Other than chain-smoking, Dean Smith has been pretty much the ideal, basketball coach, father figure, role model, the anti-Knight, more a warrant officer than a general, though his first name was title enough. No phony commission needed. Never threw a chair, never went on probation.
I first came across Smith at the Montreal Olympics. He was not impressive, a pinched, squatty man, full of pauses and tics and not the least hint of humor. But he was my coach, the coach of all of us.
“I am not here to make friends or get to know the young men on the team,” Smith said. “The only question I will be asked is did I win or lose?”
To Smith was given the chore of avenging the silver-medal shame of Munich, a Dream Coach rather sent to do the job rather than a Dream Team. A big job then, a marketing gimmick now.
Without seeming to enjoy one moment of it, Smith got back the basketball gold for the United States, restoring supremacy for America’s sport, using amateurs, most of them from North Carolina, the state and college. He was worried sick the whole time. He worried a lot.
In those good old Cold War days, you knew your enemies.
“I’m not even going to say their names,” Smith said. Wake Forest. Russians. All the same to Smith. He won the big one for his country before he won the big one for his school.
Smith won more college basketball games than anybody, and didn’t even get to count those six in Montreal.
He has been my coach ever since, and everyone else’s too, if they bothered to have one. It is not so much what he was–an innovator, if you count the four-corners offense, a tactic that once allowed North Carolina to beat Duke 21-20–but it is what he wasn’t. He was not a bully, he was not a cheat, he was not a liar, the three items that lead the resumes of most college coaches.
He did it the right way, not with rage but with will, not with payoffs but with patience, not with intimidation but inspiration.
Smith was able to put in discipline without taking anything out.
He would not have lasted 36 years, not at North Carolina, not at North Wilkes-Barre, if he did not win basketball games. So, beneath that aw, shucks, small-town modesty, there was ego and there was arrogance. No coach succeeds without ample helpings of both.
He was not much of a player, though he played for Phog Allen at Kansas, a legend then to match Smith’s now. He was the kind of player, he liked to say, who had his jersey number changed every year.
Smith threatened to leave coaching before he broke Adolph Rupp’s record for victories last spring, but he stayed and not only broke the record, but was proud of the achievement as well.
He thanked his coaches and his players for their help, as if all of them were there all the way.
Smith’s great gift was his ability to be overwhelming without being overbearing.
It is not Smith’s style to milk a final farewell, as he is entitled to do. That would detract from the team. So, barely more than a week before another season, he retires with a minimum of fuss.
“It is a relief to know,” he allowed himself to say after his first national title, “that no one will be able to say I couldn’t win the Big One.”
The measure of Smith is that in 11 Final Fours, he won only twice, and both times in fluky endings, but his successes are more significant than his failures, however outnumbered.
More Top Picks Best Crepe Makers For Home
His first national title, in 1982, came after six Final Four failures. That was the game where Georgetown’s Fred Brown threw the ball to North Carolina’s James Worthy, the one where the winning shot was a 16-foot jumper by a freshman named Michael Jordan.
Smith’s second championship came 11 years later, this one enshrined in memory by Michigan’s Chris Webber calling a timeout with no timeouts to call.
Smith sniffled a little in his farewell in Chapel Hill Thursday, but said goodbye with the same lack of emotion he has found useful his entire public life.
As I recall, in the Forum in Montreal, Smith’s U.S. team won by 21 over Yugoslavia in the Olympic final. The Forum is gone, likewise Yugoslavia. And now Smith, but not far, I suspect.