Dean Smith, the Kansas-born coach who led the University of North Carolina men's basketball team to significant and sustained success, changing the game's dictates with his "Carolina Way" of team-first play while mentoring several of the game's greatest players and coaches, including Michael Jordan and Larry Brown, has died. He was 83.
Smith died Saturday night at his home in North Carolina, the university announced. No cause of death was given, but in 2010 his family announced that he was suffering from a progressive neurological disorder that affected his memory.
Smith retired in 1997 after 36 seasons at North Carolina, with 879 victories, a collegiate record that stood until eclipsed by Bob Knight in 2007.
Smith won "only" two NCAA titles, eight fewer than UCLA Coach John Wooden, and half as many as archrival Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, yet Smith's contributions to the game were considered second to none.
"I think Dean is the best teacher of basketball that I have observed," Wooden once remarked of Smith.
Smith led North Carolina to 11 Final Four appearances, 17 regular-season Atlantic Coast Conference titles and 23 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.
He, Knight and Pete Newell are the only men to have coached teams to Olympic, National Invitation Tournament and NCAA championships.
Smith mentored dozens of future NBA stars, including Jordan -- considered by many the greatest basketball player ever -- James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Billy Cunningham and Bobby Jones.
Smith considered himself foremost a teacher. Having played for legendary Coach Phog Allen at the University of Kansas, a disciple of James Naismith, Smith had direct lineage to basketball's peach-basket origins.
The list of coaches weaned under Smith—Brown, Cunningham, Roy Williams, Doug Moe, George Karl --is a testament to Smith's influence.
Smith believed in more than X's and O's. He was an articulate advocate for social causes, a Democrat in the conservative South who opposed the death penalty and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
"I tried to be careful which torches I carried, as well as judicious in the comments I did make," Smith wrote in his 1999 memoir, "A Coach's Life."
Smith fought to integrate Chapel Hill restaurants and, in 1966, signed Charles Scott, the first African American athlete to receive an athletic scholarship at North Carolina.
Smith was a progressive Baptist who guarded his privacy, a chain smoker who didn't curse publicly but enjoyed adult beverages and, on the court, occasional dust-ups with opposing coaches.
He preached selflessness, and it applied to everyone. Jordan, one of basketball's most prolific scorers, averaged 19.6 points per game his junior year at North Carolina, prompting the joke that Smith was the only man alive who could hold Jordan to under 20.
"Jordan won all the National Player of the Year honors, so we couldn't have held him back too much," Smith said, noting Jordan did average 20 points per game as a sophomore.
Smith created a basketball environment known as "The Carolina Way."
A blue line, 10 inches wide, awaited the players at the entrance of the basketball arena.
"It marks the spot at which competition begins," Eric Montross, a former Tar Heel player, remarked in "Game Day," a book on North Carolina basketball history. "I was told early on … this line was only to be crossed with both shoes tied, practice jersey tucked in, and mind prepared for practice. ... A light blue strip of paint is not magical, but it created a mind-set for all the players under the tutelage of Coach Dean Smith."
Smith was credited with many basketball innovations:
Tar Heel players were the first to point to the assist man after scoring a basket. Players could ask out of a game by clenching a fist, with the guarantee they could re-enter after they were rested. Smith was the first to use multiple defenses during a game and, taking his cue from tennis players, made his players wear wrist bands to keep the sweat off their hands.
One of Smith's most controversial contributions, a stall formation known as the "Four Corners" ball-control offense, helped lead to the advent of a shot clock in 1985 to speed up the game.
Success did not come early, or easily. Smith's first three teams went 8-9, 15-6 and 12-12. It took seven trips to college basketball's Final Four tournament before he won his first national championship, in 1982, and an additional 11 years before he captured his second.
Smith, though, was in it for the long haul—and for reasons that transcended championships. He spoke in his memoir about the quest of the dream.
"It was about the thousands of small, unselfish acts," he wrote, "the sacrifices on the part of the players that resulted in team building."
