Vasco Evtimov will be the first to tell you: when he makes a promise, he sticks to it. Even if it takes 20 years to complete.
Evtimov graduated from North Carolina this weekend with a bachelor's degree in communications. In doing so, the 41-year-old fulfilled a promise he made to Dean Smith, his former head coach at UNC, in the summer of 1999.
And to confirm that accomplishment, Evtimov made good on another promise. In the hallways of the building that bears his namesake, there’s a bronze bust of Smith, who died in 2015 at age 83.
“The first time I saw the statue, I always told myself the day I graduate, the first thing I’m going to do is come over here and take a picture — to make sure that he knows,” Evtimov told The Daily Tar Heel in an exclusive interview. “And that’s what I did. When I finally did it, the feeling was incredible.”
The photo has done numbers. Evtimov joked that he’s “never gotten so many likes on Facebook.” And his Instagram’s been blowing up, too. Everything culminated on Sunday morning, when he sat in Kenan Stadium with thousands of other undergraduates and officially became a UNC alumnus.
His path to graduation, which he first shared with the DTH in February, was a unique one. Evtimov arrived in Chapel Hill a 1996 McDonald’s All-American, but he played sparingly for a star-studded team that went to the Final Four.
With the approval of Smith, Evtimov then took a redshirt year and completed 10 mandatory months of French military service. When the 6-foot-10 forward returned to North Carolina, much had changed.
Bill Guthridge was in his second year as head coach after Smith’s surprise retirement ahead of the 1997-98 season. Evtimov played well in the preseason, but the NCAA handed him an 18-game suspension for playing with a local club team while in France. He returned late in the 1998-99 season and felt increasingly out of place.
