Editor’s note: The original article was published by Randy B. Young. https://thelocalreporter.press/foy-roberson-jr-legacy-of-leadership-and-sacrifice/
Each season from 1942 to 2012, the Tar Heel basketball team and coaches voted on who would receive the Foy Roberson Award, Jr. as the team’s “most inspirational” player, so named for former player Foy Roberson, Jr., who in 1941 was so inspired as to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country.
The Foy Roberson Award became one of the most coveted bestowed by the Tar Heels.
“When I won the award, I remember sitting back down at the table,” said 1976 recipient and former Assistant Coach Dave Hanners. “Then Mitch Kupchak, who won team MVP and a lot of other things that year, told me, ‘That was the award I wanted.’”
But while Foy Roberson’s name continues to warrant footnotes in ancient media guides, much of the memory of who he truly was and what he meant to UNC has faded.
Named “Best All-around Man” as a senior at Durham High School, Roberson entered Carolina in 1936 (when future Tar Heel Basketball Hall of Fame Coach Dean Smith was in kindergarten). From there, the student-athlete Roberson continued to achieve.
The 6-0 left-hander lettered at guard for the Tar Heel cagers, then called the “White Phantoms” for the hues of their home uniforms. Alongside such notable talent as George Glamack and Ben Dilworth during his senior year, he was the sixth man for the Heels, helping the team achieve a 23-3 mark and beat Duke for a Southern Conference Tournament Championship under first-year Head Coach Bill Lange.
A Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity member, he was also involved with many other campus clubs and organizations off the basketball court. He was prominently connected with the German Club and the Gorgon’s Head social order and was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. After graduating in 1940, he worked at Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company in Durham.
With the political crisis worsening in Europe and the Pacific, Roberson enlisted in the Army Air Corps in late November 1940, training at Selfridge Field in Michigan. In the summer of 1941, Roberson earned his aviator’s wings, received his commission to a second lieutenant, and joined the 94th Squadron of the First Pursuit Group to fly the new, advanced P-38 fighters from an air base near San Diego, California.
It was only days later that he returned home to North Carolina. “He flew in all the way from California in his P-38 to be a groomsman at my wedding in Raleigh,” said former friend, teammate, and prominent Durham architect George Watts Carr, who passed away in 1975. “He was just a friendly, likeable guy.”
Two weeks later, Pearl Harbor was attacked.
“Our defense of the west coast was depleted, so Foy took part in air patrols operating 24 hours a day,” said Roberson’s nephew, Foy Roberson Devine, a UNC 1964, graduate and Atlanta-based attorney.
Though the US Army released little information about Roberson’s death, Devine offered more details. “After Pearl Harbor, my uncle was one of the first to die in the war,” he said. “He was in a squadron of twin-fuselage P-38’s 12 miles off the coast near Coronado Bay, San Diego, California when they thought they spotted a Japanese submarine.
“One plane rolled to the left and one rolled to the right to get a closer look. They collided and locked, back-to-back: no one could eject. They went down in the ocean and were never found.”
After his death on December 21, 1941, Roberson was posthumously awarded the World War II Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the Army Presidential Unit Citation, and the Army Good Conduct Medal.
Six months later, Devine was born and named in honor of his late uncle.
“And Foy was an only son—his death about broke his parents’ hearts,” said Carr, who, before rooming with Roberson at UNC, had grown up as a neighbor in Durham. “He was just a great guy and a born leader; I was devastated when he died.” Also in the military, Carr was stationed in New Jersey and couldn’t return home for the funeral service.
On December 28, 1941, in a service, UNC’s president Frank Porter Graham said this of Roberson: “His was the symmetry of an all-around, purposeful, happy college boy, and the harmony of an integrated, victorious personality…(Roberson) has joined the honor roll of youth who keep heroic watch beyond our shores.”
Roberson’s father, Dr. Foy Roberson, had also been a student at UNC before his son’s matriculation and was captain of the 1905 football team. Later, he was chief of Durham’s Watts Hospital surgical staff for many years and a member of the visiting staff at Duke Hospital. He served as a trustee of the University of North Carolina for many years and was a member of the University’s Athletic Council.
To celebrate the memory of his only child, he established the Foy Roberson, Jr. Award, given annually from 1942 to 2012 to the North Carolina basketball player who contributed most to team morale.
Though suspended in 2012, the bestowing of the Foy Roberson Award still reflects excellence and inspiration among Tar Heel players over the decades, just like the award’s namesake and all others like him will continue to inspire all of us for many years to come.
