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Don’t Tell Him He Can’t

Wherever he went, Hubert Davis ’92 was the underdog. His mother, Bobbie, never let him believe it.

by Tim Crothers ’86 | illustrations by Haley Hodges ’19

“Somebody once asked me, ‘Do you think you would have accomplished everything you have if your mom hadn’t had cancer?’ ” UNC basketball coach Hubert Davis ’92 recalls.

“I said, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. …’ ”

Hubert Ira Davis Jr. was that kid. You know, the one who was nice to everybody. He had his mother’s heart. Mild-mannered. Joyful. A rule follower. Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. Always anxious to please. He relished the responsibility of being the eldest child. Hubert Sr. called his son his “East Coast kid” and his daughter, Keisha, his “West Coast kid,” Hubert being the protective do-gooder, his sister the free spirit. Hubert’s dad wondered whether his son might actually be too kind-hearted to succeed as an athlete.

Hubert Jr. adored basketball, inspired by his uncle, Walter Davis ’77. He would watch Uncle Walt play for the Tar Heels and in the NBA on television and then practice on his driveway hoop in Burke, Va., dreaming of following his uncle to Chapel Hill. The Davis driveway was too narrow for a 3-point arc, so Hubert concentrated on mid-range jump shots. When he missed, he would have to chase the ball across his street, Wax Myrtle Court, so Hubert learned not to miss.

Hubert Sr. and Jr. regularly played 1-on-1. “My dad always challenged me,” Hubert Jr. says. “He was physical with me. He didn’t give me anything. He brought something out of me that I didn’t know I had.”

One day with his mother, Bobbie, watching from the porch, 13-year-old Hubert thought he spotted an opening to surprise his father and drive for a layup. But Hubert Sr. was ready. Dad blocked the shot, and son crashed headlong into the pole that supported the backboard. The dazed kid instinctively turned to the person he sought in times of trouble. Bobbie sprang up from her chair as her son ran toward her, bawling. “Don’t you hurt him,” she scolded her husband. “Don’t you ever do that to him again!”

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When Bobbie first asked her son to try the cello, Hubert resisted with all of the excuses one might expect from a fourth grader. He said he didn’t want to get teased or even beat up on the school bus, and the thing was so big Hubert wasn’t even sure he could lift it. Bobbie told him how much she enjoyed playing the cello in high school and begged him to give it a week. Hubert wound up playing cello in the orchestra throughout the rest of Ravensworth Elementary School and his six years at Lake Braddock Secondary School. “The cello is my mom to me,” he says. “It’s the prettiest instrument I’ve ever heard.”

Bobbie and Hubert Jr. were inseparable. They would cuddle together in her chair, watching her favorite soap opera, General Hospital. They would play board games together, Life and Sorry. Ping-Pong or pool together in the basement. Together, they would regularly wash Bobbie’s beloved blue Lincoln Continental. They would walk the family dog, Binky, together up and down Wax Myrtle Court. Bobbie loved to put a 45 on the turntable of the Jackson 5 singing ABC, and the two would dance together around the living room.

When Bobbie wasn’t working with her special needs kids at Garfield Elementary School, she was volunteering in the community, often with her son tagging along. Bobbie was giving, always giving. Hubert noticed how it fueled her. A devout Christian, Bobbie would often recite “The Lord’s Prayer,” planting the seed of faith in her son. She asked him to learn it. It didn’t mean much to him at the time. He just did it to please her. “I was a mama’s boy,” he says. “One hundred percent.”

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Hubert first attended UNC’s basketball camp at age 9, and he would return every summer through high school. Uncle Walt was his inspiration, but as he moved from gym to dorm to cafeteria on camp days, he wouldn’t tell a soul that he was the nephew of a Tar Heel legend. “I never wanted to be Uncle Walt,” Davis says. “I just wanted to play where he played and wear the uniform he wore.”

With each passing summer, the UNC campus began to feel more like a second home. By the time Hubert reached the seventh grade at Lake Braddock, the Tar Heel dream was firmly entrenched. In English class, his teacher assigned a project that included writing an essay titled, What I want to do when I grow up. Hubert wrote his paper about how he aspired to attend UNC and play basketball and added a photo of Tar Heel guard Kenny Smith ’87 cutting down a championship net.

