McGuire was a New York guy himself, and he knew where he wanted to go for his players. Many of us were first-generation Irish kids, except for Lennie, who is Jewish. "Most of us came from the same neck of the woods, the New York metropolitan area. "There's lots of reasons we were so unified as a team," Young said. The two remain in close contact today, as do the other three surviving members of that 32-0 squad. Young recalls leaving Penn Station in Manhattan with future Tar Heels star Lennie Rosenbluth in the summer of 1953. Young was among a group of transplanted New Yorkers recruited by coach Frank McGuire in the mid-1950s that formed the nucleus of the championship team. "Prior to us arriving there, we were a football school. "I still do some things with the university, and it's nice that people remember that 1957 team, because we were the first team to win it all," Young said. Young was the sixth man on the undefeated 1956-57 squad - the first of North Carolina's five national championship squads. "But the size and overall depth of North Carolina wore them down." They played hard and made it a game for a while," said Young, whose wife has since passed on. He watched with keen interest as the top-seeded Tar Heels got all they could handle from FGCU early before pulling away for an 83-67 first-round victory last Thursday. He follows North Carolina basketball religiously, and always gets that special feeling when the tournament rolls around. Young, 80, started coming to Naples with his wife Pat part-time in 1989, and became a full-time resident a few years ago. It's a distinction the school still holds today - nearly 60 years, 1,448 wins, 16 Final Four appearances and four national championships later. Young left four years later a national champion, and helped plant the seeds establishing North Carolina as a top destination for high school hoopsters across the nation. When Bob Young stepped onto the North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill in 1953, he was a New York City boy playing hoops at a football school in the South.
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