|
|
 |
Is North Carolina's Dean Smith a great coach?
|
By Joe Posnanski
July 22, 2010
Chapel Hill, NC — Good days. Some years ago, I went to a North Carolina basketball game with a buddy who despised Dean Smith. Well, that’s not exactly right — he had nothing against the man. He despised the IDEA of Dean Smith. He honestly believed that Smith wasn’t really a great coach. He thought that Smith’s remarkable coaching record was the result of exceptional recruiting and his willingness to choke the life out of games. Also a bit of luck. He didn’t see North Carolina’s famous Four Corners offense as an innovation as much as a cowardly manipulation of the rules. He liked to make the point that both of North Carolina’s national championships under Dean Smith were haunted by spectacular last-second gaffes by an opponent.
North Carolina was playing at Georgia Tech that day — this was another one of coach Bobby Cremins’ preposterously talented Georgia Tech teams. And my friend went to cheer for Georgia Tech and against Carolina. When I was in high school in North Carolina, they used to call these sorts of fans ABC fans — Anyone But Carolina. Maybe they still do.
Here was my friend’s problem: He had never actually seen Dean Smith coach up close. We were sitting very close to the Carolina bench that day. And it slowly dawned on my friend that he had been entirely wrong. He was watching an artist at work. I had seen Smith coach up close dozens of times, so nothing about it seemed out of place for me. But my buddy had never seen it, so he watched in awe as Smith substituted players in and out, changed defenses every time the Georgia Tech players seemed to get comfortable, pulled out that half-court trap at precisely the right time, substituted more players in and out, created matchup problem after matchup problem, commanded the final minutes. Cremins, a street-smart coach who had a knack for bringing out individual brilliance and who had faced off against Smith (and beaten his teams) many times before, seemed completely out of his depth.
The most amazing part of the game, though, was watching my friend and the way his entire opinion of Dean Smith, like a time-lapse photograph, sharpened into focus. By the end of the game, my buddy could not stop talking about the genius of Dean Smith. North Carolina won, of course, and the entire car ride home my friend babbled about what he had seen. Did you see how he countered that offense? Did you see how he cut down that three-point shooter? Did you see how he had them attack that zone? Did you see the way…
Bad days. There had been a lot of rumors — too many rumors to ignore. Dean Smith once had the most remarkable memory. An absurd memory. This is just a small thing, but it’s my personal story: I first interviewed Dean Smith when I was 21 years old for something I wrote about the late, great coach Frank McGuire. A few years later, when I interviewed Dean again, he remembered me as the kid who interviewed him for a story about Frank McGuire. He knew about my various job changes, commented on a story or two that I had written. OK, well, Dean was famous for checking up on people who were interviewing him — with his mastery of detail, I always imagined that he had extensive files on every sportswriter in the land — so I figured he might have just looked me up. But a few years after that, when I just ran into him at a Kansas event — when he could not have known that we would run into each other — he remembered all those details and more. There was no reason for him to remember me. But he did anyway. He could not help but remember.
That memory was just one part of what made him an amazing coach and one of the great sporting figures of our time. But it was the most obvious part. And so, when the rumors began that the memory was fading, when the rumors began that Dean Smith (in those haunting words you hear about people) had good days and bad, well, you knew it was true even while you hoped it wasn’t true. There was no way his memory could be faltering if he was all right.
This weekend, in a gentle story co-written by my friend Tommy Tomlinson, the family admitted it was true. Dean Smith, now 79, is not dying, everyone made that clear. He’s fading — showing “wear and tear” as Roy Williams told The Sporting News. He remembers plays and forgets games. He remembers games and forgets plays. It depends on the day. Good days and bad.
The family has tried to avoid talking about all this for obvious reasons… Dean Smith was always a private man in a public setting. But whispers began to leak out, and whispers can be crueler than truth. “He still remembers the words of a hymn or a jazz standard,” the family wrote in a letter, “but may not feel up to going to a concert.”
