Long Ago, He Won The Big One

Yet these are not exactly endearing qualities. Would you want your daughter to marry a Celica? At first, Smith's considerable basketball intellect was the only reservoir he had to draw on. True, the players accepted their young coach; it was impossible not to see how much he cared. But he was ill at ease, and certainly no laff riot; for light reading in those salad days Smith pored over theology, Kierkegaard and Buber, and otherwise carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, trying, as Brown says, "to be everything to everybody." Without the personality to sustain a holding operation, Smith needed something more substantial to prove he wasn't just another brilliant assistant who had been promoted to illustrate what we now call the Peter Principle.

In Smith's second year, Cunningham moved up to the varsity to play with Brown, but skinny as he was and barely 6'4", Cunningham had to be used at center. A rout at Indiana showed the Tar Heels how thin their soup truly was. And more of the same was expected two days later when the team moved on to Kentucky. When the players entered the huge Kentucky arena, the Wildcats' freshman juggernaut was shell-lacking somebody something like 130-18 in the prelim, and the crowd was screaming for more blood. Shaffer remembers looking around on the way to the locker room and saying out loud, "What have we got ourselves into?" In the locker room, the tension was so great that Brown broke out in hives all over his body. Smith went over the plans. On defense the Tar Heels would play a box-and-one, with a senior by the euphonious name of Yogi Poteet shadowing Cotton Nash, the premier player in the land. Then, on offense, if Carolina got ahead, it would try something that had worked in practice, with Brown taking the ball in the middle of the court and the other four players spreading out. "And, look, don't worry about the crowd, and don't think about who you're playing," Smith said. "Pretend it's Tennessee, not Kentucky."

As soon as the teams hit the floor, Brown's hives went away. And Carolina stayed with Kentucky. Yogi Poteet would not let Nash get the ball. And early in the second half Carolina moved ahead. The first time Smith signaled Brown to give the special spread offense a chance, Brown faked his man out and got a layup. The second time, one of the other Kentucky players came over to help out, and Brown dished the ball off to Shaffer for another layup. As he ran down the court, Shaffer thought to himself: "Hey, you know, that thing works." It was just a thing then. It didn't have a name. Later it would be called The Four Corners. Old Adolph Rupp, as they used to say, didn't know whether to spit or wind his watch. By the end of the game Nash was so frustrated he just went over and stood to the side, where he and Yogi Poteet watched the other guys go four-on-four. Carolina won 68-66.

In the locker room, Shaffer came over and said, "Coach, that was the greatest game of basketball anybody ever coached." All of the players were saying that. "Now we knew," Shaffer says. "We had proof that everything he said made sense."

But even with the Kentucky win, which sent Carolina off to a fine 15-6 season. Smith couldn't get the players. One of the prospects he recruited about this time remembers, with embarrassment, that a schoolmate had come into the high school locker room and asked him, "Who's the bum out there with a hole in his shoe?"

The player explained that it was the coach from North Carolina. "North Carolina?" the other kid said, incredulous. "What'd he do, walk all the way?"

More and more, Miller loomed as the prize. But he still leaned toward Duke. "You know, Larry, the saddest thing is," Rosemond told him one day, "that if you went from here down to Duke, then you'd be going all that way and you'd stilly be five minutes from heaven." Miller seemed to like that, Rosemond recalls. But more important, another idea was forming in Miller's mind: "Maybe I want to be the start of something." He wasn't quite sure anymore. He almost cried once when the Duke coaches came to visit him, and he couldn't bring himself to accept their offer of a scholarship and invite thereto his high school graduation. Whoever won, Miller would have them there, for all the world to see, at his graduation.

Duke still had the inside track. And, this year, 1963-64, the Blue Devils made the NCAA finals while Carolina dropped to 12-12. Smith's patron, Aycock left the chancellor's office that summer, and the next year, his fourth as coach. Smith was even more vulnerable. The Tar Heels lost four straight and fell back to 6-6. As Y.A. Tittle once said, "You can be a bum-bum-hero but you can't be a hero-bum-bum." The team bus came back to Chapel Hill from a bad loss at Wake Forest, and when it arrived at old Woollen Gym, there, over the front door, was an effigy, hanging high, of Coach Dean Smith. Everyone on the bus saw it right away, and no one dared breathe a sound.

In 1977 Terry Holland, the coach at Virginia, made a most memorable remark about Smith. Holland said, "There's such a gap between the man and the image the man tries to project." Consider the source.

And, consider the source when Chancellor Fordham says, "Dean has great character. He's an exemplar. He's all he appears to be." But, as Fordham also says, "You never get Dean to talk about himself." That's a problem; Smith's proclivity for privacy, increasing all the time, causes more suspicious misunderstanding than relaxed revelation ever could. Likewise, his regularly professed humility, no matter how sincere, appears phony, as it would for most any man who works in a vainglorious profession. The public simply won't accept certain types—basketball coaches prominently included—auditioning for roles in The Beatitudes.