BURKE, Va. — Tucked on the backside of a housing development and the curve of a small cul-de-sac, the house is neither grander nor smaller than its neighbors. Just another tidy two-story, this one a brick front with brown shutters and a sloping driveway leading up to the garage. Neatly tended landscaping dissects the walkway to the front door from the small porch, where a bag of soil rests between a rocker and another chair.
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A baseball cap is slung casually on the post of the rocker, as if its owner shucked it before walking inside. Its color is indeterminate. Maybe once it was gray. Could have been blue. Wear and weather have sucked the dye out of it, taking any obvious signs of the hat’s allegiance right with it. Only a patch stitched to the side, so clean it looks like someone sewed it on as an afterthought, forces a visitor to take a second glance. It is Michael Jordan’s Jumpman, bright white and outlined in blue. Upon closer inspection, the hat finally reveals itself — NATIONAL CHAMPIONS arcs over the adjustor, stitched in faded white lettering, and the front declares the particular champions the hat is celebrating … North Carolina.
Ah, so then this is the right place.
Hubert Davis Sr. opens the front door on a cloudy Thursday afternoon. He’s wearing a golf shirt from the Phil Ford Golf Classic and a pair of blue shorts. His feet are bare, but his smile is warm as he nestles into an easy chair in the front room. He’s lived in this house for 42 years. Raised his son, Hubert Jr., and daughter, Keisha, here. His younger brother, Walter, used to visit here regularly while he was at prep school in Delaware, before he became a star at Carolina. In the TV room on the opposite side of the house, Hubert Sr. has cheered on his beloved Tar Heels, and, if we’re being completely honest, occasionally switched channels in aggravation.
On that very driveway, Hubert Sr. once popped his boy so hard during a game of pickup that his wife, Bobbie, put the kibosh on future father-son games. In this house, Hubert Sr. mourned the premature passing of his wife of 19 years and taught himself how to cook, clean and launder after she was gone. He cried over her absence in between these four walls more often than he cares to count, yet found the restorative strength of friends and neighbors here, too.
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In the same living room where Hubert Sr. now chats, Dean Smith once sat on the sofa across from him, apologizing that he didn’t think there was a place for Hubert Jr. on his team. The next day, the phone here jingled with Smith’s reversal and an offer of a scholarship. Over the following two years, the ringing of the phone bounced off the walls near-daily, Hubert calling in frustration, convinced he ought to leave if he wasn’t going to earn any playing time.
And it was here, just five months ago, just days after Hubert Sr. finally received his second dose of the COVID vaccine, when the landline rang again. Hubert was calling to tell his dad that he was the new head coach at the University of North Carolina.
Yet with Carolina past and present seemingly seeped into the walls, the house is oddly devoid of Tar Heel devotion. On the drive in, other homes in the neighborhood proudly declare their affiliations, flags swaying in support of North Carolina State or Virginia or Maryland.
Here, there is only the tattered old ballcap.
“I don’t like the hoopla,” Hubert Davis Sr. says. “No hoopla.”
On the day he introduced his new head coach on April 6, North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham rolled through Hubert’s playing career, his accomplishments and values, before concluding, “He’s been an overachiever his entire life.”
It’s a common conclusion, and understandable if you dig through Hubert’s life.
Old press clippings from Hubert’s high school days almost always refer to him the same way — Hubert Davis Jr., nephew of Walter. The shadow cast by his father’s baby brother obscured the basketball sun, Walter’s successes at North Carolina — plus-1,800 points scored and a spot on the 1976 Olympic team — making any of Hubert’s accomplishments pale in comparison.
As Hubert grew and found his own rhythm for the Tar Heels, Knicks coach Don Nelson said he wasn’t terribly interested in the guard, dismissing Hubert as a one-dimensional player (in this case a shooter), while he preferred an actual basketball player. Instead, Hubert became a starter. After he retired, no one expected much when Hubert slid into an analyst’s chair at ESPN, figuring him for just another washed-up player trying to figure out a second career. He became one of the most respected talking heads in college basketball.
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And while no one was necessarily surprised or even disappointed that Cunningham chose Hubert to replace Roy Williams, the choice doesn’t come without a bit of skepticism. North Carolina is one of the premier programs in the country, and Hubert has not only never been a head coach, he’s never been tabbed as one of the hot young coaches on the rise. At 51, he doesn’t necessarily fit, but even if he made the age bracket, it wouldn’t suit him. College basketball is all about the sales pitch — sell yourself, sell the school, sell recruits — and Hubert is decidedly un-pitchman.
No hoopla, you might say.
