The Stories Are True

By Adam Lucas   

http://www.goheels.com/

February 8, 2015

Former North Carolina players from left, Sam Perkins, James Worthy, Michael Jordan and former coach Dean Smith are recognized during halftime of a college basketball game against Wake Forest in Chapel Hill, N.C., Saturday, Feb. 10, 2007. | AP Photo/Gerry Broome

I have been sitting here staring at this screen for 30 minutes. And what I have finally decided I want you to know the most about Dean Smith is this: it’s true.

In the next few hours and days, as the tributes to the legendary man pour in, you are going to hear all of the incredible stories again. Some you may hear for the first time. Some you may hear for the hundredth time. These stories are true, and you should remember all of them, because now it’s our job to pass them down. Don’t embellish them. They don’t need it. They are good enough with just the facts.

You will hear basketball stories. You will hear former players talk about how Smith would tell them exactly what was going to happen in a game. He would tell them what the opponent would do, how the Tar Heels would react, and how the opponent would react to that reaction. Then it would happen, all of it, just as he described.

These stories are true. We know this because we sat in Carmichael in 1974 when his team came back from eight points in 17 seconds against Duke with no three-point line. I just told that story to my children on Saturday night when we drove home from the airport after returning from the win at Boston College. My nine-year-old son was talking about a crazy NBA comeback he’d read about.

“Do you know,” I said, “that Carolina came back from eight points down in 17 seconds with no three-point line?”

“Whoa,” said my daughter. “Is that true?”

It is true.

Those of us of a different generation than the Carmichael crowd were in the Smith Center when Smith’s simple act of calling a timeout so shook a top-20 opponent that they meekly crumbled. I will forever believe that’s what happened when Smith took a timeout after Henrik Rodl made a three-pointer against Florida State with less than ten minutes left on the clock in 1993. Rodl’s three-pointer had cut the FSU lead to 17 points. 17 points!

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the Florida State players and coaches knew Smith thought a comeback was possible, or else he wouldn’t burn one of his precious timeouts. And if Smith thought a comeback was possible, then it was possible, and he’s done this before, you know, and uh oh, there went another turnover, and it’s getting kind of loud in here, and pretty soon Carolina had an 82-77 win.

That was true. That happened. Dean Smith called a timeout, and Florida State wilted.

And yet despite all those wins, we know exactly how uncomfortable Smith was with celebrating any of them. I can report, with authority, that with much cajoling from his players, he once did the “raise the roof” gesture after his Tar Heels won the 1997 ACC Tournament championship, and then again after earning a spot in the Final Four. It was the mid-1990’s. Everyone made mistakes.

Otherwise, however, the man who never looked flustered on the sideline looked completely awkward in victory. He would almost apologetically shake the other coach’s hand. If it happened to be an ACC or NCAA championship, he would try to disappear while the nets were being cut, so unwilling was he to climb the ladder and be the focal point of the fans and players.

Most of the time, those of us in the stands would chant, “Dean! Dean! Dean!” when he was finally persuaded to cut the final snippet. It seems a little disrespectful now. But it was the 1980s and 1990s. All of us made mistakes.

It didn’t really matter, because he would act like he didn’t hear us. With scissors in hand, before cutting the first strand, he would point to every manager, player and assistant coach he could find.

That was true. That happened after every championship, and there were a lot of them.

There are also those who will tell you those championships are completely insignificant. Funny thing about the people who most often say that: they are invariably the ones who knew him best, the ones who most understood his true character.

“I can’t put his impact on me into words,” Phil Ford said of Smith. “I don’t know where I’d be without him in my life. He’s been such an influence on me, and a friend and a brother and a father figure…Before I chose North Carolina, I felt that Coach Smith would be there for me my entire life. I was right.”

Imagine that. A 17-year-old boy felt Dean Smith would be there for him for his entire life, and 40 years later, he still believes it. Wouldn’t you like to have one person say that about you in your life?Dean Smith has—this is not an exaggeration—hundreds.

“All of that is credited to him,” Michael Jordan once said of his career. “It never would have happened without Coach Smith.”

These quotes mean a lot to us because they are from Phil Ford and Michael Jordan. But what Smith knew, and what he made every one of his players feel, is that the number of points they scored for him made absolutely no difference. My father and I had a joke in the mid-1990s. Carolina had a player named Pat Sullivan who was not at all flashy. At various times, he played on teams withGeorge Lynch and Eric Montross and Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse, much better-known players who were prone to occasionally doing the spectacular.

It never, ever failed: Stackhouse could have had the most ferocious dunk of the season and Wallace could have thrown down an absurd alley-oop and Montross could have had a double-double and Lynch could have had the game-winning steal. Then, in the car on the way home, we would turn on the Tar Heel Sports Network to hear Smith’s postgame comments and seemingly every time, they would start with, “Well, Pat had a good game,” because he had set a screen to free a teammate for an open shot that the teammate missed.

That happened. Pat had good games. Dean Smith talked about it. At the time, we laughed, and yet 20 years later, we still remember it.

This seems like the right time to point out that without ever really knowing he was doing it, Dean Smith gave all of us some of the best moments of our lives with the most important people in our lives. It doesn’t matter whether you attended every game in the Smith era or whether you watched every game on television. Because of the way Smith did it, and for how long he did it, we could relate through generations.

