The Legends Club Read online

  Smith was, without doubt, an icon. He had already taken North Carolina to five Final Fours—twice reaching the national championship game. He had also coached the U.S. Olympic team in 1976—the first active coach to lead an Olympic basketball team. Prior to the Games in Montreal, the United States had felt comfortable putting a retired coach in charge.

  But after Henry Iba’s 1972 team had lost to the Soviet Union in Munich—on a refereeing call so clearly wrong that the Americans refused to accept their silver medals—it was decided that an active coach was needed. John Wooden was getting ready to retire. The only other possible choice, in the minds of most, was Smith.

  The United States—with four North Carolina players on the team—was challenged only once, in a preliminary-round game against Puerto Rico, and rolled to the gold medal.

  And yet, in spite of Foster’s assertion that people in North Carolina believed that Dean Smith, not NaiSmith, had invented basketball, there were still some holes in Smith’s résumé.

  The one that was most notable was the one that was most obvious: he hadn’t won a national championship. No one blamed him for losing the national title game to UCLA and Lew Alcindor in 1968—UCLA never lost an NCAA Tournament game during Alcindor’s three years in uniform—but the loss in 1977 to Marquette rankled.

  The irony was that Smith might have done his best coaching job in that tournament. Tommy LaGarde, one of the ’76 Olympians, was lost for the season in February. Walter Davis, also an Olympian, hurt his hand during the ACC Tournament and played with his fingers taped together the rest of the postseason. And Phil Ford, the third returning Olympian, who most ACC experts agreed was the best point guard they had ever seen, hyperextended his elbow during a round-of-sixteen win over Notre Dame and was limited for the rest of the tournament.

  And yet, Smith somehow got the Tar Heels through one down-to-the-wire game after another. They beat Purdue by three and then came from way behind to beat Notre Dame (on St. Patrick’s Day, as Smith pointed out to Digger Phelps for years after that). Then they beat Kentucky to reach the Final Four with shooting guard John Kuester running Smith’s famed four-corners delay offense because Ford’s elbow injury made it impossible for him to handle the ball for lengthy periods.

  Kuester was named the MVP of the East Regionals and was asked afterward if it bothered him that he was the only starter on the 1976 team who hadn’t made the Olympic team.

  “No, not at all,” he answered. “I thought Coach Smith did a great job picking the team.”

  Smith, standing next to him, broke in quickly: “Of course, I didn’t pick the team, the [Olympic] committee did.” He had insisted all along that the presence of four Carolina players on his team had nothing to do with who was coaching the team. No one bought that notion, but given the way the four players performed, their selection really wasn’t controversial.

  Still playing hurt, the Tar Heels managed to beat Nevada–Las Vegas 84–83 in a wild semifinal in Atlanta thanks to a spectacular 31-point game by freshman forward Mike O’Koren. It was their fifteenth straight victory—almost all of them close—and it put them in the national title game against Marquette, which had been fortunate to beat North Carolina–Charlotte in the semifinals.

  Marquette jumped to a 39–27 halftime lead, but as had been the case throughout the tournament, UNC came back, beginning the second half on a seven-minute 18–4 run to take a 45–43 lead. Marquette appeared to be running out of gas. And yet, after the Warriors tied the score at 45–45 with 12:40 to go, Smith decided to slow the game down. There was no shot clock in those days, and Ford had perfected the four-corners spread offense that Smith had invented years earlier to milk the clock with a lead and force the defense to chase.

  Chasing Ford—even at less than 100 percent—was virtually impossible, especially since he never seemed to miss a key free throw. But there was too much time left to simply run out the clock, and Marquette appeared tired.

  “We wanted to get them out of their zone,” Smith said later. “They had a very big zone [three six-foot-nine-inch players] and we wanted to force them to go man-to-man.”

  With the score tied, Marquette coach Al McGuire, in his final game as a college coach, saw no reason to change his defense or to chase. The game suddenly slowed to a near halt.

