GoHeels Exclusive: Looking Back At Smith's Retirement 20 Years Later

by Pat James

When Dean Smith announced his retirement on Oct. 9, 1997, five other members of the University joined him on stage for his press conference.

There was Bill Guthridge, Smith's longtime assistant, who ultimately led the Tar Heels to 80 wins and two Finals Fours over the next three seasons. Athletic director Dick Baddour and Chancellor Michael Hooker also had seats. And on both ends of the table were Rick Brewer and Steve Kirschner from the Athletic Communications office.

Of the six, only Kirschner, the senior associate athletic director for communications and a sports information director (SID) for men's basketball, remains at UNC.

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of Smith's retirement, Kirschner spoke with GoHeels.com columnist Pat James about what went on behind the scenes on that historic day.

Q: When did you guys first learn coach Smith was retiring?

Steve Kirschner: "I found out the day before the public announcement. I guess that would've been Oct. 8. Dick Baddour was the athletic director, and he called me and said, 'Steve, we need to go see Coach Smith.' I thought that was kind of odd. But it was during the middle of the afternoon and we walked over to Coach Smith's office, and the only people in there were Dick Baddour, Coach Guthridge, Coach Smith and myself. Mr. Baddour looked at me and said, 'Steve, Coach Smith has decided to retire, effective immediately, and Coach Guthridge is going to be the head coach.' And I said, 'OK.' And he goes, 'No, I'm serious.' I said, 'Dicky, this is not the kind of thing you joke about. I get it. You're serious.' From that point on we decided how we're going to do this, how do we make this announcement. Coach Smith's first reaction was, 'Well, we're not having a press conference.' And I said, 'Coach, with all due respect, we have to have a press conference. You're not going to retire and not have a press conference.' He goes, 'Well, I don't want the current team there. I don't want them to be bothered. Bill, have them practice then.' Coach Guthridge said, 'Dean, we're not going to have the team practice. They're going to be there; they're going to want to be there.' And at that point, we kind of had to alert the world there was going to be a major announcement the next day, but we didn't want people to think that there was a health issue. Rick Brewer was my boss, but I was the basketball SID and he had been the longtime basketball SID before me. I said, 'Well, we need to tell Rick. Rick and I need to tell people there's something tomorrow without telling them what it is.' So for the next two or three hours, we started calling people. This was pre-email, this was way pre-text messaging, we had the internet, but it was not like it is today. So we had to call a lot of people and invite them, and we had to invite basketball media like Alexander Wolff from Sports Illustrated and Dick Weiss from the New York Daily News, people from across the country. And I had to tell them what was going on without telling them what was going on. But they knew because they trusted me and they knew Rick and they trusted him, if we were calling them and telling them, 'You need to come, you need to be here, you'll want to be here for a special announcement,' they kind of got what it was, they kind of got what it was for without us telling them.

"Now the way it leaked out he was actually retiring, other than people just taking guesses…We took the team picture that day with him in it. We have a team picture from the 1997-98 season with Coach Smith in it. The reason is so classic Coach Smith. The team was running the mile run that afternoon after the photo, and he didn't want to tell the players that he was retiring before they ran the mile run because he didn't think that was fair to them because they had worked so hard. So we took a team photo, and I'm sitting there knowing this is never going to be used. Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, those guys had no idea. And then they went out and ran the mile run at Fetzer. They came back around 5:30 or so and when they got back, they went in the locker room and he told the team. And the team was obviously devastated, they were in tears, they came out and when they came out of the locker room, the (Philadelphia) 76ers were in the Smith Center because they were practicing there. And when they came out, guys like Carter and Jamison saw Jerry Stackhouse, and they told Jerry what had happened. And Jerry told David Aldridge from ESPN, who was there covering the 76ers, and David Aldridge broke the story. At that point, it was kind of, 'Coach Smith wants to make the announcement himself, but I'm not going to tell you you're wrong.' And then the next day we had a press conference in the afternoon. The team did go. Georgetown's John Thompson came from D.C. I'll always remember that at the end of the press conference, the first thing Coach Smith did was drive John Thompson to the airport. And that was his first official act as ex-coach, driving John Thompson to the airport."

Q: How much preparation had you done in anticipation of coach Smith's eventual retirement?

