Carolina Family mourns Dean Smith
They gathered at the building that bears his name and shared memories about him, told stories about him, shed tears over him. Dean Smith was gone, the day people long dreaded was here, and members of his Carolina family mourned together at the Smith Center.
There was Phil Ford, one of greatest players Smith coached at North Carolina, and Hubert Davis, who arrived at UNC as a lightly regarded prospect and left, like so many others, a transformed player and man.
There was Eric Montross, still as tall as he was the day he led the Tar Heels to their final national championship under Smith, in 1993, but older now, wiser, because of lessons Smith taught him two decades ago.
There was Roy Williams, the UNC coach who worked alongside Smith as an assistant, and Brad Frederick, the last walk-on on the final team Smith coached before he retired in 1997.
“And he treated me just as well as he treated Antawn (Jamison) and Vince (Carter) and Ed Cota and those guys,” Frederick, now UNC’s director of basketball operations, said Sunday, standing on the court underneath the banners that swayed gently – one of them in Smith’s honor.
Smith died at 83 on Saturday night at his Chapel Hill home. He was surrounded by his wife and five children. His family.
Word soon spread throughout his other family. Williams received the call, he said, at 11:19 p.m., after he returned from coaching the Tar Heels to a victory at Boston College. At times Sunday, Williams, ever emotional, spoke through tears about what Smith had meant to him.
“He was my mentor,” said Williams, who was a dark-haired young man, an unknown, when Smith hired him as an assistant at UNC in 1978. “He gave me a chance.”
Smith created The Carolina Way
So many people could say the same thing Sunday. The players who came through his program and became All-Americans on their way to NBA riches. The less athletically gifted ones who never played after college but became executives or doctors or coaches or successes in other fields.
The Carolina Way that has become a part of the lexicon surrounding UNC – that didn’t exist before Smith arrived. The Carolina Family that people talk about, much to the chagrin of rival fans or others who have a difficult time believing in its allure and power – Smith was the patriarch.
The tradition of players coming back to Chapel Hill for summer pick-up games – that began under Smith. Who knows when? It has been that way for so long, guys coming back, passing on program traditions from one class to the next, it’s difficult to trace it all back to one point.
It’s easier to trace it back to one man.
Smith “was just a constant in our lives,” said Ford, who arrived at UNC from Rocky Mount and left as one of the best players in ACC history. “From the day that I accepted a scholarship to the University of North Carolina to the last day that he could actually commit and be a part of our lives, he was there for me. So how many years?”
Ford tried to count them. Across the way, Davis was telling stories about how of all the lessons Smith taught him, the ones he remembers least are about basketball. Montross was trying to describe the finality of this moment – one he and everyone else knew had been coming for a while.
“But you never expect that it’s going to happen today,” he said. “Or it’s going to happen last night. And so all of a sudden it starts to sink in a little bit deeper. Because we could see him occasionally being wheeled into the office or having lunch in his office.”
Finger point to coach Smith
Smith during his later years suffered from a neurological disease that robbed him of his memories. At times in recent years – not so much lately – his caretakers would bring him to the Smith Center when it was empty and quiet. The court would be dark sometimes and when he could walk, he’d walk around slowly inside a place where he built so many memories.
There were 879 victories at UNC, 11 Final Fours, two national championships. There was the Four Corners offense, and countless other innovations.
“Coach Smith has a legacy that touched basketball that will be around forever,” Williams said. “The little things like huddling at the free-throw line. Changing defenses. Guys clapping when guys come off the bench – all those kinds of things.
“But one of the ones that I’ve always admired the most was pointing at the guy that made the pass.”
They still do that at UNC. Point to the assist man.
So members of the family Smith built at UNC pointed to him Sunday, to the man who had assisted them in so many ways. They spoke of Smith’s social awareness, his civil rights advocacy, how he served as a father figure. They spoke of his leadership and, yes, the victories, too.
Montross looked out onto the court where, 22 years before – had it been that long? – the Tar Heels stormed back and beat Florida State after trailing by 22 points in the second half.
“That was a game where he instilled confidence in us from every moment,” Montross said. “And we were down 22 with 17 minutes left. I mean, we’ve seen epic collapses, been a part of some and been a part of some epic comebacks. And that was one.”
Those kinds of stories kept coming up – stories about how Smith’s belief in his players, and their belief in him, changed games and transformed lives. No wonder his players often came back in the summer. They returned because in a lot of ways they never left, or couldn’t leave.
When Ford arrived at UNC, he said former players like Bob McAdoo and Bill Chamberlain and George Karl often came back in the summers. Then when Ford left, he’d come back along with Walter Davis, another former UNC player.
“When Walter Davis and I played professional basketball before Walter got married, we’d always come back here in the summer time and rent a home,” Ford said. “Whichever team lost in the playoffs first, that guy had to pay for the bills all summer.”
And so the tradition went.
His legacy lives on
At the highest level, college basketball has become a transient game. The best players stay in school a season or two and then they’re off to the NBA. Smith, who was UNC’s head coach in 1961-97, worked during a different era.
For most of it, guys were in less of a hurry to leave. They had more time to develop on the court. Off it, there was more time to create a bond that endured.
The Carolina Family that Smith created didn’t happen, necessarily, because of what his teams accomplished on the court. It happened in places off of it – during meetings inside his office and during long conversations before and after practices.
“He was all about relationships,” said Davis, a UNC assistant coach who played at UNC in 1988-92. “He always used to talk about that he couldn’t coach us unless he knew us. And he would take time to spend time with us and get to know us. I mean, that was a great thing.
“I tell these guys now – one of the things I tell them is you need to stop by the office when you’re coming to practice. I said that’s all we used to do. Soon as we finished practice, we would come to the basketball offices and just spend time hanging out and talking to coach on his couch.”
Williams held back tears when he recalled a phone conversation he shared with Smith nearly 30 years ago. It was the night before Williams was interviewing for the coaching job at Kansas.
“Are you sure you want to do this to your school?” Williams, in a self-deprecating way, asked Smith, a guard on Kansas’ 1952 NCAA championship team.
Then Smith raised his voice, Williams said. That didn’t happen often.
“He was really mad,” Williams said. “He said, ‘You can do this job. And you’re going to be the best.’ The things that he said to me, in that phone call, were pretty doggone important.”
That was Smith’s gift – a gift that kept giving after his disease stole his mind, a gift that keeps giving now: the gift of his confidence and belief in the players he coached and the people he worked with.
Williams said he once told Smith that he was “loyal to a fault,” and Smith told him not to use those two words in the same sentence, because in his mind there was no fault in being loyal. So members of family gathered Sunday and thanked him for his lessons and his confidence, his loyalty.
This story was originally published February 8, 2015 at 8:17 PM with the headline "Carolina Family mourns Dean Smith."