Hubert’s teacher read his essay and handed it back to him with a note: Can you do this over again with something that you can actually achieve?

“I thought, ‘You told me to write about what I dreamed about doing when I grew up,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘Are you telling me that I can’t even dream this?’ ”

Hubert returned home discouraged and talked it over with his mom. Bobbie shared with him the biblical story of Barnabus, whose name is synonymous with encouragement. She explained how it’s a flaw of human nature that most people gravitate to criticism rather than praise. “Hubert, don’t let anyone ever tell you what you cannot do,” Bobbie told him. “Anything is possible.”

In English class the next day, Hubert’s teacher asked him about replacing his essay. The emboldened student told her, “You give me any grade you want, but I’m keeping it in there.”

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Bobbie thought it was a canker sore. She went to the doctor five times, and it never healed. A biopsy was performed in December 1985. Oral cancer.

Bobbie never complained. Never once asked, “Why is this happening to me?” She kept on attending Hubert’s football and basketball games. Kept on helping him with homework. Kept on taking care of the house. Even kept on dancing with her son when she felt up to it. Physically, Bobbie was deteriorating, her weight eventually dropping to 70 pounds, but her positive attitude never wavered. “I knew she was in pain, but she didn’t show it,” Hubert says. “There were tubes coming in and out of her body all over the place, but she always made you think she was going to be OK.”

Hubert, who had just obtained his learner’s permit, climbed behind the steering wheel of the Lincoln Continental and drove his mother to the hospital for her regular treatments. “Those were some of the best times I ever had with my mom,” he remembers. “Just me and her in that car. My sister wasn’t around. My dad wasn’t around. There were no distractions, just us. We talked about life. Mother and son. It was great.”

Because the radiation ravaged Bobbie’s tongue and left her unable to speak clearly, she would write letters to Hubert almost every day.


“Hubert, don’t let anyone ever tell you what you cannot do. Anything is possible.”

— Bobbie Davis

“I can remember vividly the last time I saw her,” Hubert recalls. “She came downstairs at the house, and we looked at each other. She told me that she loved me. It was just a different I love you. It was like she was saying goodbye.”

On Sunday, Aug. 31, 1986, just two days before the start of Hubert’s junior year at Lake Braddock, Hubert Sr. arrived home from hospice and told his son that Bobbie had passed. The teenager ran upstairs and punched his bedroom wall over and over, bloodying the knuckles on his shooting hand.

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Davis completed his high school basketball career with a grand total of four 3-pointers. He simply wasn’t strong enough to shoot comfortably from behind the arc. He was a 155-pound guard whose game centered on midrange jumpers, drives and post ups, and he didn’t dunk. Could that really work at the next level? Some still questioned his toughness. Too slight. All elbows and knees. He’s no Uncle Walt.

Before one practice in his junior season, Davis was talking to a Lake Braddock assistant coach about his goal to play at UNC. The coach told him: “That’s a dream. That’s not going to happen. You’re not that good. You’re not even the best player in this conference.”

“I was the best player in that area,” Davis says. “I thought, ‘Where is this coming from?’ But whenever people tell me no, that just fires me up.”

Davis remembered his mother’s story of Barnabus.

“I didn’t get any encouragement,” he remembers. “Nobody at my high school; no teachers, no coaches, no friends, nobody. I knew only two people who believed I could play at UNC. My dad and my mom.”

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As a little kid, Hubert told his mother that someday he would make so much money that his family would have its own mausoleum. When Bobbie passed, he attended her wake, where he tentatively approached the open casket, reached out and touched his mom’s hand. “It was like a bolt of lightning went through me, and I walked right out of the room,” he says.

When it came time for the funeral in Bobbie’s hometown of Winston-Salem, Hubert chose to stay home. “I didn’t go because I had promised her that none of us would go underneath the ground,” he says, “and I broke my promise to her.”

Hubert stayed with his football coach and played a game that Friday night.

