The North Carolina bench reacts after Charlie Scott hits a last-second shot in 1969 to send the Tar Heels to the Final Four. By SCOTT FOWLER This book isn’t about Michael Jordan. You already know what happened to him. It’s not about North Carolina’s 2005 national championship team. We don’t know yet what will ultimately happen to all of those outstanding players. This book is about 35 other men who also wore Carolina blue basketball jerseys – and what happened after they took those jerseys off for the last time. Some of the men whose lives are chronicled in North Carolina Tar Heels: Where Have You Gone? were superstars in Chapel Hill – men like Phil Ford, Billy Cunningham, Larry Miller, Al Wood and Charlie Scott. Some of them also won national championships, like Eric Montross and Lennie Rosenbluth. Some of them barely played at all at UNC but became major successes in other fields – doctors, dentists, bank presidents, teachers and ministers. All of them have both a public and private history. If you’re a Tar Heel fan, you know part of it – the public record of the basketball games they won and lost during their time at UNC. But you don’t know about their personal hardships, their families and their triumphs. You don’t know which one had his NBA career ended by a baby gate. Or which one became the CEO of the second-largest bank in the world. Or which one came to the North Carolina basketball reunion in February 2004 just two months after a brain aneurysm nearly killed him. All of these former players trusted me and let me into their lives to allow me to tell their stories, and for that I will always be grateful. It undoubtedly helped that I am a North Carolina alumnus myself (Class of 1987), as well as a former sports editor at The Daily Tar Heel, the excellent campus newspaper at UNC. Like all of these men, I treasured my own college experience at Chapel Hill. My real job now is sports columnist for The Charlotte Observer, where I have worked since 1994 writing four columns a week on all sports topics. This book contains 35 chapters, each focusing on a different former Tar Heel basketball player. The cornerstone of each and every chapter -- my in-depth interview with the player himself. I decided early in this project to only write about players who were 1) alive; 2) extremely interesting from a journalistic standpoint; and 3) totally willing to cooperate. The cooperation part turned out to be a little easier than I thought. Every player I was able to find and speak with directly was happy to have his story included as part of this book -- and to grant the detailed interview necessary to make that happen. About half of my interviews with these players were done on the phone (mostly the players who live out of state). The others were conducted in person. Among many other notable experiences, this book afforded me the chance to eat pancakes at an IHOP with Al Wood; talk with Tom LaGarde in his old dairy barn now filled with vintage wood; watch a UNC-Wake Forest basketball game on TV with Brian Reese; spend most of a day in Asheville with Joseph Forte; get tricked by a prank call from Steve Previs; tour principal Lee Dedmon’s excellent high school in Gastonia; visit Charlie Shaffer in Atlanta and his extraordinary Marcus Institute; and marvel at the sanctuary of Charlotte’s innovative Forest Hill Church with pastor David Chadwick. Dozens more former UNC players could have been included in this book, and it’s almost certain that a few of your favorite players have been left out. Sorry about that. I tried to choose a representative sampling from each decade, starting with the 1950s. But I also wanted to keep the number of chapters somewhat manageable so I could write longer, more revealing stories about each man. I chose not to write about current NBA all-stars with UNC pedigrees, since all you have to do to find out where Antawn Jamison, Rasheed Wallace, Vince Carter and Jerry Stackhouse are right now is to check the NBA schedule in today’s newspaper. I also tried to select a variety of players, from UNC’s all-time leading scorer Phil Ford (2,290 points – Chapter 22) to former Charlotte mayor Richard Vinroot (exactly one point – Chapter 7). Five of North Carolina’s top six scorers in history agreed to interviews for this book – Ford, Rosenbluth, Scott, Wood and Miller. So did several men who barely played at all but who have lived fascinating lives since then. I was also able to interview former North Carolina coaches Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge at considerable length about many of the players in this book, and I so much appreciate their time. Coach Smith turned 74 in 2005. Once in our interview he joked about having a “senior moment,” but don’t let him fool you. Smith’s legendary memory is still virtually photographic. In his familiar nasal twang, Smith rattled off the names of his former players’ wives and children, along with recent tidbits about their current jobs and successes, throughout our interview. “All of my players are so special to me,” Smith said several times. I hope that all of our own children some day have a teacher who cares as much about his pupils as Smith always has and still does. END OF EXCERPT Lennie Rosenbluth and Sean May share a North Carolina basketball heritage and also each won national championships at the school.