Good days. Dean Smith’s brilliance as a coach came from good days, a long string of them, practice after practice, week after week, December after December, March after March, recruiting period after recruiting period. We live in a world where Dean Smith’s legacy would have been incomplete, even flawed, without his two national championships. As it is, people remember the cracks in those championships — one secured when Georgetown’s Fred Brown mistook North Carolina’s James Worthy for a teammate, the other when Michigan’s Chris Webber called a timeout that his team did not have. But those championships have little to do with Dean Smith’s virtuosity. What made him great was his consistency — his numbing, unyielding consistency. Waves against the shore.
His teams won, of course. His Tar Heels had won 20 games or more for 27 consecutive seasons. They made the NCAA tournament every year from 1975 until he retired in 1997. They reached the Sweet 16 of the tournament 13 straight years. They reached 11 Final Fours. These are more than numbers, they are skyscrapers. His got the best players — 23 of them became All-Americans, 25 of them were NBA first-round picks. Those players graduated college — 96.6% of them got their degrees. And it never stopped, never paused, just kept rolling in — Billy Cunningham replaced by Charlie Scott, Phil Ford replaced by Mike O’Koren, Al Wood replaced by James Worthy replaced by Michael Jordan, Brad Daugherty replaced by Kenny Smith replaced by J.R. Reid replaced by Eric Montross replaced by Rasheed Wallace replaced by Antawn Jamison.
The trick, they say, isn’t doing something great. The trick, they say, is doing it again.
*This is why I have always loved Toy Story II more than Toy Story I. The first Toy Story was brilliant and revolutionary and a landmark — no one had ever done a computer-animated movie like it before. But the second Toy Story was true greatness… it was a little bit funnier, a little bit more touching (Jessie’s song is one of the great moments in recent movie history), and — more than anything — it was second. The first is inspiration. The second belongs to the power of resolve. Great second albums, great second seasons, great second books just impress me more than debuts.
Dean Smith’s teams did it again and again and again, so often that it seemed routine, so brilliantly that years with Final Four losses somehow felt like disappointment. Frank Barrows — the man who gave me my start in sportswriting — wrote a piece just before Dean Smith’s first championship suggesting that he might not win one, that Smith’s success came from a brilliantly choreographed system, and a system simply is not designed for the quirks and surprises and hard left turns of a single-elimination tournament. When Carolina won the championship, Dean very quickly sought out Frank to say, “What about that system, now?” — the coach was competitive — but I think Frank’s point stands. The championships were the pay. But the system was the art.
Bad days. John Feinstein, author of the spectacular Season on the Brink, along with many other fine books and a casual friend, told us a story. He was writing a book about Dean Smith (a book I hope he will still write when the time is right) and found, as all the people close to Dean Smith have found, that he has good days and bad. Dean told John some wonderful stories. But, as John has since written on his blog, he then asked Smith about Bob Spear, who had been his boss when he coached at Air Force Academy.
And the man with the memory like no other said: “You tell me about him. Maybe it will come back.”
Good days. The beauty of the Dean Smith system is that it moved with the music. Whatever his team’s talents — size, athletic ability, shooting, defense — the system would magnify strengths and shrink flaws and create a team that would win 77.6% of the time. Yes, there were certain things that looked numbingly familiar — the jump-trap, the half-court offenses that seemed to be built around pump fakes, the way a player who scored was always (ALWAYS) supposed to point at the passer. North Carolina shot 50% year after year after year. But the team changed subtly every single year. North Carolina won before the shot clock. North Carolina won after the shot clock. North Carolina won before the three-point line and after.
Yes, people would joke about how Dean Smith was the only man who could hold Michael Jordan under 20 points a game… but it misses the point. For one thing, Jordan DID average 20 points a game in his sophomore season and 19.6 points a game in his junior season — high-scoring numbers for a college player (Jordan, after all, was national player of the year in his junior year). But more, much more to the point, Michael Jordan went from great talent to great player at North Carolina, he honed his preposterous work ethic and competitiveness at North Carolina, he was grounded in the fundamentals, he was fed by the system. Would Michael Jordan have become Michael Jordan anywhere else? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
The Dean System was a complex array of lessons, traditions, rules. They always did certain things the same way at North Carolina. Freshmen were not allowed to talk to the media until they had played a game. Seniors were always on the cover of the media guide. Schedules were hammered out to the minute. Every practice began with a famous quote. Every free throw was preceded by a team huddle. Every tiny detail was considered, every angle covered, minutia was the air that Dean Smith breathed. The story I heard was that someone watched the North Carolina layup drill before games to record who missed layups. I don’t know if that’s true, but it fit. You always had to concentrate for Dean Smith.
