By Ed McGranahan.
Those of us that hadn’t basked under a Tar Heel blue sky were supposed to think of Dean Smith as an evildoer. They mocked his nasal Kansas
twang, his inane attention to detail and the odd routines he insisted be part of the Carolina mystique.
For a time he resisted delivering statistics in a traditional format with players listed from highest scorer down. Smith had a formula for
determining a player’s value to the team. Never mind it was indecipherable to a guy brought up on box scores, this was Smith’s way
of telling you the team was the sum of its parts.
I’d heard the stories about how they passed the team to him after Frank McGuire slipped out of town leaving the program in shambles a few years
after winning a national championship. Smith was 30-years old.
Over the next decade he built a foundation for greatness, defying convention at every turn from the kinds of players he recruited. Smith,
as I’ve mentioned before, wanted citizens, students and athletes – in that order – and was known to back off a prospect if he didn’t meet the
litmus tests on all three.
What you know or learn about Smith over the next couple of days can be gleaned from out resources, so this is a more of a personal perspective.
And what I learned as an editor and reporter here much of the last 40 years was that Smith is worthy of respect as a man, teacher and coach.
Wooden was the wizard. Smith was – well – The Dean.
First game I covered in Chapel Hill was at that tin can Carmichael. Clemson had Tree Rollins and Dean didn’t have anybody capable of
covering him alone. It was possibly the best shot Clemson had to win there, and the most indelible memory was of Rollins splayed face down on
the court as the game ended. Smith was gracious as always afterward admitting Clemson made him sweat profusely.
Next occasion to cross paths was at the tryout in Raleigh for the U.S. Olympic team in 1976. His style was very suited to the international
because of its ability to take athletic players and press them into a disciplined style that drove opponents to uncommon shrillness. This was
the height of the Four Corners era with Phil Ford, Walter Davis, et al. People scream about those occasions when the Heels would run the Corners to control the clock and the game’s pace, but many if not all those years North Carolina was among the nation’s scoring leaders. Look it up.
The trials were fascinating because everybody who was anybody in U.S. college basketball was there. It would be the first Olympics after that
disaster against the Soviets in’72 at Munich. The pressure was thick, but Smith picked four members of his Tar Heel team to represent the
country and they brought back the gold from Montreal.
Those four never won a national championship in Tar Heel blue, and it was becoming a point agitation for fans. The ACC Tournament was still
the seminal event, and Smith won more than anybody else at that time so it took the edge off not getting past UCLA, Alabama, UNLV and all the
others who booted them before reaching the grail.While working in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981, I hooked up with the Tar Heel traveling road show when it made an appearance at the Cable Car Classic, which had moved to Palo Alto several years earlier. First night I met a friend at the hotel they were staying to give him a lift down the peninsula. We stepped on the elevator, turned around and Smith followed us in. My shook the coach’s hand and began to introduce me. Smith cut him off. “Ed, so good to see you again.” We’d been introduced once during the Trials, but never had a one-on-one conversation, so I was pleasantly dumfounded.
That night during the team’s game, my friend and I saw Jerry West sitting a few rows ahead with other pro scouts. We decided to approach
him and maybe pick up a comment or two about James Worthy and Sam Perkins, who obviously he was there to see.
West demurred. No, he said he was there to see freshman Michael Jordan. My friend, an avid Tar Heel fan who named his sons after two basketball greats from the 60’s and counted Larry Brown among his best friends, flashed a puzzling look. Jordan, we asked. “Oh sure,” West said. “He’s a rare talent. He’ll revolutionize the game.” We thanked him and stepped away, rather confused. As we recall that moment once of us always says, “Well, it was Jerry West.”
But I digress.
When you whine about Duke, it’s similar to the bitching about UNC during the Smith era. I’m not certain there wasn’t a measure of truth to it.
Smith learned from McGuire how to bait and intimidate officials, and by then he owned the sideline. The zebras were part of his passion play and
he was the director.
When Rick Barnes came to Clemson he tried to stand his ground in Carolina’s first game at Littlejohn, and he gained a modicum of respect,
but only what Smith allowed him.
Watching how the North Carolina program has veered far from Smith’s track must be painful for longtime fans.
When we learned a few years ago that he’d been hit with Alzheimer’s, which meant it would never recover.