A one-club career, early European basketball, and the making of Barça’s professional era
Born in Washington, D.C., Norman Carmichael spent his college years at the University of Virginia, a program that would later produce the number one pick of the 1983 NBA Draft, Ralph Sampson. He completed a full college career and showed that he could be an efficient center, shooting 57 percent from the field. As a junior in 1967–68, he averaged a double-double, 15 points and 12 rebounds. In the eyes of professional scouts, however, it was not enough to make him a serious prospect.
A draft pick without a future
Drafted largely as a formality by the Atlanta Hawks with the 193rd pick, deep in the fifteenth round of the 1969 draft, a class featuring Lew Alcindor, Norm Van Lier, Jo Jo White, and Bob Dandridge, Carmichael never made it to Georgia.
In 1969, being drafted did not carry the same meaning it would later take on. The NBA draft still stretched into double-digit rounds, and a fifteenth-round selection was often less a pathway than a placeholder. Teams took long shots, college seniors, and players they had little realistic intention of carrying into the season. For many of them, being drafted was not the start of an NBA career. It was the last official trace of one that would never happen.
Carmichael belonged to that world. Atlanta held his rights, but there was no real NBA future waiting for him. The ABA existed, but there is no clear record that it offered him a serious route either. If he wanted to keep playing professionally, he had to look elsewhere.
Europe was not yet the familiar alternative it would become for American players in later decades. It was a gamble, almost a separate basketball universe. But for a player on the margins of the NBA, it could offer something the fifteenth round could not: a real contract, real minutes, and a real place inside a club.
The NBA did not open. The ABA did not become his path either. No clear explanation seems to survive for why Carmichael chose Europe, but the decision placed him in a still-unusual basketball world for an American player. He crossed the Atlantic at a time when such a move was still rare.
A one-club man, he plays for FC Barcelona from 1969 to 1978. During those years, the blaugrana finish no higher than second in the Spanish league and remain light-years behind the Real Madrid dynasty of the 1970s.
With Emiliano Rodríguez, Clifford Luyk, Wayne Brabender, and Juan Antonio Corbalán, Madrid dominate domestically and are considered, alongside CSKA Moscow and Varese, one of the very best teams in Europe.
Barcelona, a decade of building
In Catalonia, the 1970s are instead a decade of professional structuring for the basketball section of what would become a global multisport institution. The period is inevitably thin in trophies. Still, it includes a 1975 final in the Korac Cup, the competition’s third European tier, lost to Cantù, as well as two Spanish Cups in 1978 and 1979.
Charismatic and combative, Carmichael quickly becomes a fan favorite and is named team captain in just his second season in Spain. At 6 foot 10, sporting a thick mustache, he stands out in a league where the average height barely reaches 6 foot 3, and where until then only Real Madrid fields players over seven feet. For years, he remains the tallest player in the Spanish championship.
Captain, citizen, pioneer
Eager to make him a cornerstone of the club, Barcelona grants Carmichael Spanish citizenship in 1971, the first naturalization in the club’s history. And yet, everything nearly comes to a halt. In 1972, Barcelona appoints the American Willy Ernst as head coach. Despite sharing a nationality, Ernst and Carmichael develop a rare level of hostility, eventually coming to blows. The coach asks the board to release the center. The club refuses, arguing that terminating his contract would cost more than the naturalization process already approved by the Council of Ministers. Carmichael is reinstated. Ernst is not retained at the end of the season.
The arrival of Yugoslav coach Ranko Žeravica, replacing Vicente Sanjuán for two seasons from 1974 to 1976, marks the beginning of a non-negotiable push toward professionalism for the Catalan club, which until then meets none of the criteria of a structured organization. Žeravica is blunt upon his arrival:
For now, what matters is making the right selection of those who should remain at the club. What matters is Barcelona’s future. That is why we must take care of our players and the other teams within the section. I will demand a lot, and it will be very difficult for them. I will not use a whip, but the pace will be intense, and they will have to adapt.
From two or three practices per week, the team moves to two sessions per day. While Žeravica makes drastic roster cuts, moving on from many veterans and integrating promising young players, most notably Nacho Solozábal, the future point guard of the Spanish national team, he keeps Carmichael in high regard. A fighter and a capable shooter by the standards of centers at the time, Carmichael retains his place in a much more demanding Barcelona side.
Another Yugoslav coach, Todor Lazić, takes over the first team in 1976. He gives the mustached center one final, more limited role until the end of his career in 1978.
More than four decades after his retirement, Carmichael still holds the record for the longest tenure at Barcelona by a foreign player, ahead of Ante Tomić, Steve Trumbo, and Audie Norris. Tomić does, however, hold the record for games played, a product of the modern era.
Injuries force Carmichael into early retirement in 1978, at just 31 years old. In his final season, the Barcelona locker room looks nothing like the one he entered in 1969.
A group of players who would soon reshape Spanish basketball and become club legends. Epi, Solozábal, Sibilio, and De la Cruz. The 1978 Spanish Cup victory over Real Madrid, a game Carmichael misses due to injury, launches that new generation.
After the noise, the trace
Do not look for game footage or even box scores. From that era, only testimonies and period press articles remain. Still close to the club, Carmichael can occasionally be seen at Barcelona ceremonies, including tributes to Audie Norris and Juan Antonio Epi San Epifanio.
He reappears unexpectedly in 2021, one year before his death, when he becomes part of an extraordinary story we previously told here. The improbable reappearance of his old friend and Barcelona teammate from 1972 to 1975, Charles Thomas, long believed to have died nearly fifty years earlier.
Norman Carmichael passed away in March 2022, at the age of 74. His name rarely appears on social medias, but it remains woven into a formative chapter of FC Barcelona’s basketball history. Long before American careers in Europe became common, Carmichael chose permanence over exposure, commitment over opportunity. Not a star, not a footnote either. Simply a player who stayed, built, and belonged.
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