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player ready...Curiosity demands the origin of the nickname Tubby for Kentucky’s basketball coach because he is decidedly not. Tubby, that is.
Orlando Smith is one of 17 children, the sixth in sequence, and it seems that as a boy he liked to hog the bathtub, his affection for a good soak prompting his siblings to call him Tubby.
It could have been worse, of course. The family might have had only a shower, in which case today Smith would be Drippy. Or if he had not liked to bathe, Grimey or possibly Stinky, in which case no one would bother to get close enough to find the truth of the matter.
Unlike all previous coaches at Kentucky, it is as clear as the nose on his face that Smith brings another life experience to the job.
Of all the things Smith is–brother, son, husband, father, teacher, coach–the most obvious is one that he has no control over, and one that some people will forever hold against him.
He is a gardener.
“You can’t make anything grow unless it rains,” he said Sunday.
Prompt a planter, find a metaphor.
Nothing can be more tedious than the lessons of the field. But Smith explains how that experience applies to molding diverse young men into a cohesive whole, the result being a national championship showdown Monday night against Utah.
“I will tell my team about weeding beans,” Smith said, and I can just imagine them all perking up when the topic is announced. But this is Smith’s story, and I’ll let him tell it.
“I would be assigned three rows to weed because I was older,” Smith said. “And my younger brothers and sisters only one row. After we were finished, my father would cultivate the rows.
“I might do only 2 1/2 rows and try to help the younger ones with theirs. And none of it would get done. My father couldn’t cultivate any of them. So, then he would just beat everybody.”
Talk about pulling weeds. May we pull the moral out of this?
“I tried to do more than my job,” Smith said. “When everyone does his individual job, the whole job gets done.”
Ah, teamwork. Every coach’s story eventually gets around to teamwork.
Maybe Adolph Rupp once talked like this, but more likely the emphasis would have been on the fertilizer. Certainly not Rick Pitino, who fit at Kentucky like a silk suit on a tractor.
Maybe the safest gamble ever taken by Kentucky was to put its basketball tradition into Smith’s hands. Smith had done well at Tulsa, at Georgia, programs of lesser ambition and inspection than mighty Kentucky.
Before Smith took the job at Kentucky, a columnist in the Lexington newspaper argued against it. “Kentucky fans are not ready for a black head coach,” she wrote.
She herself is black, and as it turns out, wrong.
“I have not had one incident,” Smith said. “I said from the beginning that I wanted to be judged by the content of my character and not by the color of my skin.
“I know I’m not perfect, but no one else out there is either. There have been no complaints, except when we lost at home and I wanted to call my own radio show and call me a bum.”
Smith seems a man of natural and impressive calm, not given to extremes in anything. He will not, for example, pick at the obvious irony of his now coaching at the last SEC school to integrate and the school where a defiantly all-white Kentucky team lost the national title in 1966, the game that changed college basketball forever.
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“Sure I noticed Texas Western was a team with all black starters,” Smith said.”But what I saw was an underdog team. That gave all underdogs hope. That’s what it did for me.”
Perseverance, order, taking the long view, doing the job at hand, these are the things Smith has built his life around.
“You’ve got to weed that garden every day,” he said.
And carrying on Kentucky’s tradition has validated him?
“I think everyone has accepted the fact that maybe this guy knows what he is doing. A little bit.”
Basketball, sure, but about my radishes . . .