We cried in the living room (I did that, after Louisville beat Carolina in 1986 in the NCAA Tournament) and we danced around that same living room (my dad and I did that, after Rick Fox hit the shot against Oklahoma in 1990) and we high-fived in the stands.

That’s what we did in 1993 in the Louisiana Superdome. My dad is an accountant and therefore spends most of March and April at the office. But when Carolina made the Final Four, he would find a way to get to the game. In 1993, he waited until the Tar Heels defeated Kansas in the national semifinals. He stayed at work two more days, then caught a flight with two connections from Raleigh to New Orleans. He slid into his seat minutes before the national championship game tipped off against Michigan, and so I can say that I watched Carolina win the national title with my dad.

We went to Bourbon Street after the game, because that’s what everyone told us you were supposed to do, and so there we were—perhaps the two least Bourbon Street-ish people in all of New Orleans, including one CPA with a pile of unfinished tax returns on his desk back in Raleigh—high fiving the Tar Heel players and taunting Dick Vitale (who had picked Michigan to win the game), and we did all of that because of Dean Smith.

Without Dean Smith and Carolina basketball, I assume and hope we would have found something else to talk about and live together. But because of Dean Smith and Carolina basketball, I never have to know for sure if that’s true. The people we cheered and laughed with on all those incredible days are the people we cry with--if we're lucky--today. I told my father the news this morning. Later, he texted me this:

"I am very, very sorry. It is really very sad. He was a large part of our family for many, many years and many, many fun times. We had a lot of good times and he was always there. It doesn't seem possible to me. It seems like he and the good times ought to last forever."

And so that is why this news will be devastating to so many of us, because there are so many families who this morning will be texting and thinking those exact same words. We aren't ready for it to end.

About a year ago, I was at the Smith Center on a typical weekday afternoon. A customized van was parked in the first parking space outside the basketball office, and I knew. As I walked into the basketball office, Dean Smith came out, being pushed in a wheelchair, a Carolina hat on his head.

It was awful, and it makes my eyes moisten even now to think about it. It was not at all the way I wanted to think about him. And I would like to admit something to you now: from then on, when I saw that van, I would sometimes take a different path into the building, because I wanted my Dean Smith to be the one I remembered. I wanted my Dean Smith to be the one who I mentioned my daughter’s name to on exactly one occasion, and six months later when passing me in the parking lot, he recalled it perfectly and asked how she was doing.

That’s my Dean Smith and I wanted that to be everyone’s Dean Smith. I don’t want today’s students to think of him as old or sick. Understand this: this man could do anything. This man could coach and this man could help integrate a town or a league and this man changed the lives of hundreds of teenagers who played for him plus thousands of the rest of us who lived vicariously through their exploits.

It still boggles my mind that so many Carolina fans in 2015 don’t even remember the era when Smith was on the sideline. He’s as much a name on a building as a coach to current UNC students. It’s been hard enough living in a basketball world without Dean Smith in it. Now we have to consider living in an overall world without Dean Smith in it.

I don’t want to be part of that world. And luckily, I don’t have to. On Monday, I will pack my son’s lunch, and I will write a Dean Smith quote on the napkin. I don’t know yet which one it will be, but I know that when I see him on Monday afternoon, I will ask him about it, and we will talk, and Dean Smith will be the one who enabled that to happen.

That’s true. That will happen. And it will keep happening, and we are the ones who get to do it. I guess that pretty soon I will feel lucky for having these experiences and getting the opportunity to cheer for him and learn from him and admire him.

But right now I really think I want to sit down and have a good cry.

Legendary UNC coach Dean Smith passes away at 83

BY ALEXANDER WOLFF

http://www.si.com/

February 8, 2015

Heinz Kluetmeier/SI

"You can have peace without the world if you opt for death. Or the world without peace if you decide for doing and having and achieving. Only in play can you have both. In play you realize simultaneously the supreme importance and utter insignificance of what you are doing."

-- George Sheehan, author and philosopher of sport

Few sportsmen found the George Sheehan sweet spot better than Dean Smith. The former North Carolina basketball coach, who found peace without the world on Saturday night at 83, understood what Sheehan goes on to call “the paradox of pursuing what at once is essential and inconsequential.” Smith kept the two in almost perfect balance.

It’s the inconsequential part of sport that so many of us, heads turned by beckoning glory, find hard to accept with grace. Smith had it nailed. He didn’t need to put any game face on; he wore the same face, game or no game. Almost alone among coaches I’ve known, Smith actually preferred to speak to the press in the hours before tip-off. And if that game turned out to be a loss, he got over it quickly -- in part because for every loss he could point to roughly three-and-a-half victories (879 all told), but also because he truly understood that a billion people in China didn’t give a damn. During the back half of Smith’s career men’s college basketball spawned a generation of coaches who regarded the university -- with its classes and standards, with its women’s teams clamoring for resources and practice time -- as irritations, barriers to their entrepreneurial striving. So they tried to set their programs apart and reserve for themselves the spoils of shoe and camp and TV deals. Smith believed that every dime his team delivered to Chapel Hill belonged to the athletic department. He didn’t begrudge the women’s soccer program spending Tar Heels basketball booty; he gloried in it.

