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WSJ, Feb. 9 2015
Dean Smith, North Carolina Coaching Great, Dies at 83
by Ben Cohen
Dean Smith, the revered University of North Carolina men’s basketball
coach who won two national titles and mentored a young Michael Jordan,
has died. He was 83.
Smith, who retired in 1997, died peacefully at his home in Chapel Hill
Saturday night, surrounded by his wife and five children, his family
said. The school didn’t announce a cause of death. Smith’s family said
in 2010 that he was suffering from a “progressive neurocognitive
disorder that affects his memory.”
A member of nearly every basketball Hall of Fame, Smith coached the Tar
Heels from 1961 to 1997. In that time, he won the NCAA tournament in
1982 and 1993, and he retired as the winningest coach in college
basketball, a title now held by Mike Krzyzewski, his longtime rival at
Duke. More than 50 of Smith’s players continued their careers
professionally, including Jordan, who felt so fondly about the Tar Heels
that he wore the school’s shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls uniform.
“Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence on my life than
Coach Smith,” Jordan said in a statement Sunday. “He was more than a
coach—he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father.”
Smith also won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest
civilian honor, partly for championing the cause of civil rights in the
South. As coach of North Carolina’s basketball team, and thus one of the
most influential figures in the state, Smith was a progressive voice who
recruited the first black scholarship athlete in the school’s history.
Born in Kansas in 1931, Smith has roots in basketball that extend all
the way back to the sport’s inventor. Smith played and was an assistant
coach at the University of Kansas under Phog Allen, the protégé of James
Naismith. There are still T-shirts sold near Kansas’ campus that hail
Smith’s native state as the “birthplace of North Carolina basketball.”
Smith moved to North Carolina in 1958 as an assistant coach and never
left. He was promoted to head coach in 1961 with the school in the
throes of a recruiting scandal that resulted in a one-year ban from
postseason play. In a region that cares deeply about basketball, and at
a school that had won a national championship the year before Smith
arrived, the unproven 30-year-old coach was seen as a risk.
He turned out to be a masterful leader whose system reestablished North
Carolina as a premier name in college basketball.
Smith believed in the power of high-percentage shots, but he also
adapted over the course of his career, choosing to let each team’s
personnel decide how it would play. He liked his teams to play fast, yet
Smith is also credited with popularizing the “Four Corners” offense, a
stalling strategy so effective that it helped bring a shot clock to
college basketball.
Smith reached the pinnacle of his sport in 1982. After six trips to the
Final Four that ended with losses, Smith finally won his first national
championship, becoming one of three people ever to hoist the trophy as a
player and coach. It was a classic title game between North Carolina and
Georgetown that ended with a game-winning jump shot from Jordan, then a
freshman.
Smith’s second crown came in an equally mesmerizing way. In the 1993
final, the Tar Heels toppled the famed “Fab Five” of Michigan when Chris
Webber mistakenly called a timeout his team didn’t have, essentially
clinching the championship for North Carolina in one of the most famous
moments in basketball history.
Smith was similarly fierce about his liberal convictions off the
basketball court. In addition to taking a stand on integration, he
publicly supported a nuclear freeze during the 1980s and opposed the
death penalty and the Vietnam War.
Smith announced his retirement days before the 1997-98 season. The
current Tar Heels coach, Roy Williams, worked as an assistant under
Smith, who kept an office in the school’s basketball arena. It is called
the Dean E. Smith Center—the Dean Dome for short.
In a statement, Williams said, “I’m 64 years old and everything I do
with our basketball program and the way I deal with the university is
driven by my desire to make Coach Smith proud.”
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