His Moral Tone Is Dean Smith’s Ultimate Legacy

For at least the past eight years, maybe as many as 10, Dean Smith began each autumn by telling Bill Guthridge, his assistant of now 31 years, to get ready to take over the North Carolina basketball program because it was time to retire.

And every year, Guthridge and the other assistants turned a deaf ear because they were certain Smith would become reinvigorated as October turned into November and a new season approached.

But not this time. Dean Smith has retired. You almost choke on the words.

He was watching one of his many pupils who is now a head coach, Larry Brown, run the Philadelphia 76ers training camp here just the other day and knew that, at 66, with all the demands that make coaching so stressful, he couldn’t summon the energy he thought he needed to attack another season.

“Larry Brown always fires me up,” he said. “I was looking at him (run) practice and I thought, ‘I used to be like that.’ If I can’t give this team that enthusiasm, I’d said I’d get out. I enjoy basketball. I enjoy coaching basketball . . . It’s the out-of-season things I haven’t been able to handle very well.”

He told the university’s powers seven days ago he was thinking about retiring. He told his staff, then his players last Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday in Chapel Hill, N.C., addressed a shocked state--indeed a region--that clung to every word on live TV.

It was like watching a man decide to step down from the throne. Brown stayed here to be with his mentor, which meant missing his team’s pre-season game against the Knicks on Thursday night. John Thompson, Smith’s fiercely loyal friend and 1976 U.S. Olympic team assistant, flew in from Washington. President Clinton telephoned with good wishes.

Phil Ford, the guard who made Smith’s four-corners strategy work so well and who has been an assistant coach here the past eight years, said, “When he told me, I was silent for a moment, then I just broke down and cried.”

Smith, who has been about the least introspective public sports figure one can imagine, looked around the packed room in the basement of Dean E. Smith Center, mentioned several people by name including Thompson, and said, “What loyalty I’ve had . . . “ before choking up.

Oh, there was some joking and some funny moments. Guthridge told the story of first meeting Smith when he was a sophomore in high school and Smith was a senior guard at Kansas. Guthridge’s sister dated Smith. “By the way, I’m glad they didn’t get married,” Guthridge said, “because it wouldn’t have worked out for either one of them.”

And there was Smith, talking of why he wouldn’t dare announce his retirement but make it effective at the end of the season: “Can you imagine how many rocking chairs at different places I would get and (people) acting like they like you?” he said.

And symbolically, there was Guthridge, when asked about his first official duty as coach, literally looking down the table to Smith and asking, “Am I the head coach?” Smith nodded politely and Guthridge answered.

But for whatever yucks there were, you couldn’t get away from the somber mood.

Sportswriters have to be, as a group, the most cynical people in the world and most of us were, well, down.

Let me speak for myself: I’m down. And it has absolutely nothing to do with basketball.

Dean Smith, by far, is a greater man than he is a basketball coach. And he is on any short list of the greatest basketball coaches of all-time.

Smith is a man you could send your son to for four years and know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the kid would come back a man. It’s documented.

One of the pupils sitting in attendance at the news conference was Scott Williams, who played with the Bulls and now plays for the Sixers.

Williams didn’t go with his team to play the Knicks on Thursday; he stayed to show support for his coach. It was approximately 10 years ago that Smith had to tell Williams that Williams had lost both his parents in a murder-suicide tragedy.

“I was a 19-year-old kid, and an immature 19-year-old kid at that,” Williams said. “He became a father figure to me when he didn’t have to. But he did. There was a rumor about his health not being good, and I wanted to be here today to hear from him that everything was fine. He will always be a huge figure in my life.”

They’ve all got personal stories, from Brown to Billy Cunningham to George Karl to Bob McAdoo to Michael Jordan, even though most are less dramatic.

“I’ve never made a major decision in my life,” Williams said, “without consulting with Coach Smith, and I can promise you most other guys can say the same thing.”

Former players can give testimony to Smith’s character, but that would pale in comparison to the stories we’d hear if we knew more about Smith’s private contributions.

Like to the civil rights movement.

At a time when he wasn’t popular anyway, when he had yet to establish himself as a great coach, and when it wasn’t trendy to do so, Smith committed himself to the civil rights movement, financially and otherwise, in a way that has made him a hero to black folks nationwide.

He did so in a segregationist state and put his future at great risk. That doesn’t show up in those statistical boxes that tell you how many games he won, how many Final Fours his teams reached, and how many all-Americans he produced.

What we’ll never know is how important his influence was in changing discriminatory laws and practices, how many people who never dribbled a ball got a job because Dean Smith made a phone call, how many kids whose parents were denied access to a school like North Carolina got to attend a generation later because Smith pushed the boulder of prejudice and bigotry in the South.

Great coaches are wonderful assets to society, particularly one as sport-obsessed as ours.

But men of depth, decency and influence such as Dean Smith come along so rarely, the transition into something as natural as retirement jolts us into a wholehearted and perhaps even somewhat melancholy appreciation.