Indeed, Smith despised attitudes of entitlement in any guise. Freshmen carried the video equipment on road trips, and reporters had to wait to speak to them until after their first game, only by which time, Smith believed, a young Tar Heel might actually offer something worth listening to. Offended by premature ballyhoo over the five recruits he welcomed in the fall of 1990, Smith arranged for them to scrimmage the rest of the team for 20 minutes. What many called the greatest recruiting class of all time lost by 46 points -- 92, the coach delighted in pointing out, over a full game.

Smith recognized the absurdity of the NCAA underwriting antidrug crusades funded by March Madness ads for beer -- the undergraduate’s drug of choice, which was implicated in campus problems from vandalism to date rape -- and he said so. This ability to pull back and see the big picture extended to issue after issue percolating around college sports. Other coaches, knowing that the best players weren’t likely to stay more than a year or two, wanted to use them ASAP; Smith lobbied for a return to freshman ineligibility, because he knew a year of acclimation to college life would be good for the whole young man. As other schools tried to find ways to keep prize recruits longer, Smith nudged his own to turn pro if the money and security were there, because neither the university nor (goodness knows) Smith himself was entitled to their servitude. Yet almost every player who did leave early came back to Chapel Hill to get a degree. The graduation rate of Smith’s players, 97 percent, is both the result of and an explanation for their abiding loyalty. “We’re his flock,” one of them, Bobby Jones, said in 1997, after Smith broke Adolph Rupp’s alltime victory record. “He takes great pains to shepherd us.”

The son of Baptist schoolteachers, raised in the railroading town of Emporia, Kans., Smith played positions -- quarterback, point guard, catcher -- in high school that foreshadowed the career he would choose. In much the same way his major at Kansas, mathematics, prefigured the analytical approach he brought to North Carolina, which named him at 30 to succeed his boss, Frank McGuire.

After a loss at Wake Forest in 1965 the team bus famously returned to campus to find Smith hung in effigy. A book soon sent to him by his sister, Joan -- Beyond Our Selves by Catherine Marshall -- helped Smith both compose himself in that incident’s aftermath and loam the soil in which his collectivist beliefs took root. Marshall holds that freedom comes from acknowledging the limit to what an individual can accomplish alone. By realizing that teammates are helpmates, a basketball program can gait itself for the long run: Smith reached a Final Four in four different decades and won NCAA titles 13 years apart.

As a college basketball writer during the 1980s and ’90s, shuttling the eight miles between Chapel Hill and Durham, I couldn’t help but compare Smith and his program to Duke’s as it flourished under Mike Krzyzewski. The Blue Devils emerged during the age of Reagan and Bush the Elder, and their conservative coach made a point of unfettering his players, as if he were implementing a position paper of the American Enterprise Institute. Under its liberal Democrat coach, North Carolina basketball by contrast felt as if it were in the care of a descendant of FDR or LBJ. “Put a plant in a jar, and it will grow to take the shape of the jar,” Krzyzewski liked to say, “but let a plant grow free, and who knows what it might become” -- which to an ACC ear could sound like a variation on the old joke that Dean Smith is the only man in the world who could hold Michael Jordan to 12 points a game. Ah, but let Smith and his staff take their sweet time with a Tar Heel, holding at bay the bugbears of entitlement, and that player too would be gaited for the long run. Neither Jordan nor such star professionals as Larry Brown, Vince Carter, Billy Cunningham, Brad Daugherty, Walter Davis, Phil Ford, Rick Fox, Antawn Jamison, Bobby Jones, Mitch Kupchak, Bob McAdoo, Sam Perkins, Charlie Scott, Kenny Smith, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace and James Worthy could ever be described as having suffered for time spent in the Carolina hothouse.

Smith spoke guardedly of those players. He realized that he had to engage the press in order to highlight his Tar Heels, yet he tried to keep the spotlight from shining too glaringly. I began to recognize a pattern in our sessions together. I’d ask a question; he’d dispute the premise. Sometimes I’d rephrase the question, but more often I’d defend my original premise, at which point we were going one-on-one over some set of facts of which Smith usually had superior command. Soon enough, my time up, I’d leave his office and, leafing through my notebook, find that he had gone into a rhetorical Four Corners and run out the clock. (For example, after I’d asked about the North Carolina system: “I don’t like the word system. To me it connotes that we’re rigid, that we don’t change with our personnel, and that’s just not true. Now, if you say philosophy ...”) But he genuinely loved the sparring and scoring of points, just as he loved a challenge on the golf course as much as the basketball court.

He certainly didn’t want the attention. When a new, 21,444-seat arena (now 21,750) opened on campus in 1986, he permitted his name to grace the Dean Smith Center only because university officials and past lettermen insisted that he alone could stand for Carolina basketball since the dawn of the ’60s. When he broke that alltime wins record, he made sure to recognize the players and assistant coaches who sat beside him on the bench over the years, for “they all share in this moment,” he said, before adding, in a nod to Sheehanian duality, “if indeed it is a moment.”

