July 16, 2002

By Adam Lucas
Tar Heel Monthly

Fred Quartlebaum can't help himself. He is supposed to be giving an interview, supposed to be discussing the type of player he was as a point guard at Fordham University.

"When you get to college, everyone can score," he is saying, "So you have to separate yourself. My thing was defense, and..."

And all of a sudden you are left standing on the sidelines in a sweltering gymnasium dangling a tape recorder while Quartlebaum bounds onto the nearby court at Carolina Basketball School, yelling, "Whoa whoa whoa! What have we got here! This man just took a charge and you're just standing there looking at him! Pick him up! He just sacrificed his body for the team!"

The charge-taker remains sprawled on the ground, looking up at Quartlebaum a bit incredulously. This is a game played by 12-year-olds in Fetzer Gym on Carolina's campus, which on this particular summer day feels like the inside of an overheated hair dryer. Taking a charge was not expected to generate this kind of enthusiastic response. The player's teammates sprint over to pick him off the floor. Quartlebaum gives the entire team a high-five and returns to his interview.

"Sorry about that," he says.

But there is nothing to be sorry about, because in that moment you have learned all you need to know about Fred Quartlebaum. Wipe the sweat off your forehead, because there is no better place than inside a hot gym to get to know the man known to almost everyone as "Coach Q." This, more than the four walls back at the Smith Center, is his office. This is where he feels at home, where he walks in and immediately sees three people who he greets by name, asking them about their spouses or children-by name, of course. Gyms like this are where he will spend the better part of the month of July, mining for the next generation of Tar Heel talent. Sit down over on the bleachers by the sideline? No way. Stand up behind the baseline, where you can take in two courts at once, where you can feel the speed of the game as the players careen out of bounds.

Q knows gyms because he spent much of his childhood in New York City, where they have some of the best basketball in the world. The third-year Tar Heel assistant, the son of a New York City bus driver and a Bronx-area court reporter, played for the legendary Riverside Church AAU basketball program in New York and established the basketball relationships that go with the playgrounds in the City. He played at Fordham, where he eschewed the high-scoring, slick-passing reputation that often attaches itself to New York point guards and instead focused on defense. How little did he focus on offense? Check out the career three-point shooting statistics: three attempted, one made.

Since he wasn't going to win many NBA long-distance shootouts, it seemed natural to go into coaching. Quartlebaum spent one season as the head coach at Rye High School. From there, he jumped to the Naval Academy as an assistant coach, where Q turned into Ensign Quartlebaum. Assistants were required to enlist in the Navy. On his first day in Annapolis, just minutes after being sworn in as an officer, he was walking down a city street wearing his summer whites when he saw what appeared to be official-looking Navy men approaching.

"I didn't really know how to salute, but I figured, whenever in doubt, salute," Quartlebaum said. "I threw my hand up there and kept on walking. I didn't even stop to see if I was acknowledged, because I was too nervous."

Part of his assignment as an officer was to teach physical education to a class of midshipmen. Shortly after his first day, two students approached him after class with a tip.

"Coach Q, you remember that day you saw us on the street?" they asked him. "You don't have to salute us. We salute you. You're an officer."

"He would do things wrong all the time, but you had to admire it because he always did them with a big smile on his face," said fellow Tar Heel assistant Doug Wojcik, who graduated from the Naval Academy and was a fellow assistant coach at Navy.

That positive personality served Quartlebaum well at the Academy. When he left in 1996, he had moved up to the rank of lieutenant junior grade. His next stop was Towson State, where he got his first taste of the Duke-Carolina rivalry. Quartlebaum was friendly with Tim O'Toole, who at that time was an assistant coach under Mike Krzyzewski. One spring weekend in 1997, a recruiting trip brought the Towson assistant to Tobacco Road. He was scheduled to drive back to the office the day of the Duke-Carolina game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, but O'Toole told him that he couldn't pass up an opportunity to attend the best rivalry in college basketball.

"I figured if I was going to get fired, I might as well get fired over going to the Duke-Carolina game," Quartlebaum said.

