Eight NBA All-Star selections and Olympic gold generally means an athlete has put their sport ahead of pretty much everything in life. Not Vince Carter, though. In 2001, Carter, who was with the Toronto Raptors at the time, hopped on a plane before Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Phildelphia 76ers to attend his college graduation ceremony.
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Carter left school for the NBA in 1998 but completed college through correspondence and got a degree in Afro-American studies. He graduated with the rest of his University of North Carolina class but found himself under severe scrutiny because of his last-minute travels.
Carter recently joined Dwyane Wade, D Wright and Chris Johnson for an episode of Time Out with Dwyane Wade, where he truthfully detailed the entire discourse from 20 years ago.
Wright is the one who brought up the subject, saying, “Talk about the mental toughness that you needed to have with all the media, all the noise that was going on around your decision to … get your diploma.”
Carter began by explaining that he came from a family of educators. “Everybody in my family are all school teachers. It’s student-athlete not athlete-student. I was always taught that,” he said. “And prior to me realizing when graduation was, I worked my butt off for that. I’m a professional player, but I went back to school, every summer to finish my degree.”
“So I am going to walk like everybody else. And hearing some of these professional people who walked across [the] stage to get their degree being critical about it, which was crazy to me. Okay, fine. I didn’t get a lot of support from the league … We are always talking about student-athletes. We always talk about it and are promoted,” Carter continued.
“Well, here it is, live in your face. One of your athletes is doing it. Thats fine too. The bigger goal is, I made a promise to my mom that I would go back and get my degree if I left school early, which I did after junior year. Not only I did that … I am going to finish that job. That was finishing the job for me,” Carter explained.
Impassioned, Carter continued, “So I went to every player on that team, man to man, face to face and said, ‘This is what I am going to do. This is when I am leaving. This is when I will be back.” To his surprise, every single player he talked to was okay with it, as long as he got back on time and it didn’t affect is performance.
Now, this was Game 7 versus Allen Iverson, on the road, but, “I graduated at Chapel Hill at 9 a.m.,” Carter recalled, adding that, despite his jetting back to Philly on a private plane, the media made a real meal out of the story. A backup jet was even waiting in case the first one broke down.
Carter made it back in the time for the team meeting and was the first to mark attendance. But it didn’t matter to the media, who couldn’t seem to allow truth to get in the way of a good story.