He coached every game, from October practice games to championships, like the one my friend saw — with changing defenses, multiple substitutions, conserved timeouts. Nobody was better in the final minute. Two stories tell that tale. One was the North Carolina-Duke game in 1974, when the Tar Heels overcame an eight-point deficit in the final 17 seconds to force overtime (on a 30-foot buzzer beater by Walter Davis)… and this was long before the three-point shot. What I will always remember about that is that years later The Charlotte Observer did a story on the game and called the old Duke coach Neill McGeachy, who has never granted an interview about that game — it affected him that much. He didn’t grant one when The Observer called either, but instead said that the game has been talked about enough. And he finished with a Willy Wonka “Good day!”
The other story comes from the end of the Elite Eight game between North Carolina and Cincinnati in 1993 — the score was tied at 66, there were eight-tenths of a second left, Smith designed a play and told Brian Reese something like “OK, he will get a pick, he will seal off the defense there, and you will be wide open under the basket. You just tap it in. But do not dunk it. You do not have time to dunk it.”
The play ran precisely as Smith said … Reese was wide open. And, he tried to dunk it. The ball clanged off the rim and the game went into overtime. As it turned out, thanks to bizarre timekeeping — officials often seemed as enamored by Dean Smith’s genius as everyone else — the dunk WOULD have counted. But it could not go in. Dean Smith had perfectly orchestrated an eighth of a second. And he told Reese to not dunk the ball.
Good days and bad. Everybody calls him Coach. That is essential. Every now and again in years past, an assistant coach or a former player would be quoted calling him “Dean” or “Dean Smith,” and this inevitably led to cries of being misquoted. He was “Coach Smith,” always and forever. This wasn’t just out of respect. This was reality. He was Coach Smith, always and forever.
It has been a remarkable life. A young man is born in the middle of the country, in Emporia, Kans., the family moves to Topeka, and in high school he is a quarterback of the football team and leading scorer in basketball. He goes to the University of Kansas on a math scholarship, but he plays (sparingly) on a national championship basketball team coached by the legendary Phog Allen. He goes into the Air Force, serves his country in Germany, then coaches the Air Force basketball and golf teams. He goes to North Carolina to work under another legendary coach who could not have been more different from Allen — the New York legend Frank McGuire. The program falls under scandal, he gets the head coaching job and his team is in such shambles his first couple of years that he is burned in effigy on the campus.
He gets his bearings, develops his plan, and using nothing more than his memory, his focus, his refusal to be ordinary and his sense of direction, he builds a basketball program and a style of coaching that would be copied more than any other, even John Wooden’s UCLA. His teams win 879 games. He teaches some of the best basketball players of his era, including the best. He makes certain that his players graduate and learn basketball, but he also stays in the larger world. He works in the community to integrate North Carolina — even taking part in a sit-in at a local restaurant. He has his players practice in prisons so they will understand a little bit better the world around them (Smith was vocally opposed to the death penalty). He speaks out relentlessly against war. It isn’t his views that matter as much as his insistence on speaking them. When Rick Reilly asked Smith in 2003 if he would have allowed Michael Jordan to demonstrate his political views, Smith said: “An individual has rights. You don’t give them up when you put on a basketball uniform.”
A remarkable life. A former North Carolina player says that he saw Coach Smith not so long ago. The player had heard about Smith’s good days and bad and, with that in mind, introduced himself again. He just wasn’t sure if Coach Smith remembered. What followed is that Smith looked him in the eye, smiled, and patted the player on the shoulder, said it was good see him again, just like always. Memories rushed back. Lessons echoed. Did Dean Smith remember? The player doesn’t know. But the player believes.
• NCAA Basketball News Archive Index:
2010, 2009
• North Carolina Basketball Tickets Do you need Sports Ticket Depot to help you hunt down your cheap North Carolina basketball tickets? Contact us or fill out our North Carolina basketball ticket information request form. We will hunt down your cheap North Carolina basketball tickets for you!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