But here’s the part that people have never gotten right — not when Hubert was in high school, playing in his uncle’s shadow, trying to make it in the NBA, or on TV and even now at North Carolina. They mistook the absence of braggadocio for a lack of confidence, assumed his pleasantness equated to meekness, thought no hoopla meant no heft. “I’ve always been very comfortable with who I am and what I can do,” he says. “My parents always taught me that my life is my life. I don’t have to compare or compete against me. Just be the best that I can be.”
To understand Hubert, it helps to sit with his father. His influence courses through his son, from the smile that lights up their faces when they talk to the quiet sense of purpose both share. Hubert Sr. is chatty, but not overly so. He occasionally giggles when he spins a yarn about his son, couching what he’s about to say with, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this” before he plows along anyway.
He is a man of consistency. Stayed in the same house for 42 years. Married to one woman his whole life. Worked one job until his retirement 16 years ago. He sees no need to live through his son, brushing off Hubert years ago when he suggested he move closer to him in the early days of Hubert’s NBA career, and dismissing his golfing pals similarly today, the ones who assume he’s going to uproot and move to Chapel Hill. “Why would I do that?” he says. “Hubert has a life. I can be a part of that life, but it is his life.” Besides, he stays plenty busy. He ticks off his schedule on his fingers, explaining that he does 60 miles of exercising a week, usually 25 miles walking and 35 miles riding his bike. Just this morning, he pedaled the neighborhoods for 23 miles. Though his one-time 7 handicap has grown to a 12, he plays golf twice a week and is faithful to his church in nearby Arlington.
Hubert Sr. is small-town, old-school, one of 13 children — seven of them boys — who played basketball because it was accessible. The courts were at the school building that housed all of the kids in Pineville, N.C., grades one through 12, back when Pineville was country and not yet absorbed by the Charlotte megalopolis. Hubert’s twin brother, Herbert, turned into a very successful high school coach in Mecklenburg, and Walter, of course, went on to become the family star. Hubert Sr. was pretty good now, too — “I was the best,” he says with a grin. “Well, that doesn’t include Walter. He was too young.” He earned a scholarship to Johnson C. Smith, only the second in his family to go to college.
He met Bobbie Webb there. She was two years older, and when they elected to get married without telling either set of parents, his father memorably said, “Well, you two better make the best of it.” And they did, for 19 years, until Bobbie passed. They moved to Virginia, bought the house and settled in. Hubert Sr. joined three different hoops leagues in the area and took a job as a manager in the department of education, overseeing the TRIO program, which helps disadvantaged kids pursue college careers. After Hubert came along, his father took a break from basketball, but when he ballooned up to plus-200 pounds, he signed up again. He brought his toddler son with him to watch.
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Even as a kid, Hubert intuited his father’s behavior on the court, watching the affable, easygoing man change when he played ball. He understood, even if he couldn’t quite comprehend, that a man could be quiet and understated as a person but dominant as a competitor.
Hubert Sr. grew up a Carolina fan, his devotion fueled after Walter enrolled there. He loved Smith, appreciated the way he treated his parents as well as his brother, and during Walter’s time with the Tar Heels, forged a real friendship with the coach. Hubert Sr. often made the four-hour drive to Chapel Hill to play golf with Smith. “Let’s go hit ‘em,” Smith would say to Hubert Sr., and they would pop in at various country clubs. By extension, Hubert naturally grew up a Tar Heel fan, too. Before high school, he went each summer to the camps on campus, and soon pinned his hopes on playing there himself one day.
He was a good kid, never gave his parents any trouble. Played wide receiver on the football team, basketball naturally, and until the 10th grade, pursued his mother’s passion, playing cello well enough to earn second chair. No hoopla. “I call Hubert my East Coast kid, and my daughter my West Coast kid,” Hubert Sr. says. “Hubert, before he would do anything, he’d ask for my opinion. My daughter would do it and then she’d say, ‘Help!’ Hubert was a mature kid. He wanted to play basketball and he wanted to go to Carolina. That was it. That was his focus.”
Hubert adored his parents equally, but Bobbie was the soft touch where her son was concerned. When Hubert Sr. got a little too physical in driveway pick-up games, Bobbie chastised her husband and put a kibosh on the games.
