Blog | UNC’s Dean Smith - great coach, greater man - has died
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I will admit to being biased about this.
I am a fan of the University of North Carolina basketball team.
When I was thinking about colleges, my first choice was UNC, where I was planning to play football. (I chose Davidson College instead because I didn’t want football to be a major focus of mine.)
But Dean Smith, the man who died this weekend, was probably greater off the court than he was on it.
He won national titles and went to a bevy of Final Fours and was the all-time winningest coach (regular season and NCAA tournament) when he retired in 1997 and put maybe more young men into the NBA than anyone else, including a guy named Michael Jordan.
All of that is true, and all of that should be noted and remembered.
Smith was much more than that, though. He was breaking racial barriers long before it was popular, and the graduation rate of his players was about 96 percent. (There is a pending NCAA academic investigation of UNC that may or may not touch Smith’s era.) That’s why he received the nation’s highest civilian honor a few years ago.
He had been battling an illness for awhile now, so his passing can be deemed a well-deserved rest. No matter how you label it, a great one left us this weekend.
Here’s a really good piece about the end of his life:
From that piece:
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Dean Smith doesn't watch the games anymore. The motion on the screen is too hard to follow. Now he thumbs through golf magazines and picture books. Most of the books are about North Carolina basketball. They seem to make him happy. He turns the pages past photo after photo of himself. Nobody knows if he knows who he is.
Music seems to make him happy, too. About a year and a half ago, a friend named Billy Barnes came over to the house to play guitar and sing a few songs. Barnes played old Baptist hymns and barbershop quartet tunes -- Daisy Daisy, give me your answer true. Music he knew Dean liked. But nothing seemed to get through. Dean was getting restless. Barnes asked if he could play one more song.
After every basketball game, win or lose, the UNC band plays the alma mater and fight song. The Carolina people stand and sing. Barnes knew Dean had heard the song thousands of times. He started to play.
Dean jumped to his feet. He waved at his wife, Linnea, to stand with him. He put his hand over his heart and sang from memory:
Hark the sound of Tar Heel voices
Ringing clear and true.
Singing Carolina's praises,
Shouting N-C-U.
Hail to the brightest star of all
Clear its radiance shine
Carolina priceless gem,
Receive all praises thine.
I'm a Tar Heel born, I'm a Tar Heel bred, and when I die I'm a Tar Heel dead!
So it's rah-rah Car'lina-lina, rah-rah Car'lina-lina, rah-rah Carolina, rah, rah, rah!
"It was just pure joy. That uninhibited joy in the music," Linnea says. "It's one of those moments that you know there's more there, or momentarily there, than sometimes you're aware of."
Here is a story about one of the most important moments early in his coaching career:
Dean Smith and a civil rights legacy
From that piece:
In 1948, the Trojans placed third in the state tournament. The next year, a member of the Trojans -- the aforementioned young player -- went to Buck Weaver, the principal, to try to get the two teams merged; and he would not give up after initially being rebuffed. He wanted to win a championship by fielding the best players possible.
That player was Dean Smith -- the same Dean Smith who helped integrate ACC basketball by recruiting Charlie Scott to play at the University of North Carolina in 1966.
Weaver's hesitation was because he thought it would smash the special segregation of social life between whites and blacks, especially at the dances that were often held after the Trojans' basketball games. Topeka's football, track and baseball teams, as we've mentioned, already were integrated. But there were no dances after those games.
With Smith in the middle, the pressure on Weaver grew; and after the 1948-49 season, Topeka High School's basketball team was integrated. The next season, there were three African-Americans on the Trojans' junior varsity squad; and in the 1951 season, Bill Petersen became the first-ever African-American varsity basketball player at Topeka.
By then, Smith was a star at the University of Kansas.
Some of the alumni from the old Ramblers teams later played significant roles in the city of Topeka and around the country. Joe Douglas became Topeka's first African-American fire chief. Jack Alexander became the city's water commissioner. Coach Merle Ross became an administrator for Topeka's elementary schools. Ira Hutchinson became the first African-American to serve as deputy director of the National Park Service.
None, though, had greater impact than Oliver Brown and Charles Scott did with their roles in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which literally changed the course of America's racial and civil rights history. Scott was one of the counsels for the NAACP, which brought the suit. (There is some irony here in that the player Smith chose to help integrate ACC basketball had the same name.) Brown was the plaintiff named in the suit representing 13 parents and their 20 children. He is the Brown in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. A former Rambler!
When Smith came for his induction into the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS) Hall of Fame, we talked at length about the impact our fathers had on our subsequent involvements with civil rights issues. He knew that my dad had helped integrate the NBA by signing Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton in 1950, and he told me that his father, Alfred Smith, helped integrate sports in Emporia, Kan. As the coach at Emporia High, Alfred Smith put the first African-American player in school history on his team, in 1932. Emporia won the state championship in 1934, becoming the first integrated team to win the state title.
This story was originally published February 8, 2015 at 11:20 AM with the headline "Blog | UNC’s Dean Smith - great coach, greater man - has died."