  Smith had put senior Bruce Buckley into the game to give O’Koren a breather a couple of moments earlier. O’Koren had scored eight points during Carolina’s opening salvo of the second half. Now, with Ford controlling the ball and the floor spread, Smith sent O’Koren to the scorer’s table to sub for Buckley on the next dead ball.

  Buckley was not a scorer. He came off the bench and played good defense and rebounded. He was a classic UNC bench senior: good student—he would go on to be a lawyer—good kid, someone Smith was proud to have coached. But he wasn’t O’Koren, who would score 1,765 points during his college career and was the number-six pick in the 1980 NBA draft. Eddie Fogler, who had graduated from UNC in 1970 and was now the number-two assistant coach, leaned over to his boss and said quietly, “Should we maybe call time to get Mike back in?”

  Smith shook his head. He didn’t believe in using any time-outs, unless absolutely necessary, until the final minutes of a game. And he wasn’t about to call a time-out when it would be clear to everyone in the building he was doing it to sub O’Koren for Buckley.

  Buckley was a senior. You just didn’t do that to a senior—ever.

  Carolina held the ball for almost three minutes. Finally, Ford—still playing hurt—found Buckley on a beautiful backdoor cut. But as Buckley went up for what looked like an open layup, Marquette’s Bo Ellis came down the lane and cleanly blocked the shot. Buckley just wasn’t quick enough to get the ball out of his hands before Ellis recovered and got there.

  The ball went the other way. McGuire milked the clock for more than a minute before guard Jim Boylan came open and scored on a cut similar to the one Buckley had made. The game stayed close until the final minute, but North Carolina never got even again. The Warriors went on to win 67–59.

  Thirty-four years later, when North Carolina and Marquette met in an NCAA round-of-sixteen game, Raleigh News & Observer columnist Caulton Tudor, who had been in the Omni on that March night in 1977, wrote a column recalling the game. “The game is widely viewed,” Tudor wrote, “as Dean Smith’s worst moment in 36 years as North Carolina coach.”

  Smith would have vehemently disagreed with that notion. He was justifiably proud of the run his banged-up team had made to reach the championship game. And there was absolutely no way he would have done anything different on the fateful possession that ended with Ellis blocking Buckley’s shot.

  “The four-corners got us that far,” he said four years later, in 1981, when he was still searching for his first championship. “It made sense to pull them out of the zone.”

  And Fogler’s suggested time-out?

  “No. Absolutely not. Even after Ellis blocked the shot there were almost ten minutes left in the game. We had plenty of time to still win. We just didn’t.”

  As for it being Smith’s worst moment, that notion was almost laughable. That had come twelve years earlier.

  —

  On July 15, 1961, the day Dean Smith was named to succeed Frank McGuire as basketball coach at North Carolina, very few people in the sport had any idea who he was. In fact, even though he had been there for three years, there weren’t a lot of people in Chapel Hill who knew the name or would have recognized him walking down Franklin Street, the picturesque college town’s main street.

  That was the way Smith liked it.

  “If Dean could have spent his entire coaching career being beamed to and from the practice court and to and from the games without ever talking to anyone in between he’d have been happy,” Mike Krzyzewski said. “He loved practice, he loved getting ready for a game and the games. He treasured the relationships he had with his players. The rest of it—publicity, fund-raising, speaking to alumni or anyone else—he would h
ave been delighted if he’d never done it once.”

  Smith fit the stereotype of a small-town midwestern kid. He had been born in Emporia, Kansas, a prairie town with a population of about twenty thousand that was roughly halfway between Wichita and Topeka. His parents, Alfred and Vesta Smith, were both teachers. Alfred Smith also coached basketball. In fact, his 1934 team was the first to compete in the state championships with an African American on the team.

  “I was only three when that happened,” Smith said years later. “So, of course, I wasn’t aware of it. But when I did find out and had an understanding of what my father had done and the backlash that had occurred as a result, I was very proud of him.”

  Smith’s family moved to the big city—Topeka, the state capital—when he was in high school. He was a good athlete, playing football, basketball, and baseball. “I always liked to play the positions where you were in charge,” he said, smiling at the self-awareness of his need to control things. “I was a quarterback, a point guard, and a catcher.”

