donbosco
Inconceivable Member
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Another season has ended in defeat (All but 5 have during my 66 years of devotion). This year was filled with frustration — 23 wins and 14 losses overall with a rousing, albeit still exasperating 10-5 record over the home stretch months of February and March. Rollercoaster will ever be the metaphor and maddening the modifier for this carnival ride of a campaign. Such heartbreak and heat and heights glimpsed but not attained but for a miss here and a misstep there. Thank You R.J. for Five Fraught Years. You left your home and family in White Plains, New York and headed south at 18 beginning your journey in Chapel Hill in the late summer of 2020 amidst a global pandemic. Your first classes were online in a bewildering and dangerous new world in which you were isolated from your fellow students, the campus an unknown zone, and life lived in a bubble with only your teammates and coaches. Carolina football’s opening game on September 12 of your freshman year was played in an empty of spectators Kenan Stadium that fall as Covid-19 racked the nation. Your whole first year in Chapel Hill was surreal as the plague of the Corona Virus stalked the world.
Your first game for Carolina, a late November tip due to the pandemic, took place in a cavernously empty Dean E. Smith Center versus The College of Charleston. As the building management piped in crowd noise you scored 11 points on 4-9 shooting as the Heels won 79-60. That entire season of 2020-2021 ended with an 18-11 record and a first round exit from the NCAA. As the New Year 2021 dawned a January 5 conference game “played in front of a few dozen family members and cardboard cutout fans,” saw your much maligned teammate Andrew Platek score at the three second mark to steal a win from Miami in Coral Gables. Your minutes were limited that evening and you scored but 2 points. The following day even more history played out as an attempted Coup D’étàt in Washington shook the nation. This too, was part of your college experience. The season ended with Carolina earning an 18-11 mark and your coach, Roy Williams, turning introspective.
And thus, you were at ground zero for historic change as on April 1, 2021 Hall of Fame Coach Roy Williams suddenly announced his retirement and soon after UNC hired Hubert Davis, its first African American Head Coach. As a Sophomore you were an integral part of leading Coach Davis’ first team to the Final Four, along the way presiding over the Funeral of The Rat and Gloriously Ruining his Endless Farewell Tour. In a February 21 70-63 home win over Louisville you scored 16 points. Your future teammate Jay’Len Withers went for 10 points in that game. The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine, setting up a worldwide crisis that has revealed so very much about so many. That was game #2 in a six-game win streak that would fuel The Iron Five’s, of which you were key, race through the NCAA Tournament, again beating dook and The Rat along the way of course, only to lose a heartbreaker in the National Championship Game.
Subsequently you were part of mysterious collapse in 2022-23 when The Tar Heels tumbled from a pre-season ranking of Number One to finish unranked and uninvited to March Madness. That year remains enigmatic. We will wait for the memoirs I guess.
Your senior year of 2023-24 you were magnificent, setting the Smith Center individual scoring record with 42 points in a win versus Miami, winning The 2024 Jerry West Shooting Guard Award, and being named the ACC Player of The Year. In the classroom, ChatGPT roiled the waters and Artificial Intelligence threatened to ‘change everything.’ Led by your scoring and the inside play of Armando Bacot this team captured the ACC Regular Season Crown and swept dook. The team was 29-8 but fell disappointingly to Alabama in the Sweet Sixteen. All around you the entire landscape of college basketball was in tumult as transfer rules decades old were eliminated and paying players, long literally a crime, became the rule.
Amidst all of this Covid-19 ironically gifted you a fifth year and you chose to play it out in Chapel Hill, a choice that will forever endear you to me, another Tar Heel that was loathe to leave behind The Southern Part of Heaven. In these times so cynical and self-serving you have kept the faith. Perhaps you, R.J. Davis, have an Old Soul and the likes of you will ne’er be seen again in the Big Time College Game. At any rate, there is little doubt of the rareness of your character, of that I’m sure. You’ve repeatedly been Academic All-ACC and have already earned a degree in exercise and sport science and are enrolled in The Master of Business Administration Program as a Graduate Student. As Charles Kuralt so aptly put it in 1993, “What is it that binds us to this place as no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. Or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming…No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the University of the people.” And yes, our Alma Mater stumbles, and has done so far too often of late, but there are some things mighty powerful to love about the places in that town at the Crossroads on The Hill just the same and in R.J. Davis’ historic Five Years at Carolina I find myself reminded of a spirit that inhabits and haunts those grounds and that town. As Academia is under attack from powerful authoritarian anti-education forces It may seem foolish to find such inspiration in such a dark time for a school and the life of the mind in the career of a sportsman but in my own positivity and optimism, itself more born of my time spent in that place than anywhere else, I do see simple hope expressed quite literally in how one plays the game, in how you, R.J. Davis, have played the game.
Thanks R.J. for all you have done to keep that Spirit Alive. Play Hard, Play Smart, and Play Together.