April 10, 1972: A big exception
Blazing a trail inevitably requires navigating unmapped and sometimes painful pitfalls. Robert McAdoo Jr. ’ 72 discovered
that truth as Smith’s only recruited junior-college player, then the school’s first
undergraduate to leave early to enter the
NBA draft.
McAdoo, a 6-9 post player, did not achieve a qualifying test
score on the SAT in high school and wound up at Vincennes University, a two-year school in southwestern Indiana.Vincennes was
51-9 during McAdoo’s two seasons. He led the team in scoring his
freshman year, when the school won the national junior college
championship. “It was like 15 high school All-Americans on one
junior college team,” McAdoo says. “Our team at Vincennes, individually, man for man, was
stronger than our Carolina team
that got to the Final Four.”
McAdoo planned to transfer
after a year in Indiana. UCLA
was his preferred destination,
and a flow of letters from John
Wooden and assistant Denny
Crum demonstrated a mutual
interest. But the letters suddenly
stopped coming; later McAdoo
claimed his junior college coach
had intercepted the correspondence to keep his star player in
school for a second year.
Worried about her son’s
prospects, Vandalia McAdoo, a
Greensboro schoolteacher, contacted Smith and asked him to
consider signing her son. The
UNC coach obliged, eager to
fill a gap in the lineup caused by
Tom McMillen’s decision to
attend Maryland instead of Carolina. “I was the right piece to
the puzzle,” McAdoo says.
The center paced the 1971-
72 team in scoring ( 19. 5 points
per game) and rebounding
( 10. 1), made first team All-ACC
and helped the Tar Heels reach
the Final Four. But, joining an
upperclassmen-dominated unit
that returned four starters from
a 1971 NIT championship
squad, McAdoo’s assimilation
was not altogether smooth.
Smith had established a care-
fully calibrated system in which
opportunities were painstakingly
earned and seniority honored, a
JOHN D. HANLON/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES
Smith circumvented his own system for McAdoo, an immense talent who
was in town for only a season and left his jersey in the rafters.
primary reason he eschewed recruiting junior college players in all
but McAdoo’s case. “Though his teammates were glad to have such a
talent,” wrote Art Chansky in Dean’s Domain, “the veterans were
somewhat uncomfortable with — perhaps resentful of — McAdoo’s
instant emergence.” McAdoo says he later learned there were complaints that he usurped playing time.
Any tension was short-lived. Almost from the start of the ’ 72
season, rumors swirled that McAdoo would stay a single year.
UNC coaches had a similar expectation. Still, leaving early was
rare. To that point, only a single player had entered the draft from
an ACC school.
But a signing war was under way between the NBA and the
upstart American Basketball Association, and teams dangled big
contracts to entice top collegians to jump early. Later there would
be repeated assertions, denied by
McAdoo and never proven, that
he secretly signed a contract
with the ABA’s Virginia Squires
while playing for the Tar Heels.
Such a signing could have been
grounds for vacating Carolina’s
NCAA appearance.
The 1972 NBA draft was
held barely two weeks after the
college season ended. McAdoo,
among a handful of economic
“hardship cases” approved by
the league, was picked second
by the Buffalo Braves. It would
be another decade before a Tar
Heel left early.
“It’s an everyday thing now,
but because I was the first I
caught hell,” says McAdoo, who
left with Smith’s blessing.
Returning to attend school that
summer at Chapel Hill, he
repeatedly found chewing gum
and “nasty racial notes” affixed
to his car, McAdoo says. “I
never told people about that.
But that was the ’70s. People
didn’t want me to go. I was
really afraid to come back to
the state, it was that scary.”
Early departures such as
McAdoo’s are now so common
that five of seven ACC players
chosen in the first round of the
2009 NBA draft left with eligibility remaining. Overall, 18 Tar
Heels have gone pro before
their senior season, a total
believed to surpass any school
in the country.
