What we have tonight in the NCAA championship game between Michigan and North Carolina is perhaps the best showdown between the unorthodox and the orthodox since Willie Nelson's bookkeeper met the IRS.
This is the sporting equivalent of rap meeting rock and roll, of the Boy Scouts meeting the Boyz 'n the Hood. On the one hand there's North Carolina, the CEO of basketball. An X and an 0 for everything and everything in its place. The system is the thing. No one is bigger than the system. Bob McAdoo wasn't. Billy Cunningham wasn't. Michael Jordan wasn't. Jordan scored 15 a game as a Tar Heel, and he was happy about it.On the other hand, there's Michigan, a team without a system unless you want to count its sound system. Forget structure. What matters to the Wolverines is rhythm. Everyone is a star, or wants to be. They wear shades to and from and at practice.
Both teams wore their images well at Sunday's day-before-the-title-game press conferences. North Carolina's players talked as if they were from military school, Michigan's players talked as if they had escaped from military school. The Tar Heels talked reverently about their coach. The Wolverines talked reverently about their coach too, but with sarcasm in place of direct praise.
Carolina coach Dean Smith was clearly Ahab at the wheel. It's his way or the runway. He doesn't recruit players, players recruit him. Their mothers send him cakes and birthday cards. It's common knowledge that the last man on the Carolina bench every year broke somebody's heart at Missouri or Florida or Texas-Arlington when he turned them down. Smith hasn't had to take a Plan B recruit for at least a decade. His last 19 teams have gone to the NCAA tournament. The last 13 straight have made it at least to the round of 16.
It's no wonder he walks and talks more like George Patton than George Raveling. It's no wonder his players do exactly as they're told. If it was good enough for all those other 'Heels, who are they to argue?
Michigan coach Steve Fisher functions amid a different atmosphere entirely. You know the slogan, "The players make the coach?" Fisher is its most faithful practitioner. Ever since he took over for Bill Freider just prior to the 1989 NCAA tournament and got out of the way in time for the Wolverines to win that national title, he has been following the same script: Don't mess up a good thing.
He recruited five blue-chip freshmen two years ago and promised them something that would never make it into a Tar Heel recruiting pitch: "Playing time." Come to Michigan, he told Ray Jackson, Jimmy King, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose and Chris Webber, and load up on minutes.
The Fabulous Freshmen were born. Now, a year later, they're ready to play in their second straight NCAA final and Fisher is still pointing them to the court like it's an asphalt playground with chains on the rims and the only way you can keep playing is if you keep winning.
Michigan looks and acts more like an entrant in a weekend three-on-three streetball tournament. The Wolverines' uniforms are cut in the street style of the day. So is their hair. Most of them are as bald as Michael Jordan.
"We cut each other's hair," said Rose at yesterday's press conference. Webber said that his father would let them cut off his hair, too, if they won the national championship. "And coach Fisher said the same thing," added Webber, deadpan.
"I did say that," said Fisher, not missing a beat. "I said Chris's dad was going to shave his head."
The coach looked as satisfied as a high school principal who has just held his own in street-talking.
The subject switched to Fisher's personality when he's coaching behind closed doors. The players were asked if it's different than the friendly, easy-going, somewhat bland personality you see in, say, a press conference?
"He curses a lot more in practice than he curses up here," said Rose, after which all five of the Michigan players laughed and gave each other mental high fives with their fists. Fisher laughed too.
Smith probably wouldn't have laughed. But during his press session, such questions and answers never came up.
Michigan is undisciplined. Carolina is disciplined. Michigan is new money. Carolina is old money. Michigan is a boom box waiting for an excuse to be turned on. Carolina is a golden oldie waiting to be played again.
The two rather opposite systems will clash tonight in the Superdome. The winner won't necessarily validate either approach, but the contrast in styles should provide great basketball theatre. As much as any championship game in recent memory, the confluence of Michigan and Carolina is a reaffirmation that there is more than one way to the top.