That comment underscores how Smith was his sport’s philosopher king. Practices, games and the rankings of teams and recruits might ebb toward insignificance in the mind of a man who lent his name and voice to grand crusades, like civil rights and a nuclear freeze, and kept the works of Kierkegaard on his nightstand. Yet remember, per Sheehan: The game is essential as well as inconsequential. “There’s very little that feels as good as a conference win on the road,” Smith once said -- confessed, really.

He obsessed over tactics and grappled with officials, engaging in gamesmanship with the grubbiest of his rivals. Yet he never lost sight of the cross purposes at the heart of sport, and he once mused to me, “I suppose my first goal was to keep my job. Then I wanted to win. Then I got more mature and said, ‘Oh, we want to play well.’ Then I’d ask myself, Why do I feel good when we don’t play well and win?”

Such are the baser angels of our competitive nature. “I think we’re most happy and free when there’s a creator or spirit in charge of our lives,” he once said. “And that’s where I struggle. Because I want to take over constantly.” So it was, addressing a college commencement audience at Eastern College in Pennsylvania, that he riffed on Churchill, “Always, always, always, always, always, always quit.”

Imagine how baffling that would look generations from now if read out of context. For an epitaph, better that we reprise something SI employed to describe Smith in 1997. It’s our citation upon naming him Sportsman of the Year: “He never forgot that the arena is but an outbuilding of the academy.”

Dean Smith impacted hoops, people

He changed the game and earned respect from those he coached and faced

By Dana O'Neil | ESPN.com

http://espn.go.com/

February 8, 2015

Once, during a coaches meeting, Dean Smith made Lefty Driesell so angry that the old Maryland coach wrote Smith a letter telling him he'd never shake his hand again.

True to his word, the next time Maryland and North Carolina played, Driesell turned away the man he liked to call "a hook-nosed little sucker."

Yet years later, when Driesell's son, Chuck, came to him for advice about coaching, Driesell had just one tip.

"I told him, 'Don't model yourself after me; model yourself after Dean,'" Driesell recalled Sunday while driving home from Duke's game against Notre Dame. "Dean always said the right thing, did the right thing. He was a true gentleman."

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Kevin C. Cox/Getty ImagesEven old opponents like Lefty Driesell couldn't help but respect Dean Smith.

Time, and more the frailty of a rival, has a way of smoothing away past resentments, and so it was with Driesell and his animosity toward Smith. In the final years of Smith's life, Driesell called Smith's secretary almost weekly to check in.

On Sunday, when he learned that Smith had died at the age of 83, he said simply and quietly, "I'll miss Dean."

If Smith wasn't the last of his kind, he certainly was one of the last, a man from an era when coaches were less politically correct yet far more impactful.

They were real and honest, sometimes brazenly so, unshackled by the burdens of multimillion dollar contracts, unafraid to stand up for what they believed in. Smith believed in a lot, and his battles against social injustices earned him an even greater appreciation from people outside the sports world.

But within the confines of basketball, he was perhaps even more admired. It was not because of the successes, though there were plenty of those -- 879 wins, 13 ACC titles, 11 Final Fours and two national titles -- it was because he was a Coach, with a capital C.

The ideal of a coach is of a man whose game plan is for a life, not just 40 minutes of basketball, who believes his job is to instill something in his players other than just a good stance on defense.

Smith was that ideal.

He called his method the Carolina Way, but really his principles guided people far beyond the reaches of Chapel Hill. Smith showed his peers how to truly be a coach and his players how to be men.

"He was just a wonderful fella," Driesell said. "We were rivals, but I always respected him. We all did. Every one of us."

They didn't necessarily love him, the other coaches, at least not when they were competing against him. Saint Dean, they'd say mockingly, angered and admittedly jealous about the special dispensation Smith seemed to receive. A young Mike Krzyzewski once wondered why it seemed his rival had a different set of rules, especially with ACC officials, and well, we can all chuckle at that irony of that now, can't we?

Smith's Four Corners offense -- the stall tactic that eventually gave birth to the shot clock -- was brilliant, no doubt, but absolutely maddening to coach against.

But mostly they didn't dislike him so much as they hated playing against him. He won so much and so easily -- with just one losing season, his first, during his 36-year tenure at Carolina. He had 27 20-win seasons, back when that benchmark was the true measure of success, and a top-three ACC finish in each of his final 33 years.

Smith didn't collect national championship trophies quite like John Wooden, but his program was no less a dynasty. The Tar Heels made 26 NCAA tournament appearances under him, rolling up 65 wins.

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Grant Halverson/Getty ImagesMichael Jordan held a special affection for Dean Smith, one shared by seemingly everyone who played for the coach at North Carolina.

Yet buried beneath whatever on-court animosity Smith's successes may have engendered was a deep-seated respect for the quality of the man. He was fiery and competitive yet humble and dignified, and he demanded that his players carry themselves the same way.

Roy Williams is 64 years old, nearing retirement age himself. Never once has he referred to his coach by his first name. None of them have, the boys who arrived on campus as his players and became his sons.

He is Coach Smith, never Dean.

Smith gave his players lifelong advice and guidance, and in exchange they gave him the rarest of gifts -- true reverence and deference. It is not because he turned them into basketball greats, although he certainly did that, turning out 50 NBA players. He set standards for them, expectations of behavior and not just performance. He didn't demand perfection, but he required accountability. By being a man of strong character himself, he showed them how to be the same.