SK: "None, zero. If he had said in April, 'Hey, I'm probably going to retire in July.' We may have prepped some sort of thing. Now, it isn't like today. We didn't have to prep graphics, we didn't have to prep social media, we weren't pushing out a lot of video. We were very much a media services office. We weren't doing a whole lot of original content. We were helping media cover the event more so than us creating content to push out. It would be totally different now. Under the time frame we had, we would be scrambling just as much. We didn't have time to prep things. We just reacted. We got a lot of compliments from other SIDs, schools around the country that said, 'Wow, you guys pulled this off. That was pretty amazing.' Especially when they found out we didn't know until 3 o'clock the previous afternoon. I have a picture in my office taken from behind the table, and I'm seated next to Coach Smith and there's this gigantic media throng there. I always remember, there's a picture of Dick Weiss from the New York Daily News, who is in the Hall of Fame, standing and applauding Coach Smith. It's one of my favorite pictures I have because of the amount of respect Dick Weiss, someone whom we all have a lot of respect for, showed Coach Smith.

"It was kind of a surreal press conference. If it happened in April, two days after the Final Four, it wouldn't have come out of the blue. But the fact that we got all the way to October was so true to Coach Smith. He had always said, 'If I get to the end of the season and I don't have any energy left, I'm done.' And Coach Guthridge would always convince him to come back. Coach Guthridge said that April, Coach Smith said he was done. And they said, 'All right. Dean, c'mon. Just take a month. You'll recharge the batteries.' But this time the recharge didn't happen. But he also said, 'If I get to the first day of practice and I don't have that fire, then it's time to go.' At that point, Coach Guthridge had earned the right to step into the first seat. I think a lot of people thought he didn't want to. But he was a very competitive person, as well. Very competitive. I think people sort of thought the older, spectacled gentlemen, top lieutenant and all of that, people just assumed Coach Guthridge didn't want to be the head coach. Coach Guthridge absolutely wanted to be the head coach. But he also didn't want Coach Smith to retire. I had a conversation with Coach Guthridge where he talked about that inner turmoil of, 'Yeah, I'd love to be the head coach, but I want Coach Smith to be the head coach for as long as possible.' But when Coach Smith finally said, 'No, I'm done,' Coach Guthridge wanted to test himself and see what he could do. And he made it to two Final Fours in three years. We had ups and downs during those three years, but to his credit, two Final Fours and 80 wins in three years. Absolutely he answered any questions about whether he could have been a great head coach."

Q: What were some of the most difficult logistical challenges with organizing the press conference?

SK: "We didn't really have a great place for a major press conference. Back then, the press room was where the weight room is now, and we weren't going to have Dean Smith's retirement press conference there. And we didn't want to make it a circus. But it led to one of the great moments with the students. The windows that are at the top of what is now the practice gym, students were there looking through and hanging banners saying, 'Don't go.' They were writing messages on the sidewalk. There were some cool things that happened as a result of that it was where it was. It was a room that could fit a lot of media but also a lot of Rams Club members and athletic department members. So many athletic department staff people, people from Chapel Hill, friends of Coach Smith, friends of the University. It was a historic moment in the life of the University.

"There were six people sitting on the podium. Rick Brewer, who was my boss, and I were at the end. Dick Baddour, chancellor Michael Hooker, Coach Smith and Coach Guthridge. It's weird because people are like, 'Why is Coach Smith second to the end? Why isn't he in the middle of the picture?' He is because I wasn't going to be in the middle of the stage ahead of the chancellor or the athletic director or the coaches. But Coach Smith wanted me next to him because he was going to tap me on the knee when he was done with questions. So I sat at the end and Coach Smith sat next to me.