He went to the game and O'Toole landed him primo seats directly behind the Duke bench-and directly in the line of the ESPN television cameras, which beamed his distinctive shaved head all the way back to Towson, where his boss had a clear view of his assistant coach who was supposedly out recruiting instead sitting in the stands watching the Devils pull one out over Carolina.

It didn't cost Quartlebaum his job, but the game did serve as an awakening. "I had been at Navy, and the Army-Navy game is really special," he said. "Beat Army-those are the first two words that midshipmen learn. But Carolina-Duke is priceless."

Flash forward three years later, and Q has moved up in his profession. He vaulted from Towson to Holy Cross to Fairfield before former colleague Wojcik put in a good word for him with a fellow New Yorker named Matt Doherty, who had just gotten the head coaching job at Notre Dame. Soon Quartlebaum was a member of the Fighting Irish, which is where he found himself in the summer of 2000 when Bill Guthridge resigned from the University of North Carolina.

On that day, Quartlebaum's family was vacationing with Doherty's family near Lake Michigan. Guthridge's retirement didn't really shock Quartlebaum, since he assumed Roy Williams would be the next Tar Heel coach. A couple twists and turns later, and he found himself in the Bowles Room of the Smith Center in a little over a week, being introduced to a somewhat quizzical crowd as a member of the next Carolina staff.

Even as he was introduced, Quartlebaum had never seen the basketball court at the Dean Dome. It wasn't until several hours later-after he left the press conference and immediately began working the telephones with potential recruits-at about 2:30 a.m. that he stuck his head in the 21,500 seat palace to check out his new digs.

He's gotten more familiar with the place since then, comfortable enough to give flawless directions to Bingham Hall to perplexed parents of freshmen wandering the campus one summer afternoon. "You have Carolina on your shirt and you just look like you know your way around," they tell him when they stop to ask. As he's sending them on their way, he gives them the Q smile, a 120-watt grin, and says, "That's where it is, I promise you."

Then he hops back in his car, which has Jay-Z thumping out of the speakers. So now we've got the perfect portrait of the man, right? Slick recruiter, city guy, sharp dresser, got everything he needs to connect with today's kids right down to the proper CD's in the car. He's Q.

All that is true-he is all of those things. But he's also Fred Quartlebaum. Dig a little deeper and you'll find out that he may be the most well-rounded person on the basketball staff. A voracious reader who makes it his goal to read one new book every month, he's devoured books on military history, music, and, of course, basketball. Even the birth of his second child in May hasn't slowed down his reading, as he's currently zipping through the latest Rick Pitino book.

And about that music? The rap that would make many occupants of those light blue Smith Center seats cover their ears and furrow their brows? Don't let it fool you. Quartlebaum serves as Matt Doherty's DJ of choice, often picking up CD's for the head coach when he gets a free minute.

"I tell him that he has a license to pick me up one or two whenever he's out," Doherty said. "He has to, because otherwise I just keep the same CD's in my car until I get a new car. He picked me up a little Sting one time, and I got some Najee one time."

So which is the bigger surprise? That Q would be listening to Sting, or that Doherty would drive to Najee, a mellow jazz musician?

Does that surprise you? All of a sudden this nearly 35-year-old man doesn't seem to be quite so simple. You're still standing in that gym, waiting for the last bead of sweat to roll down your forehead, when all of a sudden the interview subject turns serious, and a thin smile remains but there is no mistaking the intensity that burns in the man's eyes. He has been watching the game taking place in front of you, but now he turns to you and touches you on the arm to make sure his point is sinking in.

"What I want is players who are passionate about the game," Quartlebaum said. "I wouldn't want someone working with me who didn't love what they do. I would feel like I was being cheated out of something. When you get that, when you have players who want to win and are team players, that's when you have something special. That's when you've got championships."

And then he is ready to go, having seen his fill of ragged, heat-induced basketball for the day. So he heads back to his car, the one that's got jazz and rap in the same CD changer. But he can't leave before he speaks to two more people, asking, "How are things?" with that smile that convinces you that he really does want to know the answer.

Then he's gone, back in the car, perhaps with time to pick up a quick CD or a new book for the nightstand. The sound of Jay-Z fills the air.

Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com