In December 1985, Bobbie developed a sore on her mouth. She was a smoker, but doctors dismissed it, convinced it was a pesky canker sore. Five, maybe six times, she went back as medicine failed to clear it up, until finally the doctors did a biopsy. They diagnosed her with oral cancer. By August of the following year, she was gone. Hubert was 16, Keisha just 10. Hubert Sr. cut back on his hours and threw himself into parenting. Plenty of nights the family pried open the aluminum foil on the Hungry Man TV dinners, but Hubert Sr. also mastered a few meals, too. “Keisha would tell you, ‘My dad liked to cook Cornish hens,’” he says, laughing uproariously. “All the time she’d say, ‘Oh no, not Cornish hens again!’”
He didn’t hide his grief from his kids. They’d find him crying in a room by himself, and he’d explain that he just needed to let it out. Yet he never let it consume him. “Never once complained, that’s the biggest thing,” Hubert says of his dad. “It was never, ‘Why me?’ Never, ‘I’m tired.’ He showed up every single day.”
Just as he absorbed his father’s behavior on the basketball court, Hubert took this in, too. He did not feel the same as his dad. Hubert was angry, angry at God, angry at his circumstances. While Hubert Sr. doubled down on his faith, Hubert initially turned away. But even lost in that bitterness, he showed the same resolve as his father, gritting his teeth at his pain, using it as fuel rather than quicksand. He asked for no favors, no sympathy. No hoopla. Just channeled his fury. “The only place I found rest and peace was on the basketball court,” he says. “Some people have asked me if I think I would have made it to North Carolina if my mother was alive, and I honestly say, ‘I don’t know.’”
The story has been told so often it reads like folklore. It’s all true. Dean Smith did, in fact, sit right across from Hubert Sr. on the sofa set beneath the front windows. There he told his good friend that he didn’t know if his son had what it took to play at Carolina, and fretted that if Hubert did come to Chapel Hill and sit the bench, it would ruin the friendship between the two men.
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As it turns out, Smith didn’t merely underestimate Hubert’s talent that day; he misunderstood his friend. Hubert Sr. understood the business of basketball, and while he appreciated Smith’s candor, it did not sway his opinion anymore than it did that of his tunnel-visioned son. Hubert Sr. wanted more than just a basketball experience for his son. He always had. He didn’t let the boy play in showcase camps until after his junior year, insisting as his own father did with him, that he concentrate on things other than hoops. In this case, academics. Hubert Sr. wanted a school that would provide for him beyond basketball, that could lead him down a successful path even if he didn’t succeed on the court.
Now the truth is, he thought his old golfing buddy was wrong about Hubert. He didn’t see, or maybe he couldn’t see until Hubert was under his watch, what most everyone fails to see about Hubert: how hard he works. He does not trumpet that work — no hoopla, remember. Just puts his head down and does the work. Hubert spent hours on that driveway, perfecting a silky smooth jumper that eventually would become a near sure thing and took honest stock of his game, trying to fix the imperfections so that he would be a more complete player.
Heading into his junior year, he also was stoked by that awful pent-up grief, channeling his anger and hurt into his basketball. The January after his mother passed, he scored 30-plus points in four consecutive games. In an epic seven-overtime win against rival Robinson, he scored 35, connected on 13 of 27 shots even after the opposing team went diamond and one on him. He could play, and he believed he could play at Carolina, so much so that he refused to consider anywhere else. At that lone camp experience — at Five Star — he played well enough to merit a few impressed eyeballs, including that of Georgetown coach John Thompson Jr. But the wise coach figured rightly he had no chance, telling Hubert Sr., “Oh, we all know where he’s going.”
Roy Williams was in his 10th and final year as Smith’s assistant when it came time to consider Hubert in the fall of 1987. In a year, he’d be the head coach at Kansas. But Williams had built up enough equity with his boss that he wasn’t afraid to share his opinion, even when it ran counter to Smith’s. He predicted Hubert would play more than Smith expected. “That’s the kind of kid you’re going to enjoy coaching,” Williams told him. Smith slept on it and the next day called back, offering Hubert a scholarship.
It was not a Cinderella story. That house phone never stopped ringing those first two years, Hubert calling his father suggesting maybe they were both wrong, that it would be best if he looked elsewhere. Still grieving the loss of his mother and struggling to earn playing time, he felt lost. Hubert Sr. let his son vent and then hung up, never once going down to visit. He knew Hubert was in the right place. Hubert Sr.’s intuition eventually proved correct. His son found a Bible study group, and freed from his anger, he blossomed. As a junior, Hubert averaged 13.3 points on a Final Four team, and as a senior, all of that driveway shooting finally found its aim. He averaged 21.4 points per game and connected on 50 percent of his shots. By the time he graduated, he ranked 15th on the all-time scoring list despite the slow start.