"So we had been going for a while – we had been going for about 40, 42 minutes or something – and it was good. Coach, he was funny, he was telling jokes and he was very relaxed. I'm pointing out different people, and I'm like, 'Next question here.' I looked and I said, 'Are you doing OK, coach?' And he said, 'Yeah, let's get them all. Let's get all of the questions out of the way.' He answered the next one, and then as soon as he said it, he tapped me on the knee and said, 'Let's go.' I said, 'OK.' And that was it. We were done. It was just this incredible transition from Dean Smith running the basketball program in one minute to all of a sudden not. I remember he took Coach Thompson to the airport, and it was kind of like him riding off into the sunset. And then the rest of us all kind of looked each other and went, 'We have the No. 1 team in the country, we're coming off a Final Four and and now we have a 60-year-old rookie head coach.' And I just remember we had some meetings and stuff to kind of figure out what was going on. The next morning, Rob Daniels from the Greensboro News & Record had asked to come over and talk to Coach Guthridge. I was surprised 50 people didn't ask to come talk to coach Guthridge. But Rob Daniels did. And I remember going into coach Guthridge's office – it probably was that afternoon of the press conference – and I asked Coach Guthridge, 'Coach, Rob Daniels and somebody else, they want to come over tomorrow and just see how your first day is going. I don't know if you're OK doing that or not.' And he looked at me and goes, 'Let me tell you something. I'm not Dean Smith. I need to do more media than Coach Smith wanted to do because they don't know who I am, recruits don't know who I am. I need to be more visible, and I'm going to trust you to tell me which ones I need to do and I'll do what you ask me to do.' And for three years, Coach Guthridge did everything I ever asked of him. It wasn't that coach Smith was anti-media. But after 36 years of doing it, he was Dean Smith. He didn't need to do an interview so people would get to know who he is and some recruits somewhere would know more about him. He was Dean Smith. But Coach Guthridge was also secure enough and self-aware enough that he knew he was 60 years old and wasn't a household name. I always tell coaches their time is my most valuable asset, my most valuable resource, and I'll never abuse their time. And Coach Guthridge was great about that."

Q: As word started getting out, what sort of calls were you receiving at the office from both fans and media?

SK: "Everything you could imagine. 'Is anything wrong? Why is he doing it now? Is he sick? Who is going to take the program? Are you guys going to call Coach (Roy) Williams?' But it was mostly, 'Is Coach Smith OK?' I remember more people calling and asking about that than anything else."

Q: With this occurring pre-social media and largely pre-internet, how might you have approached this differently today?

SK: "We would have just been so much more proactive in the content. We would have had a video, we would have testimonials, you would be writing a story about the career of Dean Smith and there would be something from Adam (Lucas). We would have five or six different guys working on stories, and we would be assigning, 'OK, you write this. You take the former player angle. You take the new coach angle. Here's a look at the coach.' We would be so much more in position to position Coach Guthridge and get the world to know him. We would be saying, 'Look, we've got to do a sit down.' He and Jones (Angell) would do a video of, 'Here's Bill Guthridge, here's who I am.' Jeff Camarati would be working on a Dean Smith pictures through the years. There would be so much more. Tony Tucker would be designing all sorts of graphics and we'd have a big social media plan. Back then, it was managing the media relations part of it. Now it would be managing the creative services content part of it as well as the media relations. We would be doing so much more of that.

Q: How much did you talk to coach Smith about his statement for the press conference?

SK: "Coach said whatever he was going to say. I'm sure I worked on something with Dick Baddour. But I didn't work on any statements with Coach Smith. Working on statements with Coach Smith was, 'Steve, here's what I'm going to say. Take this down.'"

Q: You mentioned that moment when Dick Weiss and the rest of the audience stood up and applauded. Twenty years later, how much does that moment still stand out?

SK: "That press conference was unlike any press conference I've ever been to. We don't invite the general public or fans or Rams Club members to most press conferences. When we hired Coach Williams, major football and basketball coaching hires, fans get in through the Rams Club or friends of athletic department members, things like that. But by and large, we don't really do public press conferences. It's rare that there are media applauding anybody. But just out of respect to coach Smith and just the sheer number of people. Alexander Wolff came in from Vermont, Dick Weiss came in from Philadelphia, people came in from Kansas City, Dallas, Boston, New York. A lot of people came in and they appreciated the heads up because they wanted to be there when Coach Smith retired. It was a historic moment in college basketball. He had just broken (Adolph) Rupp's record, he had just been to his 12th Final Four, we won the ACC. Thirty-six years, the way he did it, the class with which he did it, people wanted to come pay respects. And it was very cool."

GoHeels Exclusive: Looking Back At Smith's Retirement 20 Years Later

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