How UNC’s Hubert Davis and Duke’s Christian Laettner went from rivals to close friends
Thirty years after his last game against Duke as a player, as Hubert Davis prepares for his first game against Duke as head coach, Christian Laettner is on his mind again, and it has very little to do with basketball.
Davis and Laettner played 11 games against each other through one of the more memorable periods of the rivalry, with North Carolina rising in opposition to one of Duke’s greatest teams. As a senior, he helped the Tar Heels upset the eventual national champions at the Smith Center before scoring a career-high 35 points in a loss at Cameron.
But the games they played as college players with UNC holding a 6-5 edge, including two ACC championship games, don’t resonate with Davis now. His friendship with Laettner does, born not out of competition in college but as NBA teammates some eight years later when Laettner joined Davis with the Dallas Mavericks.
“There’s a lot of great memories from those games and those rivalry games, but I’ll tell you this: My best friend from the 12 years I played in the NBA is Christian Laettner,” Davis said this week.
They spent three seasons as teammates, being traded together to the Washington Wizards in 2001, putting aside old college rivalries as they formed an unlikely friendship along the way.
“He would either come over to my house or I would go over to his,” Davis said. “We both loved playing ping-pong. We were both competitive and we would just play ping-pong all day after practice. My wife and his wife got along.
“To think of us from a competitive standpoint not liking each other while we were here, to later in our life really enjoy our friendship and being around each other and enjoy playing together, I just think it’s really cool. When I tell people that, that it’s Christian and I have a great relationship with him, people are shocked, but we do.”
Laettner, sadly, couldn’t be reached for his side of the story, but it’s curious that the famously iconoclastic Duke loyalist found common ground with a player whose roots at North Carolina run two generations deep.
Or is it?
One of the many aspects of this rivalry that makes it so enduring ranges far from the popular conception of hate and bile, even if blood was spilled while Laettner and Davis were on the court. (Eric Montross’ blood, in the 1992 upset in Chapel Hill, just to start.) There’s a secret kinship behind it, the shared experience that only someone who has been through it – on either side – can understand.
Did that play a role in the NBA friendship between Davis and Laettner? Davis said this week he doesn’t think so. He said he enjoyed the directness of Laettner’s personality and his competitive fire both on the court as a teammate and on the ping-pong table as an opponent. (Virginia coach Tony Bennett, who played with Laettner with USA Basketball in Cuba, can verify: “He’s a really good ping-pong player and we used to go at it.”)
But from the outside, it’s also easy to see how they are both members of a club that admits very few, whether they realize it or not. Davis seemed to realize that a long time ago.
“Everybody seems to think we hate each other, and on the court I guess we do, but we do respect each other,” Davis said … in 1992.
Davis has been a charter member of that club, as a player and as an assistant coach. But this is a new rite of passage, under new circumstances. He will become the fifth North Carolina coach to go up against Mike Krzyzewski, but he will also be the last, and it’s fitting that the Tar Heels should be starting a new era of basketball just as the Blue Devils are ending one.
As different as they were, you didn’t have to look hard to find the common ground between Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, just as it came to exist – eventually – between Krzyzewski and Smith. Davis, at the beginning of his head-coaching career, will never have that with Krzyzewski. Time is too short. Perhaps it will develop between Davis and Jon Scheyer, should they both endure as long as their predecessors.
At the very least, he’ll always have Laettner, the bitter rival who became a close friend.
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 6:05 AM.
