The Indiana big man was the centerpiece of UNC’s monster recruiting class of 1990.
As the winter of 1990 turned into spring, Dean Smith’s status as a great coach was secure. Yet, as the 1990 basketball season wound to a close, Smith’s North Carolina basketball program appeared to be slipping after almost a quarter-century of sustained excellence.
It was bad enough that the Hall of Fame coach had not led the Tar Heels to a Final Four since 1982. Worse, Smith’s 1990 team, weakened by the early NBA departure of center J.R. Reid and frustrated by a series of close misses on the recruiting trail, was struggling to reach the standards that Smith had established during his long and successful tenure. The veteran team—led by seniors Scott Williams and Kevin Madden; juniors Rick Fox, King Rice and Pete Chilcutt—lost six of 10 games down the stretch and finished the regular season with fewer than 20 wins for the first time since 1970. A first-round exit from the ACC Tournament sent UNC to Austin, Tex., as a No. 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament, needing a first-round win to get to the 20-win mark.
Had time—and a new generation of young ACC coaches—finally caught up with North Carolina’s iconic coach?
As it turned out, the 10 days after that dispiriting ACC Tournament loss to Virginia would demonstrate Smith’s resiliency. He would remind his critics of his game-time brilliance by engineering not only a first-round NCAA victory over Southwest Missouri State, but a stunning second-round upset of the nation’s No. 1 ranked team, Oklahoma.
And just 72 hours after pulling off that on-the-court triumph, Smith would strike gold on the recruiting trail, stealing a prize prospect from Bob Knight’s backyard to cap the most acclaimed recruiting class of his career—a class that would restore UNC to the top of the ACC pyramid.
THE YOUNG GIANT
Eric Montross was a slender eighth-grader when he got his first recruiting letter.
“My first letter was from [Iowa coach] Tom Davis,” Montross recalled. “I played AAU ball with Damon Bailey and he had been getting letters since he was knee high to a grasshopper. In the eighth grade, I could barely walk and chew gum. I thought getting the letter was a great moment, a momentous event. I didn’t realize that it was a chain letter that they sent out by the thousands. My sister probably got one.”
Montross was a thin 6-8 player at that stage in his development, but he had great bloodlines—his grandfather and father had played big-time college basketball for the University of Michigan. By the time Montross was a junior at Lawrence North High School—located just on the northern edge of Indianapolis—he stood 7-1 and weighed in at close to 240 pounds. Montross was good enough to lead Lawrence North to an Indiana state championship, earning tournament MVP honors. At that point, it’s safe to say, he was getting more recruiting letters than his sister.
“I was fortunate to be recruited by almost every major school,” Montross said. “I even got a letter from Southwest Mississippi Junior College. I don’t mean to belittle them, but it was so out of context.”
Naturally, North Carolina wanted to get involved.
“Jack Keefer, my high school coach, had worked Coach Smith’s summer camp for something like 14 years,” Montross said. “He asked me if I’d be interested in being recruited by Carolina. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Carolina or the ACC. Oh, I knew the names of the schools, but growing up in Big Ten country, that was a different place. Indiana is a basketball hotbed, but the focus was different. I imagine it’s like high school football in Texas, kids there don’t grow up dreaming of playing out of state.
“I talked to my father about it. He had read a book—‘The Carolina Corporation’—and he said, ‘You don’t want to play there … Coach Smith takes players out who make one mistake!’”
Luckily for the Tar Heels, Montross kept an open mind about Coach Smith. He found that the Tobacco Road school offered much of what he was looking for.
“I was looking for a place that combined good basketball and strong academics—primarily academics,” he said. “I was fortunate to be recruited by so many classy coaches. I had a lot of really good opportunities.”
The recruiting timetable was a little different in those days. Prospects rarely committed until after their junior seasons. Many would take advantage of the early signing period and sign in early November of their senior seasons, but a fair portion of the top prospects would wait until spring—and the end of their prep careers—to make a decision.
Montross did not want to rush the process.
“I really enjoyed the recruiting process,” he said.
The prized big man eventually trimmed his recruiting list to four schools: Indiana, Michigan, Duke and North Carolina. The nearby Hoosiers, with Bob Knight in his prime, were clearly the favorites. Michigan, the alma mater of two generations of Montross’s forebears, was a strong contender. The two Tobacco Road contenders were longshots— at least they where until Montross made a combined official visit to the two neighboring superpowers that fall.
“I think the difference was that with Carolina, there was such consistency, such professionalism, such a sense of family … a welcoming atmosphere,” Montross said. “Of course, the same weekend, I also went to Duke and I had the same experience. That’s going to happen. When recruits visit, everybody is on their best behavior. I don’t know anybody who ever made a recruiting visit and came back and said, ‘What a bunch of jerks.’”