It was his way of coping. Hubert remained in denial until the moment when his mother’s death finally sunk in. He recalls that for years when Bobbie arrived home from work at around 4 p.m., Binky would bound up onto the windowsill beside the front door to greet her. “After my mom passed, every day Binky used to keep jumping up on there,” he says. “And then one day after about two months, he stopped. Because he knew she wasn’t coming home.”

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When UNC basketball coach Dean Smith and his assistant Roy Williams ’72 came to visit the Davis house on Wax Myrtle Court in summer 1987 before Hubert’s senior year, Bobbie’s chair was empty. But her son could still hear her voice.  Anything is possible.

Hubert understood the situation. He knew that Coach Smith would not be in his living room if not for Smith’s relationships with Uncle Walt and with Hubert Sr., who had become a golfing buddy over the years. Hubert wasn’t a McDonald’s All-American or the kind of elite prospect Smith normally recruited. In fact, when Smith showed up that August, Hubert had scholarship offers from just two schools: George Mason and George Washington. Hubert quickly realized that Smith had come to de-recruit him.

Smith advised Davis to go to a mid-major. He said that if he came to UNC, he might never play. At one point, Smith even pulled Hubert Sr. aside and said that he’d hate to jeopardize his close ties with the Davis family.

“Coach Smith didn’t think I was good enough, athletic enough, quick enough to be able to play right away at Carolina,” Davis recalls. “I remember sitting there at 17 years old telling him, ‘You might be right that I can’t play at that level, but you won’t know for sure unless you give me a chance.’ ”

When Smith departed, Davis assumed that his Tar Heel dream left with him. But two days later, Davis received a phone call. Coach Smith told him that he’d thought a lot about what Hubert had said that night in the Davis living room, and he was going to give him the opportunity to come to UNC with no guarantee that he’d ever play. Hubert committed on the spot.


“Coach Smith didn’t think I was good enough, athletic enough, quick enough to be able to play right away at Carolina,” Davis recalls. “I remember sitting there at 17 years old telling him, ‘You might be right that I can’t play at that level, but you won’t know for sure unless you give me a chance.’ ”


A year later, Davis arrived in Chapel Hill quicker and stronger, saddled with the nickname Rook because he was the only member of his recruiting class. Rook began most days in his suite at Granville Towers by blasting the Jackson 5’s ABC at 7 a.m., much to the dismay of his suitemates, King Rice ’92, Rick Fox ’91 and Justin Kuralt ’91. At Tar Heel practices, Davis drilled jump shots as though he would have to chase them into the street if he missed. The kid who made only four 3-pointers in high school willed himself into a starter and the best 3-point percentage shooter in Tar Heel history. Four years after Smith tried to talk Davis out of UNC, Rook became a first-round draft pick of the New York Knicks.

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Dean Smith mentored Davis in more than basketball. He required that all of his freshmen attend church, watering the seed Bobbie had planted years before with “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Spirituality had never come naturally to Davis. As a kid, he resisted his mother’s pleas to join her at church, and when she died, he lost all faith. “I grew a tremendous hatred towards God,” he recalls. “I couldn’t understand any reason why he would take away my mom.”

One Sunday morning, as Davis sat restlessly through another of Coach Smith’s mandated Sunday services, he began thumbing through a Bible. He came upon a verse that was among Bobbie’s favorites. It suddenly resonated with him. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11


“He always told me what I needed to hear instead of what I wanted to hear,” Davis says. “That motivated me. I just relentlessly wanted to show him something different. The pleaser came out.”


Gradually, Davis started to believe that his mother’s passing was part of God’s plan to prosper him. Two days before the beginning of his junior year of college, Davis became a Christian.

“Instead of being upset that Jesus had taken away the most beautiful person in my life,” Davis says. “I became thankful every day that he gave me the best mom that I could ever have for 16 years.”

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In summer 1995, Davis arrived for a Knicks workout, preparing to be the team’s starting shooting guard in his fourth NBA season. Before the session, Davis was approached by Don Nelson, the Knicks’ new head coach. “You’re never going to play for me,” Nelson told Davis abruptly. “I know you can shoot the ball, but I need a basketball player. I need somebody who can shoot and rebound and defend and handle the basketball. I don’t need a one-dimensional player.”

