A segment early on in the ESPN broadcast of Friday night’s marquee game laid out the dizzying number of ties between the Kansas and North Carolina basketball programs.
A direct line extends back from both programs’ current head coaches to the inventor of the game, James Naismith, who coached Phog Allen, who coached Dean Smith, who coached Larry Brown and Hubert Davis (the current UNC basketball coach).
Larry Brown, meanwhile, went on to win a national title as Kansas’ coach and for one season had Bill Self – KU’s current coach – as his assistant.
Naturally, the segment showcased Roy Williams. Nobody better represents both programs than the 74-year-old Smith disciple who took KU to four Final Fours in 15 years as the Jayhawks’ head coach before winning three national titles in 18 years at the helm of his alma mater in Chapel Hill, N.C.
Williams, too, is the chief reason behind one of most interesting “what ifs” in UNC/Kansas basketball history – Razorback great Ronnie Brewer would have instead suited up in blue for the Hall of Fame coach had Williams not kept his word to a certain Tar Heel recruit.
To understand why Brewer, a two-time All-SEC player with the Hogs in the early- to mid-2000s and 10-year pro basketball player, came so close to playing out of state, you have to go back to his days as an impressionable child sitting in the bleachers at Fayetteville High, watching in awe as Nick Bradford did practically whatever he pleased as the Bulldogs’ star in the mid- to late-1990s.
Brewer, the son of Arkansas basketball great Ron Brewer, recalls watching the 6-foot-7 Bradford show out while sitting in the front row, bag of popcorn in hand, was often the highlight of his Fridays.
“He had semi-baggy shorts, a headband kind of skinny guy, kind of like me – but he had a sweet, sweet game,” Brewer, age 39, said this summer. “He’s a lefty. He could shoot the basketball from three, he could shoot the ball from mid range, but he’d also get to the rack. He could also make plays for others. And I thought he was the greatest thing I’d seen.”
In time, Brewer got to know Bradford – about six and a half years older – not just from those official games, but pickups all over town – places like the Yvonne Richardson Center, the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club.
So when Bradford chose to attend Kansas, where he quickly made a splash, Brewer and a group of family friends like the Fennels and Tony Blackburn resolved to drive to Lawrence, Kan., and support him “no matter what. He’s not a Razorback, but he’s family. So when he went up to Kansas, we all became Kansas Jayhawk fans” as well as supporters of the local Razorbacks.
Brewer started attending Roy Williams’ summer basketball camps, where Bradford helped open a whole new world to him. Once, in the cafeteria at camp, Brewer recalled Bradford inviting him over to sit with him and his KU basketball royalty teammates.
“I sit with him and Paul Pierce and Jacque Vaughn and all these dudes around Scott Pollard. I’m like, ‘Bro, what?’” Brewer said. “I come back another year and you got Wayne Simien and Kirk Heinrich and Nick Collison, Lester Earl, all these bigger-than-life personalities that I’m seeing. Ryan Robertson, Jeff Boschee, Jared Haase [then an assistant]. I mean, you can go on and on and on and on.”
As the summers went on, Brewer kept playing up in age at the camp and impressing Roy Williams. Eventually, once he became the kind of star at Fayetteville High that Bradford had been, he too got a scholarship offer from the Jayhawks.
That meant so much to him that to this day, that offer – along with the Razorbacks’ scholarship letter – both sit framed on his wall in his home office.
Kansas was very much in the hunt to get Brewer’s signature because his front-runner, Arkansas, had a major falling out with former head coach Nolan Richardson in the spring of 2002, Brewer’s junior year in high school. While Brewer would have loved to play for Richardson or Mike Anderson, then his top assistant, he didn’t know Richardson’s successor Stan Heath.
So, for much of his senior year, Brewer felt like Kansas was in the lead as Heath and his Arkansas basketball staff put the full court press on him. “I really thought that I was going to go [to Kansas] because of the history, the culture, the final product of what they were doing, they were producing pros.”
North Carolina Basketball and Ronnie Brewer?
North Carolina native Roy Williams, however, answered the bell when Matt Doherty was fired from UNC after the 2002-03 season. Doherty had been the latest failed experiment to find a suitable replacement for Dean Smith following the legend’s 1997 retirement. Williams couldn’t resist the call of his home state and left Kansas in the spring of 2003 to take over the Tar Heels.
Once in Chapel Hill, Williams “reached out to me and was like, ‘Ronnie, we signed the No. 1 recruiting class with Raymond Felton, Rashad McCants, Marvin Williams, Sean May – they had Jackie Manuel, Jawad Williams, all these guys. It was great.”
The rub: UNC had only one full scholarship available.
Compounding the issue, it had already been offered by Willams’ predecessor Matt Doherty to an incoming freshman, a North Carolina native named Reyshawn Terry who at 6-foot-8 played on the wing like the 6-foot-7 Brewer.
Terry had already signed his NLI in the early signing period, and Williams decided to stay true to Doherty’s offer. Brewer says he did offer a walk-on position, but Brewer knew he was good enough to stand out at a high major program and didn’t want to go down that route.
If Williams never left Kansas, Brewer feels like he “probably” would have signed with the Jayhawks. Had he been offered a full scholarship by Wiliams at UNC, meanwhile, he says it’s certain he would have been a Tar Heel.
In the end, however, Arkansas won out. The pitch coming from Stan Heath and former UA assistant Oronde Taliaferro was simple: “If you come to Arkansas, you’re going to be our guy. We’re going to recruit you harder than anybody in the country. We’re going to come up with a player development plan.”
“Ultimately they recruited me harder than anybody in the country. At every AAU game that they were able to attend, they would come to every practice, they would attend high school, and ultimately they outworked everybody else combined.”
In the end, it all worked out. Brewer stayed true to his roots, while Roy Williams stayed true to his.
Lessons Learned for Arkansas Basketball Recruiting
And these days, Brewer gets to put some of those same recruiting tactics he absorbed from the likes of Heath and Taliferro to good use in his everyday life when recruiting all the blue-chip high schoolers that his new boss, John Calipari, wants to scout.
He’s even gotten to recruit his basketball hero, Nick Bradford, back to Fayetteville.
After a couple seasons coaching together at Fayetteville High, Brewer took his job on the Hogs staff and not long afterward Bradford took an assistant position coaching the women’s basketball team at Wichita State.
When an assistant position on Mike Neighbors’ UA staff opened up this past offseason, however, Bradford asked his friend what he thought about it.
“I was like ‘the opportunity to be able to coach back at home, there’s nothing like it. To be able to see your mom come to a game and how happy she is to see you on the sideline or your friends and other family members to be able to come to Bud Walton where you wanted to play and you should have played and you’re walking the sideline as a coach.’”
Nick Bradford decided to join Neighbors’ staff and is now in his first year of coaching the women Razorbacks. Both men told Best of Arkansas Sports how much it means to them to get to share the same office building with each after decades of friendship.
“We’re all living our dream, trying to push to get better, push to thrive, to get better, push to achieve high levels,” Brewer said.
Some of that means being willing to take your licks against top-tier competition early in the season to get the kinds of lessons needed for March success.
Brewer just finished such a trip to Dallas this weekend when he coached in a 5-point loss to the No. 8 Bears at American Airlines Center.
In a plaza just south of that arena is a 24-foot statue of Dirk Nowitzki shooting a one-legged jumper with a message that should resonate for fans of the Mavericks, Razorbacks and Tar Heels alike: “Loyalty Never Fades Away.”
***
The above photos, taken while Brewer and Bradford coached at Fayetteville High, are courtesy of Nick Bradford. The top one might have originally been taken by Andy Shupe.