Long after they graduated -- and 96 percent of them did under his watch -- they sought his counsel. In the last few years, when his health failed and, worse, his beautiful mind faded, they still came to see him. He had no more advice to give them, but they went anyway, because they loved him.

Maybe the true essence of Dean Smith -- of Coach Smith -- is best defined by a picture, taken during a 2007 ceremony at North Carolina. It is of Michael Jordan and Smith.

Jordan has his arm wrapped around the crook of Smith's neck as he gently kisses him on the top of his head. It is a public moment of incredible intimacy, of a man adored by millions showing the world the man that he reveres.

His Coach.

Dana O'Neil | email

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An appreciation of Dean Smith’s life

By John Feinstein February 8 at 1:20 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports

Dean Smith retired in 1997 with 879 wins. He passed away on Saturday.

Credit Bo Gordy-Stith (PBoBS) / Flickr/Creative Commons

Words will come pouring forth in the next few days from those who played for Dean Smith, those who coached for and against him and from the President of the United States, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom a little more than a year ago.

The news of the legendary North Carolina basketball coach’s death at age 83 is hardly shocking. He had been seriously ill with dementia for several years. Knowing him and knowing the condition he has been in for a long time now, I think I can say with confidence that for those who loved him most, this is a blessing. Dean Smith was a very spiritual man and there is no doubt if he had any say in the matter, this escape would have come long ago.

As a coach, he had many great rivals, none more intense than the one he had for 17 seasons in Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. On Sunday morning, Krzyzewski was getting gas when a text popped onto his phone telling him that Smith had died.

“I looked at it and said, ‘OH NO!’ ” Krzyzewski said. “Obviously, I knew he’d been sick, I knew he was in tough shape, but for some reason I never thought about him dying.” He paused. “Maybe that’s because he’s one of those people who you think is going to live forever.” He paused again and there was a catch in his voice when he continued. “Of course he will live forever. Not because of what he did but because of what he taught.”

That’s exactly it. Above all, Dean Smith was the ultimate teacher. Sure, he taught on the basketball court, all the extraordinary numbers he produced are testament to that. But his teaching went way beyond that. He taught loyalty — by being loyal, often to a fault. He taught passion — not just about winning games, but about doing the right things in life. He was outspoken on issues that often didn’t make him very popular in the state where he lived, including the death penalty, a nuclear freeze and the Vietnam war.

The story about his involvement in desegregating restaurants in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 1958 — when he was still an assistant coach — has now been told often, but for many years no one knew it had taken place. Not surprisingly, the first person to tell the story publicly wasn’t Smith, but the Rev. Robert Seymour, the minister at the Binkley Baptist Church, where Smith worshipped from 1958 until his death.

When I asked Smith to fill in details on that night, he said, “Who told you that story?” I told him it had been Seymour. He shook his head and said, “I wish he hadn’t done that.”

Surprised, I said, “Dean, you should be proud of doing something like that.”

He looked me in the eye and said, “John, you should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do the right thing.”

Talk about a teaching moment.

His competitiveness, even in a world filled with fanatic competitors, was legendary. He couldn’t stand losing a basketball game or a golf match or an argument. He didn’t lose many arguments because, inevitably, he was the smartest guy in the room.

He was one of the great innovators basketball has ever seen. His use of the four corners delay offense made opponents crazy, but it led to college basketball putting in a shot clock in 1985 — which was exactly what Smith wanted. As successful as he had been at slowing the game down, he knew that playing the game faster would be to his advantage because he almost always had the best players. The more possessions there were in a game, the more time there was for that talent to take control.

He wasn’t just innovative on the court. He was the first coach to insist that his seniors be recognized before their last home game. He started them all — from stars to walk-ons — and if he had six seniors, they all started and North Carolina began the game with the other team shooting a technical foul free throw. No one thought to do that before Dean Smith.

Everyone who spent time with him has multiple stories about him: stories about his generosity, his dry humor, his legendary sarcasm. Smith NEVER cursed — not in practice, not in a game — never. But he could cut people down in an instant without ever raising his voice.

“In practice, he’d say, ‘Buzz, do you really think that was a good shot you just took?’ ” said Buzz Peterson, who was Michael Jordan’s roommate at UNC. “Before I could say anything, he’d say, ‘let’s ask your teammates what they thought. Or do you just want to tell me if you think that was the best shot we could have gotten right there.’ There was no hole deep enough to crawl into at that moment.”

All his players remember those moments, but they also remember the late night phone calls after they graduated, checking up on them or offering help when someone might be out of a job or when a marriage had gone south or a relative had been lost. It has often been said — accurately — that there was nothing Smith wouldn’t do for a member of the North Carolina basketball family.

That said, it often went beyond that. Smith recruited Bobby Hurley when he was in high school but Hurley went to Duke, where he helped the Blue Devils win two national championships. After Hurley had played his last college game, he received a letter from Smith, telling him how proud he should be of what he had accomplished in college.

No one better defines the cliche about the measure of a man’s life being the number of lives he touched than Dean Smith. I thought about that on Sunday morning when I first heard the news he had passed away. It occurred to me that if Dean ever sat down and started listing all the people who meant something to him during his life, I wouldn’t crack the top 1,000. And yet, outside of family and close friends, very few people were more important to me than Dean — because of what he taught me about how to treat people and how to live your life.

