If Armando Bacot took off his right shoe, he wasn’t sure he would get it back on.
So, the logical solution? Don’t take it off … even to sleep.
That was Bacot’s reality on the night of April 2, 2022 — hours after he led North Carolina to a Final Four victory over arch-rival Duke, ending Mike Krzyzewski’s career. In the last few minutes of the Tar Heels’ 81-77 win at the Superdome, Bacot rolled his right ankle, in the worst sense of the word. Mangled is more like it. As evening turned to early morning, Bacot — sprawled out on a somehow-too-small king bed in the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel — could not get his ankle to stop swelling. In just a few hours, it had grown to the size of a grapefruit, maybe a cantaloupe. Depends on your produce provider.
A lot of people don’t know,” UNC assistant coach Sean May says. “He was hurt. Like, bad.”
But as Bacot lay in bed, staring down at his balloon of an ankle — knowing the national championship game against Kansas was less than 48 hours away — he couldn’t stop ruminating on his past.
The losing. The boos. The embarrassment.
Through his first two seasons at North Carolina, Bacot had lost more games than any Tar Heels player in a two-year stretch in almost two decades.
“I hadn’t done anything,” he says 18 months later. “I was one of the most losingest players in UNC history.