“Carolina was family,” Hubert Sr. says. “When I dropped him off the first time, he showed me the dorm and then I said, ‘Well, I’m going to head back.’ He couldn’t believe I was leaving, but I didn’t need to see anything. I knew where he was. I knew he was safe because he was with family.”
The Carolina family, in basketball circles, it sounds near like the mafioso. Decisions are made in the family and by the family, especially the head coaching choice. When Williams surprisingly retired in March, folks didn’t waste a lot of breath wondering if Cunningham would go outside to find his replacement. Other names were bandied about — Scott Drew, Billy Donovan, Porter Moser — but no one paid any of it much mind. Though Smith was a Kansas graduate, he defined the essential Carolina man, well-respected not only for his basketball savvy but for his community involvement and commitment to social justice.
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Universally respected and revered, he came to symbolize what the very university wanted to be about, spawning a legacy that now makes a degree from UNC a near prerequisite for the men’s basketball bench. “The thing that binds us together is our shared experiences,” Hubert says. “It’s the cornerstone and foundation of the place, and in order to coach here, you have to have that experience of playing here. I tell the guys all the time, if the only thing I’m doing is coaching basketball, I need to be fired or quit. The job is to help and to serve, and if you don’t get that, you’re missing what this place is about.”
The family lineage put Hubert, with his nine years hitched to Williams’ side, at the top of the list. He called his dad and told him he wanted the job and felt good about his chances. He had Williams’ endorsement, which felt as close to a rubber stamp as he could get. Hubert Sr. delicately poured a splash of cold water on him, reminding him that the decision would not be left to Williams, that it would climb much higher up the ladder. He also echoed everyone else’s refrain: “It’s a big job now.”
It’s funny how people like to point that out, as if Hubert hasn’t been on a big stage before. Following his Carolina career, he was drafted 20th overall … by the Knicks. There are no brighter lights than those in the Big Apple, and Davis arrived to Pat Riley’s team, one that included the larger-than-life body/personality combo of Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley, with the sweet stroke meant to solve the riddle of the team’s shooting woes. By his second season, he ousted veteran Rolando Blackman as the backup shooting guard and finished as the fourth-leading scorer on a team that lost to Houston in the NBA Finals.
He lasted 14 years in the NBA before jumping into the analyst chair. For four years, he traveled from campus to campus, sitting in on practices and picking the brain of various coaches, before settling back at his alma mater. Hubert never marketed himself, never tried to get noticed. He doesn’t tweet — there’s an actual account called HubertDontTweet — and some people mistook the quiet for subservience. The lack of hoopla in a profession hellbent on creating hoopla made it seem like Hubert wasn’t quite ready for the big job. “I’m 51, not 35,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been ready for this job at 35. I couldn’t have done this job without my time in the NBA, without the experiences I had at ESPN. I learned to be on camera, to talk to people, talked to people about how they run a program. I had a front-row seat to college basketball and then I was next to Roy Williams for nine years. That’s experience. That’s a lot of experience.”
Hubert Sr. near beams when he recalls the day Hubert called to tell him he officially was the new head coach at Carolina, his mind jumping back to Hubert’s high school days at Lake Braddock, when his team lost in a district tournament. “He just cried and cried, and thought that was the end of the world,” Hubert Sr. says. “The only way I got him to calm down was I said, ‘Hubert, I know you didn’t get it, but all that means is God has different things in store for you.”
Yet when pressed about what he is most proud of when it comes to his son, Hubert Sr. doesn’t talk about Hubert’s Carolina career as a player or coach, or even his run in the NBA. “He’s a family guy,” he says. “Nothing comes before his wife and kids. They ask him to do something and his answer is always yes.”
It’s true, Hubert admits. He is the ultimate yes man when it comes to his kids, so much so that wife Leslie has remarked on it. “It’s because of losing my mom,” he says. The void never gets filled, and there are days he misses her now more than he did at 16. “I’ve lived my life,” he says. “But there’s a piece of me that’s gone forever.” She never saw him play at Carolina or in the NBA. Never met his wife or her grandchildren. He lives with that constant reminder, that tomorrow isn’t promised, so yes, he is a committed and content pushover where his own kids are concerned.
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They’re older now — the oldest, Elijah, plays at Lynchburg — so the requests come less frequently. This summer the kids turned him on to the Netflix series “Outer Banks,” and he cops sheepishly to a desperate need for answers to the season two cliffhanger. A good day — no, a great day — saw Hubert nestled on the sofa with his family watching the teen drama.
The drama of being the head coach at North Carolina, and the hoopla, stopped at the front door.
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos: Brian Rothmuller and Tom Pennington / Getty Images; Bettmann / Contributor)
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