University of North Carolina Athletics
SMITH'S LEGACY OF PRIDE OUTLASTS WINNING RECORD
September 14, 2003 | Men's Basketball
Sept. 14, 2003
(A couple of personal friends spent 10 days last month traveling in the United Kingdom. Upon arrival, their host--an avid Duke fan--gave them a copy of THE TIMES from August 22, 2003, and the attached article concerning Dean Smith's visit to London. I thought you might enjoy it.--Woody Durham, Voice of the Tar Heels.)
He is the man that Michael Jordan says "taught me the game" but for Dean Smith, walking anonymously around London this week, his career and retirement have brought far greater rewards than the credit for nurturing one of the world's most gifted sportsmen. For 36 years, until 1997, Smith, 72, coached the University of North Carolina (UNC) basketball team, amassing more victories--879--than any college coach in history, producing countless professional stars in the process and running a programme from which an unparalleled 97 percent of his players graduated with degrees.
For every student who left Smith's team to pursue sporting greatness, there are a handful of equally successful businessmen, lawyers and doctors. In American college sport, where corruption and moral bankruptcy are endemic, Smith and UNC are beacons of honesty and decency.
"Coach [Smith] is always there for his kids," Steve Bucknall, one of Smith's former players, said. "He tried to take quality young men and make them even better people. It was about basketball but it was also about making sure people had an education. He was as interested in somebody who would never make the pros as he was in Michael Jordan."
Indeed, Jordan found that out last month. For the past four years, Smith has been paid handsomely by his former student to attend a four-day $20,000-a-head "fantasy" basketball camp in Las Vegas, at which he was expected to do little more than act as Jordan's golfing partner. This year, Jordan's dates clashed with Bucknall's inaugural "Carolina Experience" camp at Crystal Palace last weekend and, having given his word to Bucknall, Smith flew to London to work for nothing.
Loyalty to players, past and present, is a hallmark of UNC and the man. Smith knows the whereabouts of practically all of those who have served him. Players, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, were given lessons in deportment and booked into the best hotels for games away from home. Yet, back at UNC's Chapel Hill campus, they were ordered to live in standard student housing among their non-sporting peers and forbidden from skipping classes. It is little wonder that whenever Jordan has had a decision to make in his life since leaving Chapel Hill in 1984, he has called Smith first.
"Our job as college coaches is to be educators," Smith said. "Our [players'] graduation record in the 36 years I coached was 97.2 percent. We are proud of that fact. I'm in London because I said I'd help Steve and another of my former players [Steve Previs] now works here and we'll see him while we're here. It's nice to be able to go to weddings, hear about their children."
If the royal "we" creeps into conversation, Smith has every right to employ the pronoun. He is basketball aristocracy, his lineage dating back to his student days at the University of Kansas, where he played for Phog Allen, the legendary coach, who in turn had played for James Naismith, the Canadian gym teacher who invented the sport.
Smith's own acolytes permeate the game at every level. It is no mere chance that the coach [Larry Brown] and assistant coach [Roy Williams] of the United States Olympic team for Athens are both former assistants to Smith. But more important than the sheer statistical weight--leading the US to the 1976 Olympic gold medal, leading UNC to a top-15 finish in 28 of his last 31 seasons, two National Championships, a winning rate of 73 percent in the Atlantic Coast Conference--is Smith's moral and social legacy.
North Carolina is located, politically if not geographically, in America's Deep South, with Jesse Helms, the ultra-conservative, its most famous politician. Yet Smith has strong liberal views, taking an anti-nuclear stance in the 1980s and condemning the war in Iraq.
Most significantly of all, in 1966 he recruited Charlie Scott, the first black player to be offered a scholarship at UNC, at a time when the civil rights issue was tearing apart the South. A year later, Smith accompanied Scott to a Chapel Hill restaurant that had defied federal law and refused to integrate. Chapel Hill and North Carolina would never be the same again and, only last year, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education ranked UNC No. 1 in a poll of the nation's most racially integrated universities. "Go through civil rights again?" Smith said years later. "Yeah, I'll be there."
Smith's controversial views extend to the death penalty. "One doesn't kill," Smith said. "I heard that in church." Smith would take his players to visit death row inmates, some of whom he was known to call on the eve of their execution. When Jordan's father was murdered in 1993, many observers were surprised that his family did not seek the death penalty for those convicted of the killing. Smith did not share their surprise. Such victories, rather than those on the basketball court, are Smith's true legacy.
Today, Smith still actively helps his former players, in between working in a fund raising capacity at UNC and spending as much time as possible with Linnea, his wife, his five children and grandchildren. "I still enjoy basketball," Smith said. "And I can play golf whenever I want. That sounds like a pretty good retirement to me."
