A Season Of Change

The 1956-57 Tar Heels, it turned out, were a transition, a bridge. Before them, college basketball was a regional game, and after them, influenced by them, it went big time, coast-to-coast. Soon there weren't that many guys crossing themselves at the free throw line.

The white people—the Catholics and the Jews—moved to the suburbs, and black people started moving onto the courts in increasing numbers. The only basketball player to come out of North Carolina at that time and become a pro star was a guy from North Carolina Central named Sam Jones, whom nobody at the NCAAs had ever even heard of.

Maybe the Noo Yawk boys made it easier for those who followed. Maybe if a bunch of Catholics and a Jew can play for your Dixie alma mater, that makes it more palatable to accept blacks. Certainly, that's a possibility.

But once the Tar Heels' players understood it was over, all of them went on about their lives. For athletes using sports to scratch their way up then, college was itself something to achieve; it was not, as it has become, merely basic training for the pros. Of the 12 guys on the championship team's roster, all graduated from Chapel Hill, and six earned advanced degrees. "That," says Brennan, "may be more of an accomplishment than the 32-0."