  Even then, he was a detailaholic. His younger sister, Joan, told a story once about a football game during which Smith overthrew one of his running backs in the flat and the ball rolled several yards after hitting the ground.

  “The running back was named Dean too,” she remembered. “He started to run over to pick the ball up and toss it back to the referee. Dean yelled at him to just leave it and let the ref go over and pick it up. He didn’t want him to waste any energy chasing the ball down.”

  Smith went to Kansas, one of the powers in college basketball then as now, but not on a basketball scholarship. Instead, he earned an academic scholarship and majored in math. His wizardry with numbers became legendary among coaches and led to a conversation with Bobby Cremins, then the coach at Georgia Tech, at an ACC coaches meeting that everyone in the room talks about to this day.

  “Gene Corrigan [then the commissioner] was talking to us about a number of things and Bobby started getting on him about the pressure basketball coaches were facing to make the [NCAA] tournament every year,” former Maryland coach Gary Williams remembered. “He said it was unfair for us to be judged just on that because it was so hard to get in.

  “Gene said, ‘Come on, Bobby, sixty-four teams get in.’ And Bobby said, ‘Out of how many?’ Gene said it was about three hundred. So Bobby turns to Dean and says, ‘Dean, you’re the math major; what’s sixty-four into three hundred?’ Dean, of course, says right away that it’s twenty-one point three percent. Bobby turns back to Corrigan and asks how many football teams make bowl games. Back then it was, I think, fifty-six. Bobby says, ‘Out of how many teams?’ Gene says, ‘About a hundred.’ So Bobby turns back to Dean and says, ‘Okay, math major, fifty-six into a hundred, what percent is that?’ ”

  Smith did play basketball in college but was never a starter. By the time he was a senior, Phog Allen, Kansas’s legendary coach, had made him an unofficial assistant coach, assigning him to work with the younger players. Kansas played in the Final Four in both 1952 and 1953—beating St. John’s in the championship game in ’52 before losing, 69–68, to Indiana a year later. Smith always pointed out to people that he did play in the ’52 game—late—when Kansas pulled away for an 80–63 win.

  By the time he was a senior, Smith knew he wanted to coach. He had signed up for Air Force ROTC—the Korean War was in progress—and he had a two-year commitment when he graduated. Just before he was sent to Germany, he met his first wife, Ann, in what friends would later describe as a “classic Dean Smith moment.”

  “It was at a graduation dance,” Smith said. “Ann came with a football player I didn’t like. He was very cocky. So, I thought maybe I’d take him down a peg by asking his date to dance. Which I did. We started talking and I realized that I really liked her. So, we started dating and we kept in close touch while I was in Germany.”

  During that time overseas, Smith met Bob Spear, who was about to become the first basketball coach at the brand-new Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Spear offered him the job as his assistant coach with one caveat: he also had to coach the golf team. Smith accepted. The golf team wasn’t very good.

  “I knew we were in trouble,” Smith said later, “when I realized I was a better player than most of the guys on the team.”

  He had better luck in basketball. Spear was not only an excellent teacher, he came to be his assistant’s number-one advocate. At the 1958 Final Four, when North Carolina coach Frank McGuire was looking for an assistant, Spear recommended Smith. And so, at the age of twenty-seven and with a wife and two very young children, he packed his bags and moved to Chapel Hill.

  One of the first things he did upon arriving was look for a church to join. A young minister named Robert Seymour had just become the Binkley Baptist Church’s first pastor, and Smith took an instant liking to him. They were close in age and in beliefs. Seymour was very disturbed by the fact that restaurants in Chapel Hill were still segregated. He and Smith decided to do something about it. One night the two of them walked into the Pines, a well-known Chapel Hill restaurant, with an African American divinity student who was a member of the church.

  “We just sat down and ordered,” Smith said later after Seymour had told a reporter the story. “I guess management made a decision that they didn’t want to start trouble with Frank McGuire’s assistant coach. They served us dinner and, after that, at least as far as I know, began serving everyone who came to the restaurant—not just white people.”