Davis was stunned, faced with yet another can’t. Beginning with the workout that day, he set about expanding his game, focusing on the weaknesses Nelson had identified. Nelson quickly came to understand that Davis thrived on being underestimated. To push him, Nelson sometimes stuck Davis on the scout team during practices and was even known to yell at him on the sideline when Davis wasn’t even in the game. “He always told me what I needed to hear instead of what I wanted to hear,” Davis says. “That motivated me. I just relentlessly wanted to show him something different. The pleaser came out.”

Davis believes his improved defense and ballhandling helped extend his pro career to 12 seasons, during which he produced the third-highest 3-point shooting percentage in league history and even played his last four seasons as a point guard. Among his proudest NBA moments occurred before the 1997 season, when he signed as a free agent with Dallas. The Mavericks general manager at the time? Don Nelson.

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Hubert Davis Sr. still lives in that house on Wax Myrtle Court. “I don’t go home very often,” Hubert Jr. says. “It’s just hard. Everything in the house reminds me of her. It’s so interesting that my dad won’t leave home because my mom is there, and I won’t go home because my mom is there.”

Truth is, childhood homes don’t always feel like home forever. Ever since the day Dean Smith invited him to come to Chapel Hill, Davis said it felt like home. He became a college basketball star there. He with fell in love with and married, Leslie Seigle Davis ’93, there. He became a Christian there. He bought his first house there, and when his NBA career ended and he and Leslie could settle anywhere, they chose to move back there. Their three children were born there. He worked there for nine seasons as a Tar Heels assistant coach. And then in April, he got his dream job there, walking in the footsteps of Dean Smith and Roy Williams.

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“I know there are plenty of people saying I can’t do this job,” says Hubert Davis, in his new Smith Center office. “Well, I played at UNC, and I played in the NBA, and I’ve been in some pressure situations. I’ve got thick skin. Every significant thing I’ve ever done in my life has come after I had someone telling me I can’t do it. I’m OK with criticism because my mom prepared me for that.”

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

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“She’s here. …”

Davis felt his mother’s presence inside the Smith Center on April 6 as he spoke on his first day as the Tar Heels’ head basketball coach. He saw Bobbie in his family, who sat in the audience on the court that afternoon. “I could see her in how my dad loves her,” he says. “My daughter looks just like my mom. My oldest son has my mom’s heart. My youngest son has my mom’s easygoing personality.”

He still speaks to her. He visits Bobbie’s gravesite regularly and talks to her about life, son to mother, just like he did on those drives to her chemo treatments when he was a teenager.

“It would have been awesome if the first time I walked out of that tunnel as the UNC coach if she could have been sitting there behind our bench,” Davis says wistfully. “She would never have believed what has happened to me in my life, but she would have loved it.”


“It’s going to be a good conversation when I finally get to see her again. The first thing I’ll ask her is, ‘Did I do OK? Are you proud of me?’ ”


She is always there. She’s been there for the past nine years when the Tar Heels huddled moments before taking the court to recite “The Lord’s Prayer.” She is there when he dusts off his cello at Christmastime and plays Jingle Bells for his cackling kids. She is there when he stumbles upon one of Bobbie’s letters written in her elegant cursive handwriting. She is there in the way he was always encouraging during his seven seasons as UNC’s junior varsity coach, reassuring his players that anything is possible.

“I can still hear her voice … barely,” he says. “It’s going to be a good conversation when I finally get to see her again. The first thing I’ll ask her is, ‘Did I do OK? Are you proud of me?’ ”

Which brings us back to the question that opens this story.

Do you think you would have accomplished everything you have if your mom hadn’t had cancer?

Just months into his new job coaching the Tar Heels, Bobbie’s son sits on the terrace outside his office and considers the subject again.

“I would like to think I would have, but I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if I would have had the toughness to persevere whenever things got really hard. That’s what changed me. Anytime I’ve ever doubted if I could do something, I’ve thought that if I can get through losing my mom, I can do anything.”

— Tim Crothers ’86, a lecturer in UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, is the author of three books and hundreds of stories for Sports Illustrated.


 

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