Nobody knew it at the time, but after his fall trip North Carolina became the frontrunner for Montross. Although he wasn’t ready to sign in November—or even commit. That gave Indiana partisans at North Lawrence and in Indianapolis plenty of time to apply the pressure to stay close to home.
While Montross waited, Smith and his staff were working hard to put together a class for the ages.
HITS AND MISSES
The fall of 1989 was a frantic time for recruiters on Tobacco Road.
N.C. State’s Jim Valvano was hamstrung by the controversy surrounding his program, but energetic young coach Dave Odom was breathing life into a moribund program at Wake Forest and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski had his recruiting machine in high gear.
Smith was holding his own after former UNC star Phil Ford replaced Kansas-bound Roy Williams as his chief recruiter following the 1988 season.
“That was the era of Dean Smith,” veteran recruiting analyst Bob Gibbons said. “People used to say he didn’t recruit, he selected. That was unfair … he did recruit very well, but he didn’t get everybody he wanted.”
Indeed, in the late 1980s, Smith endured plenty of misses. He seemed to have Greensboro’s Danny Manning locked up, but Kansas coach—and Smith protégée—Larry Brown hired Manning’s father as an assistant coach and that was that. A year later, Smith lost a tough head-to-head battle with Krzyzewski for Danny Ferry. Kenny Williams, a gifted power forward from Elizabeth City, N.C., committed to Carolina, but failed to qualify for admission. However, his early commitment played a part in convincing Buffalo big man Christian Laettner to pick Duke over the Tar Heels.
Perhaps the biggest blow during this period was the loss of New York City point guard phenom Kenny Anderson, who was long considered a lock for the Tar Heels. Smith’s focus on Anderson was so strong that he missed a chance to land the No. 2 point guard in the class; put on hold by Smith, Jersey City’s Bobby Hurley picked Duke instead. When Anderson shocked the basketball world by electing to play for Bobby Cremins at Georgia Tech, UNC was forced to compete against the nation’s two most talented young playmakers.
Those recruiting misses explain the pressure on Smith and his staff to put together a dynamic recruiting class in 1990.
Smith had some early success in the fall of ’89. The Tar Heel coaches received early commitments from Derrick Phelps, a gifted 6-3 point guard from Middle Village (N.Y.) Christ the King, a defensive demon who would be perfect to battle the likes of Anderson and Hurley; and from 6-10 Clifford Rozier, a powerful and mobile forward from Bradenton (Fla.) Southeast High.
However, there were also a couple of disappointments.
Grant Hill was even more frustrating. Smith, like almost every other college coach, coveted the talented and intelligent Reston, Va., product. He was a former prep teammate of UNC’s Hubert Davis and a lifelong Tar Heel fan. But he bonded with Duke’s Krzyzewski and picked the Blue Devils over the Tar Heels.
Smith didn’t cry about the decision, he acted decisively to replace Hill—evening up an old recruiting score in process. Brian Reese, a 6-6 swingman from Bronx (N.Y.) Tolentine was planning to play for Cremins at Georgia Tech. But he couldn’t resist the last-minute opportunity offered by Smith and signed with UNC instead.
Smith also scored a small victory over Krzyzewski, convincing 6-7 Pat Sullivan from Bogata (N.J.) to pick the Heels over (among others) the Blue Devils.
That gave UNC an impressive four-man signing class in the fall. It certainly impressed Gibbons, who included three of the UNC recruits among his Dandy Dozen. He had Rozier at No. 10, Phelps at No. 11 and Reese at No. 12. Sullivan was his No. 53 prospect. He knew that they were also in the picture for Montross, his No. 2 prospect (behind Memphis bound “Penny” Hardaway).
“If they could add Montross, it would without a doubt be the greatest recruiting class of all time,” Gibbons told reporters.
But could UNC beat out Indiana for the Hoosier giant?
CLOSING THE DEAL
With four prime prospects already in the fold, Smith and his staff were able to focus their attention on Montross during the season. Smith, Ford and sometimes administrative assistant Dave Hanners attended a number of Montross’s prep games.
The young big man decided that he wanted to take another look at UNC, just to confirm his growing connection to the faraway school. He and his father paid their own way to Chapel Hill in late February.
“I wanted to see a game,” he said. “We came down—I don’t remember who they were playing, maybe State?—but I remember sitting behind the scorer’s table. I remember the atmosphere. It was a reinforcement of what I knew. Everything seemed to gel. When I left Carolina, I had a gut feeling.”
Montross wasn’t quite ready to commit, wanting to allow his high school season to play out. But from that moment, he was a Tar Heel at heart.
