A Team That Was Blessed

Cunningham, at 6'3", tall for a 1950s guard—and to gild the lily, McGuire listed him at 6'4"—was the other starter. Just where were you, Bobby? "Sneakin'. Always sneakin' around," he says. "Lookin' after my children." He means the four more visible starters. Cunningham was the classic fifth man.

As a high school junior he scored more than 20 points a game and got 30 college offers. But, in November of his senior year, he took 100 stitches in his shooting hand when it went through a window. The doctors wanted to amputate his thumb right away, and would have but for the pleas of his father, an immigrant laborer from Ireland. So the thumb was salvaged, but only McGuire kept his promise of a scholarship, a display of loyalty that also had much to do with cementing Kearns's decision in favor of Chapel Hill.

His touch gone, Cunningham accepted the grubby tasks. "After where I came from and what I'd been through, I was just glad to be a part," he says. Even Rosenbluth, the big name, the big scorer, says that Cunningham, the least renowned, was "the key." But they all had to give up something. Rosenbluth would take himself out of the flow and let his teammates score more if he was double-teamed.

But none of the others ever resented sending the ball in to Lennie, because they'd never seen a man who could shoot as he could—spinning layups, hooks, turnaround jumpers. Three of the other four starters—Kearns, Cunningham and Brennan—all proudly, distinctly recall being the one who threw the pass to Rosenbluth when he scored his most extraordinary basket, a 14-foot hook shot, in traffic, against Wake in the ACC tournament, in the final minute, down a point. Kearns, although the cockiest of the lot, probably had the most difficult time adjusting, both to the team and to "the foreign country down there." As popular and smooth as he was, Kearns was more of a loner than his classmates on the team, and would have left Carolina as a freshman except that his father, a cop and a Coast Guardsman, wouldn't brook that kind of move. "I had real culture shock," Kearns says. "I mean, trees! And I'd be walking around the campus, and all of a sudden everybody is saying hello to me: Hi, how you? I kept thinking, what do they want out of me? What's the con?"

But Kearns found new friends, joined a fraternity in which he was the only member from north of the Mason-Dixon, fell in love with a bank president's daughter over at Duke (McGuire feared Kearns would give away team secrets between kisses) and at last acclimated himself to that strange existence beyond the subways.

It may seem odd, perhaps, that it was the playmaker and the leading scorer, the two who started and ended most of the action, who were the two most distant individuals on the team. But interpersonal dynamics are often overrated. They were Noo Yawk when it mattered. As Rosenbluth, the captain, the old man, remembers, "we got so close on the court that we got to know exactly what everybody else was doing—and we were freelance, too. For example, I knew that if Pete put the ball on the floor, it was going up."

But certainly, everybody rooting for the Tar Heels had fallen in love with them. Even the most devout Catholics could see some advantages in that. McGuire received this advice from a bishop: "I know you're making a lot of converts down South, but tell the boys not to bless themselves on the free-throw line unless they're sure they can make the shot." Coincidence or not, the roughest games tended to be against Wake, where anti-Semitic remarks had been directed from the stands against Rosenbluth. Carolina played Wake four times that season and beat the Deacons each time. But each game was tight, and when Rosenbluth won the last one with his miraculous hook, McGuire was moved to observe, "The Catholics and the Baptists were having a helluva battle, until the Jew took over and broke it up."

And the Tar Heels were good public relations for the state. To have Carolina associated with urbane, ethnic New York was hardly all bad, especially since New York was the limited partner in this endeavor. In a way, you could say that with McGuire's team, the Sun Belt, as we know it, began its transmutation—visibly, anyway—from the Bible Belt. Lennie Rosenbluth was this century's Virginia Dare.

Even if you never thought about it in quite those terms before, Carolina moved onto the Final Four at 30-0, 31-0 counting the lidlifter over the McCrary Eagles, which some people still did. Unfortunately, if the Tar Heels got past Michigan State in the semis, their opponent in the championship game would surely be Kansas and Chamberlain, and they would have to face them in the Jayhawks' home territory, in Kansas City. As the Tar Heels' play-by-play announcer, Ray Reeve, was to say over the radio from K.C.: "Nobody's given them a Chinaman's chance."

THE FINAL FOUR