I first met him when I was a college junior, when I introduced myself to him after Carolina had pounded Duke in a game in Chapel Hill. I had written a column a few weeks earlier in the Duke student newspaper urging Bill Foster, who was then Duke’s coach, to look at the model Smith had built 10 miles down the road as he tried to rebuild at Duke.

“Oh yes, I read the column you wrote about Bill and how to rebuild at Duke,” Smith said — almost causing me to faint. “I thought you were very fair to us — especially for someone from Duke.”

Years later, I was sitting in his office, working in the nascent stages of the biography I had wanted to write about him for years. This was 2009, and he had finally agreed to let me write the book. Sadly, his extraordinary memory was already failing him then and it was becoming apparent to me that I had blown it — I had gotten him to agree to the project too late.

As we sat there on a summer afternoon, my cellphone buzzed and I could see it was Lefty Driesell calling. Thinking Dean might get a kick out of talking to his old rival, I answered, told Dean who it was and handed him the phone.

“You really gonna let a Duke guy do a book on you?” Lefty — a Duke graduate — said to Dean. “You gonna trust a Duke guy like that?”

Dean looked at me and smiled. “I trust him,” he said, “because I don’t think of him as a Duke guy but as a GOOD guy.”

I never got to finish the book. But I treasure that moment. Krzyzewski had it right. Dean Smith will live forever.

For more by John Feinstein, visit washingtonpost.com/feinstein.

More coverage:

Jordan on Dean Smith: ‘My mentor, my teacher, second father’

Legendary coach Dean Smith dies at age 83

Photos: Basketball coach Dean Smith, 1931-2015

Patrick Ewing recalls recruitment by Dean Smith

Smith’s legacy reached far beyond the court

Dean Smith was a true gentleman

His innovations were immense, but bigger still was his character and integrity

By Jay Bilas | ESPN.com

http://espn.go.com/

February 8, 2015

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/12296434/former-north-carolina-basketball-coach-dean-smith-was-true-gentleman

Dean Smith was one of the finest coaches in the history of American sport. His championship record, innovation, teaching and influence in the lives and careers of players and coaches are unsurpassed in college basketball. Yet the profound sadness we all feel at his passing Saturday at the age of 83 speaks to something far more substantial.

Dean Smith, the coach, was the embodiment of true coaching and competitive greatness. Dean Smith, the man, was far greater, and far more influential.

There has not been a finer tactician and teacher of the game than Smith. And no coach stood taller on issues of social justice. Smith was a giant in coaching, but he stood much taller as a man.

To his former players, many of whom I have the privilege to know and call friends, Smith was more than a coach. He was a teacher, mentor, father figure and person in whom they could trust, and trust for life. Smith was intensely loyal to his players and would do anything within his power to help them through his influence and wide network of friends.

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AP Photo/Joe Holloway Jr.Dean Smith fought to win games, that's for sure. But he also fought for things that matter more than just basketball.

I was fortunate to have competed against Smith's teams in the 1980s as a player and in the 1990s as a graduate assistant coach at Duke. To say that I had great respect for Smith would be an overwhelming understatement. His teams were always prepared and well-schooled, and they competed at the highest level. The Tar Heels were big and fast and played an up-tempo, pressing, trapping style on defense. On offense, his teams ran, played ahead of your defense and then hit you with a secondary break that was relentless. One of his books, "Multiple Offense and Defense," is still the best book on basketball I have ever read, and it was the first time I ever heard of "points per possession" long before the current age of analytics.

Smith was the gold standard in the ACC and in basketball when I was a player. He was the most respected coach in the game. Yet even though he coached the blood rival of my school, every time I had any interaction with Smith, he was very kind to me and always a gentleman. In a game full of characters, Smith was a man of great character.

He fought like crazy to win and never gave an inch. He had an amazing mind and memory. If you talk to any of his former players, assistants, managers or staff, they will speak of him with reverence and unconditional love.

When Smith and North Carolina were dominating the ACC, there were those who felt somewhat resentful of his success and the reputation of his program. After all, they were competing against him, and he was winning the overwhelming majority of the time. Smith was not an extrovert and did not always excel at what would now be called "personal branding." Yet if you got to know Smith personally, you got it. He was ahead of his time as a basketball coach, and he was a person of unquestioned integrity and character. He was a gentleman with great dignity and grace.

My last memory of personal interaction with Smith was at a meeting in Chicago at a basketball summit. In the hotel lobby, Smith and I were exchanging pleasantries and talking about golf, and I brought up a funny story that our mutual friend, Bill Raftery, had just told me about something Raftery had done on Smith's annual golf trip.

Smith began to laugh at the memory. He laughed so hard that he doubled over a bit. I had seen Smith smile and laugh before, but never anything like that.

For me, that's the memory I want to keep of Dean Smith: a basketball legend, a true gentleman of principle and character, laughing out loud thinking fondly of one of his friends.

Jay Bilas

College Basketball analyst

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• College basketball analyst for ESPN and ESPN Insider
• Played and coached at Duke
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Trial comes for Marine accused of killing 'American Sniper'

The Associated Press

http://townhall.com/

February 7, 2015

Eddie Ray Routh, charged with two counts of Capital Murder for the shooting deaths of Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, appears in court for a pre-trial hearing on Sept. 16, 2013. 

