BY RODERICK BOONE
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Lost in all the excitement of North Carolina's pasting of Mount St. Mary's last night was an embarrassing moment for Marcus Ginyard.
Ginyard collected a steal and had a fastbreak all by his lonesome. So he goes up to dunk ... and gets stuck on the rim. He fell to the floor and smirked a bit as he ran downcourt to get back on the defensive end. He knew he was going to hear about that and he sure did.
Here's what he had to say about it today:
"Didn't work out the way it was planned obviously," Ginyard said. "Was feeling a little stiff out there. I told Coach before when I came in, he looked at me and said, 'Are you OK?'"
"I said, 'Yeah I'm all right, a little stiff.'"
"He said, 'You haven't been playing, you have two fouls.'"
"And I said, 'I'm a little stiff staying on the bench and when I'm playing, I'm sore. I don't know what to do.'"
"He said, 'Get out there old man'" and I got out there and next thing I know I'm out on the break things slowed down a little bit, didn't quite feel right. And tried to get my steps together, tried to go up kind of smooth, didn't want to get too much emphasis or anything like that. But I guess my knees just tightened up on me, and I didn't get up quite as high as I needed to, and just didn't come down right. And the worst part about it was falling down on my butt afterwards. So I got a lot of texts last night telling me how my butt was feeling. It's doing fine. Thank you for the concern."
Then he added this: "I'm hoping to get it back and I'm planning to. So just be on the lookout for that."
Now, back in the day when I was growing up, that's what we call a Gumby. He basically rejected himself and his teammates gave him the business.
"He caught a lot for it," Tyler Hansbrough said when I asked him about it. "Just to be honest with you. He was pretty open there and it's definitely embarrassing."
Said Ty Lawson: "Once he missed and came to the bench, we were talking about how he missed it, tell him to ice his shoulder and things like that. Coach said, 'That's probably one of the wosrt dunks that they had as a player.' But it looked pretty bad. We seen it last night on the news. It was terrible."
Yup, Ginyard will never live that one down.