He decided to go public after his Lawrence North team was eliminated from the playoffs. He gave Indiana’s Knight one last chance to make his case on Monday night, March 19, waited 24 hours, then called Smith on Tuesday night and gave him the news.
‘He was really excited,” Montross told reporters the next day. “No one is more excited than I am though.”
Smith was en route to Dallas for an NCAA Sweet 16 matchup with Arkansas when Montross revealed his choice at a press conference at his high school.
“I should have waited and not muddied the waters,” he said in hindsight. “It was selfish of me. But recruiting is a real selfish time for kids—and that’s good. You’re on the cusp of a decision that will change your life. You hear these days about so many people involved in the process. My parents never once said anything to influence me, never once gave an opinion. In my mind, I suspected they favored Michigan, but when I told them I was going to Carolina, they said, ‘That was our choice too.’”
Of course, not everybody took the decision so well. Indiana fans were furious with the hometown boy going off to school.
“We got more hate mail than I can shake a stick at—‘You’re a traitor’… ‘I hate you,’” he said. “I always thought it was pretty humorous that an adult would waste the time to write a letter, mail it and stick a stamp on it because they were upset at the decision by a 17-year-old.
“My mom was the one who was offended, she didn’t like it that her little boy was being attacked. I was immune to it. That’s what Carolina meant to me … I didn’t care.”
THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK
How do you measure a recruiting class? Is the greatest class of all time the one with the highest assembled rating? Or is it based on accomplishment?
“It’s not how they are rated … it’s how they end up,” Gibbons said.
But he still rates UNC’s 1990 Class as the highest rated ever signe—up to that time.
“Of course, the following season, Michigan recruited the Fab Five—that surpassed North Carolina’s Class of 1990,” he said. “But up to that point, they were the best.”
That UNC class would justify its high rating.
North Carolina’s five 1990 newcomers—joined by Kevin Salvadori, a slender 7-footer who had redshirted the previous season—breathed new life into the Tar Heel program. It started even before the first game, when ACC media members voted UNC (just 8-6 in the league the year before) as the ACC’s overwhelming preseason favorite. AP voters agreed, picking UNC (unranked in ’90) as the No. 5 team in their preseason poll.
Smith wasn’t thrilled by the high expectations.
“If everybody promised to just play freshmen this year, Duke and Wake Forest and us would have a heck of a race,” he told reporters.
The Tar Heel coach was determined to ease the newcomers into the lineup. When UNC took the court for the first time that fall in an exhibition against the German National Team, he started three seniors (Fox, Rice and Chilcutt), a junior (Davis) and a sophomore (George Lynch).
But he was quick to insert the newcomers. Montross, Phelps and Rozier were on the floor when UNC broke open a close game and ignited the 37-point rout of a veteran team. In the official opener against San Diego State, Smith continued to start his veterans, but the Tar Heels were leading just 21-19 midway through the first half when the Blue team, including freshmen Salvadori, Rozier, Sullivan and Reese, sparked an 18-0 run that broke the game open.
UNC’s depth was incredible and Smith was quick to use it, giving 11 players extensive minutes. The newcomers were labeled “The New Kids on the Block” after the first big boy band, which had exploded in popularity in 1990.
UNC’s “New Kids” were making their own mark, helping UNC to a 29-win season that included a 22-point rout of Duke in the ACC title game and Smith’s first trip to the Final Four in nine years. Two years later, the New Kids were at the heart of UNC’s 1993 national title team—Montross, Reese and Phelps all started, while Sullivan and Salvadori were key reserves.
Rozier, frustrated by Smith’s demands that he work as hard on the defensive end as he did on offense, left UNC after one season, ending up at Louisville (where he was a 1994 All-American). But the other ’90 recruits stayed all four years and finished their careers in 1994 on a team that won a second ACC championship and finished the season ranked No. 1 in the final AP poll.
Montross justified his high ranking. He became a two-time consensus second-team All-American and made the first Wooden All-America team as a senior in 1994. He contributed to a national title, two Final Four teams, two ACC championship teams and to three teams that finished the season ranked in the top five. UNC was 114-27 during his tenure. To cap it off, Montross was the ninth player picked in the 1994 NBA draft, going to the Boston Celtics to start a 14-year NBA career.
“You can’t realize the magnitude of our accomplishment until you look back on it 5-10-20 years later,” he said. “I’m proud of what we accomplished. I’m proud of the work ethic and the consistent effort of the group.
“Anytime you talk about championship teams, you hear about the chemistry of those teams. That’s what we had. It was like I was the body, Derrick was my left hand, Pat was my right hand and Brian was somewhere in between.
“It all played out well.”
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