The name of the restaurant was The Pines, and back in the late 1950s, when Frank McGuire was still coaching basketball for the University of North Carolina, he often would bring his team there for a pregame meal. The restaurant welcomed each and every player, because they always brought two things. Every one had a hardy appetite.
And every one had white skin.
McGuire’s assistant coach noticed this. Years before, as a boy in Emporia, Kan., the assistant’s own father – also a basketball coach – had done the unthinkable: He’d integrated his team with African-Americans, even as the town and the state athletic association threatened to banish him for life for such a bold move.
“My father,” Dean Smith would explain, “believed in the human family.”
And Smith took notice. So one day in 1959, Smith and his pastor at Binkley Baptist Church, the Rev. Robert Seymour, brought a black theology student with them for lunch at the restaurant. This was a full year before the famous sit-ins at a Woolworth across the state in Greensboro. There was no rancor, and there were no television cameras.
There was just a student, a minister and an assistant basketball coach, standing in the door, the restaurant manager not quite sure what to do, before quietly understanding there was only one thing he could do. He sat them.
Thus had Coach Dean Edwards Smith claimed his first victory, one he never bragged about, one he barely acknowledged until years later, when Seymour told the story. It was John Feinstein, who’d covered Smith for years, who’d known him since Feinstein was a student at Duke, who asked him, incredulously, “Aren’t you proud of doing something like that?”
To which Smith replied: “You should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do the right thing.”
This was the man so many of his players and his friends were talking about Sunday, when the news arrived that Smith had finally succumbed to a long, cruel struggle with Alzheimer’s disease at age 83.
This was the message so many of them wanted to carry forth — more than the 879 victories that, at the time he retired, were the most ever assembled by a Division I coach, more than the two national championships, more than the army of professional basketball players he nurtured and developed, more than his impact on college basketball as it shifted from a cute regional sport to a national phenomenon throughout the 1970s and ’80s, into the ’90s.
“Coach Smith touched the lives of so many people as a coach and teacher,” tweeted Matt Doherty, who played for Smith in the early ’80s and was one of his successors as Tar Heels coach. “He was the reason I became a coach. I wanted to try to have an impact on young men the way he impacted me and all the Carolina players and managers that were a part of his program.”
Years ago, when Doherty was assisting another Smith disciple, Roy Williams, at Kansas, he was sitting in a hotel coffee shop and being peppered with questions about his college coach. And Doherty smiled, sipped from his cup, and shook his head.
“When you’re 18 years old, you don’t think anyone can be that good, that generous, that wise,” he said. “Except when you were around Coach Smith, you realized he was even better, wiser, and more generous than you ever imagined.”
Success didn’t come quickly for Smith. McGuire left the Tar Heels a probationary mess, and his successor’s first five seasons were modest: 66-47, 41-29 in the ACC, zero postseason berths. In January 1965, 12 games into his fourth year, the team bus returned to Woollen Gym after Carolina had been pummeled at Wake Forest.
On a nearby tree, Smith had been hung in effigy. Billy Cunningham, Smith’s first true star, bolted the bus, raced for the tree, and pulled down the puppet along with teammate Billy Galantai. “I was just glad the students used a dummy,” Smith would often joke, “and not the real thing.”
But it was an early indicator how much Smith’s players revered him. A year later, he would recruit Charlie Scott, who’d been born in Harlem, attended Stuyvesant High and was the valedictorian of his senior class in Laurinburg, N.C. Scott was the first African-American scholarship athlete in Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels qualified for three straight Final Fours. They would add 11 more along the way.
He would win all those games, touch all those lives. At a time when the face of college basketball was often the red-faced fury of Bob Knight, Smith was a visible reminder that there was another way, too. He truly was one of the best who ever was. And a pretty good basketball coach, too.