STEPHENVILLE, Texas (AP) — Eddie Ray Routh had been talking crazy for a while. So when he showed up on his sister's doorstep one afternoon two Februarys ago and claimed to have shot two men, she didn't know what to think.

But when Laura Blevins saw the big black custom pickup truck in the driveway, not Eddie's Volkswagen Beetle, her stomach tightened. He asked if she was with him "in hell," then drove off into the fading light.

"I'm terrified for my life," she breathlessly told a 911 dispatcher. "I don't know if he's being honest with me."

It wasn't long before she got her answer.

Routh, a 27-year-old Iraq War veteran, is scheduled to stand trial Wednesday, charged with capital murder in the slayings of Chad Littlefield and former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, whose memoir "American Sniper" is now an Academy Award-nominated movie. The two men had taken the ex-Marine to a shooting range in an attempt to help him battle post-traumatic stress disorder and other personal demons besetting him.

Routh's attorneys are planning to argue that he was insane. Many expect PTSD from his Iraq tour and a relief mission to earthquake-stricken Haiti to be another narrative thread in that defense.

But with Kyle's personal story the subject of a blockbuster currently packing them in at cinemas near and far, Routh's defenders wonder whether he can get a fair trial.

___

Although it appears that Kyle and Routh hadn't met before that fatal day in February 2013, they had a lot in common.

Both had attended high school southwest of Dallas in the town of Midlothian, the self-proclaimed "Cement Capital of Texas." Each had played football for the Midlothian Panthers and been involved with the Future Farmers of America, though 14 years apart.

And, most importantly, both ended up in the military and went to war.

After a brief stint in college and a flirtation with rodeo bronc riding, the 6-foot-2, 230-pound Kyle joined the Navy and qualified for its elite special forces unit. As a sniper with SEAL Team 3, he would rack up, by his own count, more than 300 kills and earn two Silver Stars, the military's third-highest honor for valor.

The father of two left the Navy in 2009, following four tours in Iraq. Three years later, he published his best-selling memoir, "American Sniper."

Routh's path would be paved with far less glory.

By most accounts, he was a middling student and a bit of a troublemaker. Kc Bernard, a former security guard at Midlothian High, remembers Routh as a decent defensive lineman, but easy to anger.

"He had a chip on his shoulder," says Bernard, who recalls a heart-to-heart with Routh outside the school gym after the teen had had a falling out with his parents.

"I know for a fact that his home life wasn't great," says Bernard, who now teaches social studies in Dallas. "They did not get along."

But by senior year, Routh knew what he wanted to do with his life. Although a photo in the 2006 Midlothian High yearbook shows a buzz-cut Routh chatting with an Army recruiter, he had his heart set on the Marines.

"I want to be one of the few and the proud," he told the photographer.

Not long after graduation, Routh — also 6-2, but about 50 pounds lighter than Kyle — was off to boot camp in California. By September 2007, he was in the Middle East.

In a conversation with his parents shortly before deploying, he reportedly expressed concerns about having to use his weapon.

"He said, 'Dad, how are you going to feel about me if I have to kill somebody?'" his mother, Jodi Routh, told a writer from Men's Health magazine before a judge imposed a gag order in the case. "Our response was, of course, 'Eddie, this is a war. You kill them before they can kill you.'"

A few months later, his parents told the magazine, he called home and suggested that something bad had happened while he was out on patrol.

"How would you feel if I shot a kid?" they said he asked.

But family and friends say Routh was more disturbed by what he saw during a later deployment — in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

In January 2010, Routh was attached to the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit as part of Operation Unified Response, sent to the island nation. They found a country in ruins, with about a quarter million dead — many of them stacked in rotting piles along the muddy roads.

Routh talked of being forbidden by an officer to give his rations to a starving boy — and of things much worse.

"He wasn't prepared for what he was doing out there," his father told London's Daily Mail for an article published last month. "Fishing hundreds of bodies — men, women, children — out of the ocean, piling them up and throwing them into mass graves."

Routh left the Marines as a corporal that summer and floated around — a brief stint with a military contractor, doing odd jobs for a real estate agent, cabinet-making, building storage units. He was diagnosed with PTSD the following summer, according to medical records viewed by Men's Health.

His drinking, which had begun in his teens, got worse.

In September 2012, Routh was transported to Green Oaks Hospital for psychiatric care after his mother told police he'd threatened to kill himself and family. Police had found him wandering — barefoot, shirtless and reeking of alcohol.

"Eddie stated he was hurting and that his family does not understand what he has been through," the police report said.

His parents and sister have told reporters that Eddie claimed to be a vampire or werewolf, and complained that a tapeworm was eating out his insides.

Routh would go back to Green Oaks at least one more time. On Jan. 30, 2013, his mother took him to the Veteran's Administration hospital.

Despite her pleas that he be admitted, doctors sent him home.

___

To the Iraqi insurgents who'd placed a bounty on his head, Chris Kyle was "al-Shaitan Ramadi" — the "devil of Ramadi." But to Jodi Routh, he was an angel.

