March Madman

"When Greg came home, the doctors said he'd never ride a bike again," says Gene. "Well, one of the first things we did was get a bicycle and go down to the baseball field. He'd fall off and pick himself up, but eventually he rode that bike. You couldn't tell Greg he couldn't do something. He even played high school basketball. He wasn't a star, but he'd get in a game and, boy, you talk about an ovation." No one cheered louder than Tyler, who later took Greg's number 50 and still wears it in honor of his brother.

These days, when Greg isn't finishing up his senior year at Columbia (Mo.) College and preparing for his future job as a track coach, you can find him training just as hard as his brothers. He has run three marathons and six half-marathons. "I could sit here for hours and tell you how proud I am of him and how much he's done for me," Tyler says. "For him to beat the odds and run marathons is just unbelievable."

WHEN HANSBROUGH arrived in Chapel Hill in the fall of 2005, he had never used e-mail. He had never eaten sushi or bison or ostrich. He had never danced in a lecture hall in front of 200 people. And he most certainly had never had a pedicure. Today he does all of those things, even as he holds on to the influence of the beloved hometown he calls The Bluff. (That's plain to see in his black Dodge Ram pickup, with its cattle guard the size of a small Mississippi River barge.) "I love college, just being here and living with these guys," Hansbrough says.

Maybe that's why he has already cosigned the house lease for next fall, why he vows there's only one scenario that might cause him not to return for his senior season. "If I were to leave early," Hansbrough says, "I'd want to have that national championship." The desire for a title drives him mercilessly. When the Tar Heels fell behind by 18 points at Boston College last Saturday, it was Hansbrough who led a furious comeback, finishing with 25 points. Carolina won by 10. "He has almost put this team on his back," says Ginyard. "He wants the game in his hands."

And so, as the season winds down, Hansbrough's coach will file away every moment in his memory bank. "When he leaves, I'm going to just sit and think about how lucky I was to have coached that kid," Williams says. "I've had great players, but this one is unique. Every moment he's thinking, How can I be the best player I can be?"

There's also a human side to Hansbrough that was harder to see two seasons ago, when his shyness sometimes made him appear like a hoops-playing cyborg. "When I first met him, he barely talked," says Frasor, his roommate for three years. "Now he's on campus talking to people, making jokes, showing his personality." For Halloween, Hansbrough poked fun at himself by donning the face mask he wore in last year's NCAA tournament and dressing up as Jason from the Friday the 13th movies. During his performance communications class last fall, Hansbrough did the Souljah Boy and Oompah-Loompah dances on stage in his and Frasor's rendition of the YouTube clip Evolution of Dance.

This is no robot, after all. He bleeds. He cries. And he's not as fearless as he seems. He has an abject dread of elevators and airplanes. After a game at Georgia Tech last season, in fact, Hansbrough was so freaked out by the windy conditions that he begged off the team's charter flight and took the bus by himself back to Chapel Hill. "I'm pretty terrified of flying," says Hansbrough, who calls earning potential bus trips to Raleigh and Charlotte for the NCAA tournament "another motivating factor" for trying to clinch the No. 1 seed in the East region.

Who knew? Maybe, in the end, we needed to see Hansbrough's imperfections before we could fully appreciate his achievements, before we could embrace him as the Face of College Basketball. Now, on the eve of perhaps his finest hour, there is no disputing that title. "I think he's more worthy than anybody we've seen in a long time," says Williams. "You're talking about the highest character, the highest degree of dedication and desire and focus. There will be other players who are better than Tyler, but I don't know that there will ever be another Tyler Hansbrough."