Dean Smith, the teacher

PARIS (George Eddy's International Show) - The passing of Dean Smith marks the end of an era (please read this excellent article with hommages to Smith from US President Barack Obama, Michael Jordan and Mike Krzyzewski).

This was the era of college coaches as kings when the best players stayed more than one season at the NCAA level.

John Wooden said: "Dean Smith is a better teacher of basketball than anyone else". Coming from the Wizard of Westwood, that says it all!

In 2001, I was working on a documentary about the historic rivalry between North Carolina and Duke and Dean gave me an autographed copy of his biography, "A Coach's Life", which I cherish to this day. I found Smith to be approachable, knowledgeable and humble.

What a life he had. Both his parents, fittingly, were school teachers and Smith inherited his love for basketball and social justice from his father while growing up in Kansas. His father won a state championship as a high school basketball coach in 1934 with a team that included a black player, a rare occurence at the time!

Dean won an NCAA title as a player at the University of Kansas (UK) and then became a coach like his dad.

Kansas represents an incredible family tree of coaches because the inventor of the basketball, Dr James Naismith, coached a certain Phog Allen there, a legendary coach himself who transmitted his savoir faire on to Smith who played and was an assistant for him at UK.

Coach Smith had a strong religious upbringing and moral fiber that was accentuated in the military, a typical apprenticeship at the time.

Mike Krzyzewski and Gregg Popovich followed a similar path when starting their coaching careers.

Dean Smith became an assistant at the University of North Carolina (UNC) when the school was involved in several betting and recruiting scandals and the administrators decided to de-emphasize the sport for a while. He was given the job as head coach with the priority being to clean up the program more than just win games.

After a rough start, he turned out to be the perfect fit for the position which he held for 36 years. His intelligence and moral character were off the charts as he had gone to Kansas on an academic scholarship specializing in math and his tenure at UNC was full of examples of Smith fighting for civil rights and against the death penalty.

We can't imagine how much courage it took to stand up for these priciples in the south in the early 1960s. My father fought alongside Martin Luther King for civil rights in Florida at this crucial time in US history so this part of Smith's humanitarian legacy touches me profoundly.

The democratic Party of North Carolina would have liked to see Dean run for U.S. senator and his integrity and open-mindedness could have taken him a long way but Smith was, viscerally, a basketball coach.

He won lots of games and two NCAA titles despite running a clean program which, let me tell you, was no easy task at the time because cheating and corruption concerning college recruiting were rampant!

Smith and Wooden were such great teachers and mentors to young players that they could win without cheating.

Wooden taught the finer points of winning basketball to Lew Alcindor (later to be known as Kareem Abdul Jabbar) wheras Smith made Michael Jordan into a fundamentally sound, all-around player.

When Jordan arrived at Chapel Hill, he was an unbelievable athlete, a diamond in the rough and Smith told him "if you can't pass the ball, Michael, you can't play basketball here".

In the end, it was Jordan's jump shot as a freshman that gave Smith his first NCAA title after several disappointing Final Fours.

Jordan was Dean's greatest work as he went on to become, possibly, the best player of all-time!

The two remained close after Jordan's college career because for Dean Smith, if you played for him, you were part of his extended family... forever!

The list of great players that Smith prepared for the NBA is longer than a food stamps line during the Great Depression! He welcomed many international players to his program before this became fashionable. He even coached the ultimate iconoclast, Rasheed Wallace, and they went to the Final Four together in 1995.

Coach Smith invented many things related to basketball and was way ahead of his time. Player huddles, acknowledging the passer, asking to come out when a player was tired and "senior day" were some of his innovations. His use of the "four corners offense" pushed the NCAA to go to a shot clock which, thank goodness, ended the college era of low scoring, "stall ball" games! 

His math background paved the way for all kinds of new and inventive statistics, like measuring the impact of setting screens, diving for loose balls, the pass that leads to the assist, deflecting passes and blocking out on defense. He had legions of basketball interns noting all this information at games AND in practices. These innovative stats were the groundwork for the modern fascination with "moneyball" analytics that are so popular in sports now.

Smith's practices and film sessions were meticulously prepared, disciplined and efficient and when a coach spoke you could hear a pin drop! Many of his former players and assistants, like Larry Brown (who was Popovich's mentor), went on to be great coaches preaching "Let's play the right way".

Dean Smith's ultimate basketball slogan and philosophy were resumed in his famous "Play hard, play smart and play together".  So simple and so true...

George Eddy

FIBA

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