke forward Shane Battier after Jamison had gone over and around him and his teammates to score 35 points. "Before you can say, 'Where'd he go?' he's scoring."

Jamison also spent the summer launching 400 to 500 jump shots a day, working to extend his range beyond the lane to NBA precincts. But he has long been comfortable shooting anything from 12 feet in, even though he concedes that the closer he is to the basket, the more improvisatorial he gets and the funnier his shots look. "Sometimes, when we're watching game films, the guys will see one of my shots, and all of a sudden they'll start snickering," he says.

"You hear about his quick release," Krzyzewski says. "But where's that release from?"

Sometimes from over the top. Sometimes from three quarters. Sometimes, it seems, sidearm. Maybe Michael couldn't hit. But Antawn sure can pitch.

Against Duke, Jamison made a play that seemed to bespeak the ascendancy of his game and of his team. Cota is so unpredictable when he light-foots it into the lane that one time when he penetrated into the paint late in the first half, the home crowd momentarily muzzled itself in anticipatory wonder. Cota then sent a floater short off the rim. The fans hadn't yet had reason to renew their roar when Jamison sprang up, claiming the rebound with a sudden clap of his second hand on the ball. The Smith Center was still quiet enough to permit this report to make its way to the building's farthest reaches, up even to the powder-blue beam from which Jordan's retired number had hung until being stolen over the previous weekend. Jamison then spun and sprang right back up again, tossing the ball into the basket, and the Tar Heels faithful threw up their wall of sound anew.

Nonetheless, for a few beats the Smith Center had been silent as a chapel, and one man had every parishioner's ear. What he said with that rebound wasn't so much a valedictory for the fans, although this may well be Jamison's final collegiate season. It was more an address to the blue heavens: If something's needed to fill that space where 23 once hung, another number is on its way.