Before he was a Bull, Michael Jordan was a Tar Heel — and original photographs from his three years at North Carolina are markedly scarcer than his NBA press imagery. This is one of them: a Type I press photograph from the 1983 NCAA Tournament, with Jordan in the white #23 Carolina uniform, ball cocked, rising to shoot through two Georgia defenders. The research places it precisely. The "MAR 27 1983" date stamp and the "Syracuse – 1983" notation pin it to March 27, 1983 — the East Regional Final at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, North Carolina against Georgia.
The result is part of what makes it interesting. Jordan led all scorers with 26 points — the printed caption on the back says exactly that — but Georgia pulled off the upset, beating Carolina 82–77 to end the Tar Heels' season in Jordan's sophomore year. To be clear about the history: this is an NCAA Tournament game, which adds real significance, but it is not from Carolina's championship run. Jordan's NCAA title came the year before, in 1982, when he hit the game-winning shot against Georgetown as a freshman. This 1983 photograph captures the season after that — a tournament loss, but a vivid college-era frame of a future legend.
What elevates this particular print is the back. Rather than a blank reverse, the back carries the original newspaper clipping of this very image pasted in place, surrounded by the apparatus of a working press photo: two wire-service date stamps ("MAR 27 1983" and "MAR 28 1983"), the photographer's "Photo by Dick Blume" stamp, blue-ink archival notations ("Syracuse – 1983," "NCAA Basketball"), and a historicimages.com inventory label. It is a layered historical document — you can read the path the photograph took from the Syracuse arena to the newspaper to the archive.
The photographer was Dick Blume, a staff photographer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, which covered the regional because it was played on its home turf. A college-era Jordan original, authenticated by PSA as a Type I, held one-of-one, and carrying its full published history on the back, is exactly the kind of layered artifact the DimeLabs Type 1 collection is built around.