The reason for sports rivalries are often as varied as the rivalries themselves, but for University of Maryland fans, there was little reason to dislike North Carolina men’s basketball coach Dean Smith save for the best one: He always won. During the 36 years he was in charge in Chapel Hill, Smith’s Tar Heels were the Road Runner to Maryland’s Wile E. Coyote.
Try as they might – and Lord knows they did try – a procession of Terp coaches and players attempted to catch Smith and his charges, usually to end up holding dust. The lineup of great players to don Carolina blue during Smith’s tenure was breathtaking. From Phil Ford to Sam Perkins to James Worthy, to the most notable Tar Heel of all, Michael Jordan, Smith welcomed wave after wave of All-Americans.
And they won. Smith, who died Saturday night at his home in Chapel Hill at the age of 83, retired after the 1997 season as the all-time winningest coach in Division I men’s basketball with 879 victories, 11 Final Four appearances, 13 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament titles and two national championships, with an Olympic gold medal thrown in for good measure. Eventually, Smith’s win total would be eclipsed by Bobby Knight, Jim Boeheim and his chief rival, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. But none of them cast as profound an affect on the game as Smith did. Smith invented the four corners, an offense where four players went to individual stations on the floor while a guard dribbled out the clock. The Tar Heels usually employed the four corners late in games where Smith was trying to protect a lead.
Smith’s players were also smart. They graduated North Carolina, a pretty good academic school at a 97 percent rate. Even players like Jordan who left early came back to get their degrees, because they respected Smith, who, above all, considered himself an educator.
Smith had an air of erudition about him that bordered on occasion on smugness. Indeed, the one time that I saw him get ejected from a game, during a Final Four contest in 1991, the scene reminded me of the moment when umpire Drew Coble tossed Cal Ripken and proclaimed that it was like throwing God out of Sunday school. And Smith’s pre-eminence made the occasional victories over North Carolina that much sweeter.
No one in College Park will ever forget that it was Maryland and the great Len Bias who hung the first loss on North Carolina in the 23,000 seat dome they built in Smith’s name. But it bears noting that Dean Smith’s greatest achievement was in being the first ACC coach to sign a black player to a scholarship in the mid-1960s in the South, with all the tensions that came with it. For Smith, signing Scott wasn’t about gaining an advantage, though Scott became a pretty good player. No, Dean Smith signed Charlie Scott for the same reason that he opposed capital punishment and favored gay rights: because it was the right thing to do.
And while some may have thought Smith to be self righteous, he told writer John Feinstein quote You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.