In search of another mission after leaving the SEALs, Kyle helped create a program to help rehabilitate wounded and troubled veterans through exercise. Jodi Routh worked as an aide at the Kyle kids' school, and she asked if he would take her son on.

Kyle and Littlefield — a neighbor and hunting buddy who also volunteered his time with veterans — decided to take Routh shooting. It was Feb. 2, 2013.

In Kyle's black pickup, they drove to Rough Creek Lodge and Resort, which sits on 11,000 acres of rolling hills scattered with scraggly trees and prairie grasses. In addition to luxury accommodations, it has hunting areas and a 1,000-yard shooting range.

Around 5 p.m., a resort employee discovered the bodies. Kyle and Littlefield lay on the ground amid scattered weapons; each had been shot several times.

About 45 minutes later, Routh pulled up at his sister's Midlothian home in Kyle's truck.

Laura Blevins told police that Eddie "was out of his mind saying people were sucking his soul and that he could smell the pigs." He told her he'd "traded his soul" for the pickup.

He'd killed Kyle and Littlefield, Routh allegedly admitted to his sister and her husband, and later to Texas Rangers. Echoing the advice his parents had given him before he left for Iraq, Gaines Blevins says his brother-in-law told him he'd "killed them before they could kill him."

After leading police on a brief chase, Routh was arrested on Interstate 35 near Lancaster. In an interview with the Texas Rangers, Routh said he understood what he'd done and wanted to apologize to the men's families.

"It wasn't a want to," he said in a recording played in court. "It was a need to, to get out of that situation out there today or I was going to be the one out there to get my head shot off."

"You know what you did today is wrong, right?" the ranger asked.

"Yes, sir," Routh replied.

___

That evening, police blocked off the street and told Routh's neighbor Danny Elizondo to stay in his house.

The Eddie he knew was a normal guy who came to neighborhood barbecues and asked if Elizondo, who painted cars, would redo his VW "bug" in camouflage. Routh had complained of flashbacks, but Elizondo had never known him to be violent or delusional.

"Eddie would come to my house and sit out there and talk to me and tell me stuff," he says. "The bombing and stuff, the bodies on the side ... kids, out when they were going through patrols. Kids out there kind of hungry and stuff."

He figures something out at Rough Creek made him snap.

"I just have a feeling that Eddie went to that rifle range ... and he heard the shelling again, and something triggered him off," says Elizondo.

Many former Marines aren't buying it, some expressing their doubts in angry, profane online posts. And records obtained by The Associated Press suggest they're right to be skeptical.

Routh was a small-arms technician, also known as an armorer. Veterans say a support person like that would not have been out on patrol.

Raymond Routh was quoted as saying his son claimed to have helped guard prisoners at Balad Air Base. A 2013 New Yorker article said Routh had "witnessed several mortar attacks on the base; once, while he was on the phone with Raymond, sirens began blaring, and he said that he had to take cover."

But Marine records indicate that Routh was attached to Combat Logistics Battalion 8, based in Fallujah — more than an hour south of Balad. Haley Carter, who was a 2nd lieutenant with the unit during that tour and helped oversee the morning reports, said Routh's story makes no sense.

"I don't know why we would send an armorer to Balad ... when there are plenty of MPs who have the training to guard prisoners," Carter, who left the Marines as a captain in 2013, told the AP. "The whole thing seems funky to me."

The unit's command chronology, a detailed official account of the deployment obtained by AP, shows none of its Marines assigned to Balad during Routh's service. The portion of the chronology covering the first several months of that tour was not available, a Marine archivist said.

As for the Haiti mission, the 22nd MEU chronology shows that while Marines helped distribute food, water and medical aid, there is no mention of burials. It also appears from the narrative that the command element, to which Routh was attached, never left the assault ship USS Bataan.

The only document that mentioned Routh by name was a "debarkation roster" dated April 1, 2010 — the end date of his deployment.

"There's no information that we have at this time that can confirm or refute his claims of being in those particular locations and doing those particular tasks," said Capt. Stewart Coles, a spokesman for the II Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

___

With area theaters showing the Oscar-nominated movie about Kyle's life — and alluding to his death, in a brief on-screen note and footage from a funeral motorcade — defense attorney J. Warren St. John has expressed concern that Routh can't get a fair trial in Erath County.

On a recent rainy afternoon, people lined up outside the Cinemark Cinema 6 in Stephenville for tickets to see "American Sniper," starring Bradley Cooper. That show and the next quickly sold out, and management has been adding an extra screen on weekends to meet demand.

Like others in the crowd, Elby Cato has received a jury summons. He says the movie won't affect his ability to be impartial.

"Can he get a fair trial here? You bet," said Cato, 48. "I think a lot of people have military kids here, and they understand what they're going through. ... He's going to jail, but I feel like he needs to have a lighter sentence because of it — and help."

Moviegoer Janet Huggins has given a lot of thought to PTSD, and whether a noncombat veteran like Routh has a right to use it as a defense. But she recognizes that it is "a terrible disease."

"They are all victims," said Huggins, 56, a collections manager, also called for jury duty. "Eddie's a victim. Chad Littlefield's a victim, and so is Chris. And then you've got the families. Everybody's going through their own hell."

___

Stengle reported from Stephenville; Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.