But no moment sits more squarly at the center of this pale-blue/royal-blue relationship than the 1957 NCAA final, in which the top-ranked and unbeaten Tar Heels defeated the No. 2. Wilt Chamberlain-led Jayhawks 54-53 in triple overtime. And that brings up another figure with one foot in Lawrence and another in Chapel Hill.
By the 1950s Dick Harp had become the top assistant to Allen, assuming a more and more important behind-the-scenes role in running the Jayhawk program. Allen still worked hard to lure young men to Lawrence, and he still motivated them on game days. But Harp was the eminence grise of Kansas's 1952 NCAA title, the man credited with developing the half-court press that helped the Jayhawks ease past Frank McGuire's St. John's team, 80-63, in the final.
[We interrupt this narrative to bring you a Kansas-Carolina bonus trivia question. Who are the only two coaches to have taken two different schools to an NCAA championship game? The answer: Larry Brown (UCLA in 1980 and Kansas in '88) and McGuire in (the Johnnies in '52 and the Tar Heels in '57 - both, curiously enough, against Kansas). Soon after McGuire moved to Chapel Hill, Brown would play for him and Smith would serve as his assistant.]
By the 1956-57 season, Harp's first in charge in Lawrence, Smith was now an assistant at the Air Force Academy. That March he roomed with his boss, Falcons coach Bob Spear, and McGuire in Kansas City at the Final Four. Two years later Smith would join McGuire in Chapel Hill, but here, during the championship game, he cheered unabashedly for his alma mater. After all, four years earlier Smith had coached three of the Jayhawks' current seniors, Gene Elstun, Maurice King and John Parker, on the KU freshmen team.
Thus Smith was as disappointed with the UNC victory as Harp, howse team finished a 24-3 season only five points and eight seconds short of perfection. For years afterward Harp would blame himself for his team's failure to get the ball into Chamberlain during the final, and he would persist in describing the game as one of the Jayhawks "coulda won, shoulda won."
Like Smith, who had grown up in Emporia and Topeka, Harp spent his childhood in the Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood of Rosedale, listening to Jayhawk games on the radio before coming to Lawrence and making his mark as a basketball player. In 1986, now long since ensconced at North Carolina as head coach, Smith brought Harp to Chapel Hill as an administrative assistant coach. Over the three seasons Harp spent with the Tar Heels' program, Carolinians would occasionally bring up the events of '57, and that wasn't much fun. But Harp was integral to North Carolina's two ACC regular-season titles and one ACC tournament championship over that span, and a circle, in a sense, had been closed.
Since Smith arrived in Chapel Hill, the two schools haven't gone out of their way to play one another. They have faced each other only seven times in the 40 years since their first, unforgettable meeting. (The Tar Heels lead the series 5-2.) But only two of those games occurred since Smith's proteges took up in Lawrence; both were unavoidable encounters in postseason play, in the national semifinals of the NCAA tournament. "Why play against someone you consider a friend?" Smith says. A situation in which the joy of victory gets complicated by sorrow for the vanquished coach is something, Williams adds, that "we don't need to schedule." The stat sheet from their messy meeting at the '91 Final Four - sub-40% shooting; 30-plus turnovers - makes clear that neither was really up for doing battle against the other.
The two programs are family in their own fashion, so better that they march onward and upward in parallel, like spouses, for better or for worse. When Dean Smith's old classmate Nancy Landon Kassebaum remarried in 1997, there was only one thing wrong with the occassion. Her groom, Howard Baker, was a former U.S. Senator from... Tennessee.
Webmaster note: This article was taken from the book: The Kansas Century. 100 Years of Championship Basketball by Alexander Wolfe. This is but a small sample of what this book contains. If you are a true KU Basketball fan, your library REQUIRES this book!!! It really shows you the history our basketball program has gone through.
To order: ISBN# 0-8362-5303-5
