CHAPEL HILL
On the day Bill Dooley died, John Bunting remembered his eyes – “those ice blue eyes,” Bunting said on Tuesday, “that kind of stared right through you.”
In his mind, Bunting saw those eyes again staring back at him during long-ago North Carolina practices, in games. He saw them just as he had that day when Dooley, the longest-tenured football coach in UNC history, visited Bunting’s high school and then asked: Are you going to play for me?
“And I kind of froze,” said Bunting, a former linebacker, “And said, ‘Yeah.’”
Dooley had a way like that with players.