  Smith always played down his role in what occurred, but Seymour did not. “What you have to remember is that Dean was not Dean Smith in 1958,” he said. “He was an assistant basketball coach, new in town. They knew him at the Pines because that’s where the basketball team went for team meals [as it still does to this day]. Dean and I had discussed the risks that were involved. He could have been fired for stirring up trouble. I don’t think the thought of not doing it ever crossed his mind.”

  As an assistant to Frank McGuire, Smith had no trouble staying comfortably in the background. Billy Cunningham, who would go on to be an All-American at Carolina and an NBA Hall of Fame player, remembers McGuire and Smith coming to his parents’ house in Brooklyn when he was being recruited in 1961.

  “I remember Dean being there,” Cunningham said. “But that’s about all I remember about him. It was as if he faded into the living room wall. The pitch was all Frank.”

  McGuire was a showman, the way Al McGuire (no relation) would be at Marquette and Jim Valvano would be years later. He was a New Yorker who, even after leaving St. John’s for North Carolina, continued to recruit New York kids. In basketball circles, the odyssey of city kids to Chapel Hill was called “McGuire’s underground railroad.”

  Sometimes, when he went into a Catholic home, McGuire would bring the local parish priest with him. With the Cunninghams, that wasn’t necessary.

  “His cousin lived next door to us,” Cunningham said, laughing. “After the visit, my dad said to me, ‘Okay, Bill, you’ve got two choices: you can go play for Uncle Frank or go to a Catholic school—your choice.’ ”

  Cunningham went to play for Uncle Frank.

  McGuire was not an X’s and O’s coach by any means. Nor was he a detail guy. He recruited great players and expected them to continue to be great. Smith was the detail guy. He made the practice plans every day; he scouted the opponents. He did all the background things that no one—except the players—would notice.

  Three summers after Smith’s arrival, McGuire “resigned” as coach. The school was being investigated for numerous NCAA recruiting violations, and Chancellor William Aycock thought it best for McGuire to leave. When the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors were searching for a new head coach, McGuire pursued the job—and got it. On his way out, he recommended to Aycock that the chancellor hire his thirty-year-old assistant coach as his replacement. Since it was July and finding a so-called name coach at that time of year would be difficult, Aycock decided to give Smith a chance.r />
  “When I heard Coach McGuire was leaving my first thought was that I should go someplace else,” said Larry Brown, who was a rising junior that summer. “We all knew the NCAA was going to come down on us, so I thought maybe I should go someplace else. I called my mom to see what she thought and she said, ‘Coach Smith’s already been here. You’re staying.’ ”

  Several players did leave. And Smith started his career with one hand tied behind his back. That first season, UNC was allowed to play only two nonconference games and finished 8–9. Scholarship numbers were limited. The second season, Carolina was allowed to play twenty-one games—and finished 15–6.

  “We were good that year,” Brown said. “Billy [Cunningham] had become a star, and we had figured out that Coach Smith knew what he was doing. If not for darned Duke being so good, we could have made a dent in postseason.”

  In those days only one conference school could go to the NCAAs, and darned Duke—which ended up in the Final Four—won the conference tournament. “We were very good that year,” Smith said during the last season he coached. “We’ve had maybe five or six teams I thought were good enough to win the national [title] and that was one of them.”

  A year later, after Brown and Yogi Poteat had graduated, the Tar Heels slipped back to 12–12. Nowadays, an ACC coach with a three-year record of 35–27 might be in jeopardy of losing his job. There were mitigating circumstances in Smith’s case—the NCAA sanctions—but even so, boosters and alumni expect instant success, especially in a program that has recently won a national championship, which UNC had done in 1957 under McGuire.

  Cunningham was a senior and a star in 1965. The Tar Heels were 6–3, including a win over Kentucky, when things began to go south. They lost a game at Florida—coached by Norman Sloan, in his first incarnation there—and then lost to Maryland in the first game after Christmas break. That left them 6–5 with a trip to Wake Forest coming up two days later—on January 6.