Dean Edwards Smith was born Feb. 28, 1931, in Emporia, Kan., one of two children of schoolteachers Vesta and Alfred Smith. Smith's mother was also the church organist, and his father coached football, basketball and track at Emporia High. In 1934, Alfred Smith broke precedent by allowing a black teenager on his football team.
"My father said, 'Value each human being,' " Smith recalled in his memoir. "And we did."
The family moved to Topeka when Dean was 15. In high school Smith played quarterback in football, guard in basketball and catcher in baseball.
He accepted an academic scholarship to the University of Kansas, and made the basketball team, where he was a seldom-used guard on the Jayhawks' NCAA title team of 1952. Smith had a habit of working his way up the bench to get closer to the great Phog Allen, although the coach actually urged Smith to become a doctor.
"Don't go into coaching," Smith said Allen told him. "Too many ups and downs. Too much heartache."
Smith could not shake the coaching bug. After graduating with a bachelor's in mathematics and physical education, marrying Kansas student Ann Cleavinger and then completing a two-year stint in the Air Force, Smith became an assistant basketball coach on Bob Spear's Air Force Academy staff.
In 1958 Smith became an assistant to Frank McGuire at North Carolina, coming off a national championship season. Smith admired McGuire's flamboyant style and lavish recruiting trips to New York.
McGuire, it turned out, was loose with his bookkeeping and was targeted by the NCAA for "excessive recruiting expenditures." The school was hit with probation that included one year's banishment from the NCAA Tournament.
Fed up with what he believed were trumped-up charges, McGuire resigned to coach the NBA's Philadelphia Warriors and their young center, Wilt Chamberlain.
In August 1961, at age 30, Dean Smith was named North Carolina coach. Chancellor William Aycock told Smith his job was safe so long as he did not further embarrass the university. Smith kept his word, graduating 96.6% of his players over 36 years, while never running afoul of the NCAA.
Smith also won 77.6% of his games, although no one, in the early years, saw a budding dynasty.
In 1961, North Carolina finished 8-9 in Smith's first, and only, losing season. His record after four years was a modest 50-36.
Smith's deployment of the Four Corners stall offense often drew ire, particularly when he used it in a 21-20 loss to Duke in the 1966 Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament.
"We heard a lot of boos, and some debris was even thrown on the court," Smith recounted in his memoir. "... We didn't want a good game. We wanted to win."
Tar Heel basketball found its footing under Smith in 1966, a 26-6 season that started a streak of three straight Final Four appearances. It was also the year North Carolina broke the color divide by signing Charles Scott.
Smith had earlier joined his pastor, Robert Seymour, in integrating a Chapel Hill restaurant not in accordance with the public accommodations act by walking in to the diner with a black student and ordering a meal. There were no cameras, no fanfare, and no opposition to service.
Scott became a cornerstone of North Carolina's basketball resurgence and a trailblazer for minority athletes in the segregated South. Scott recounted to Sports Illustrated a game at the University of South Carolina after which a fan referred to him as a "big, black baboon." Two assistants, Scott said, had to restrain Smith from going after the fan.
"It was the first time I had ever seen Coach Smith visibly upset, and I was shocked," Scott said. "But more than anything else, I was proud of him."
North Carolina's success in the late 1960s was overshadowed by UCLA's basketball dominance. UCLA was in the midst of a seven-year NCAA title streak when North Carolina, in 1967, made its first of three straight Final Four appearances.
Smith and Wooden met only once for the title, in 1968, with UCLA easily winning, 78-55.
It took Smith more than 20 years to reach the top. He coached North Carolina to the NIT championship in 1971 and led the United States' gold-medal effort at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, yet returned to lose NCAA title games in 1977 to Marquette, and again in 1981 to Indiana.
Smith finally claimed his first title in 1982 against Georgetown, on a game-winning jump shot by a freshman named Michael Jordan, who would leave for the NBA after his junior season.
"There's no way you guys ever would have got to see Michael Jordan play without Dean Smith teaching me the game," Jordan said in 2009 when he was named to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
It would be another decade before Smith added his second national title, in 1993, with a victory against Michigan.
In the spring of 1997, Smith was fast approaching Kentucky Coach Adolph Rupp's all-time mark of 876 wins, a record Smith had so little interest in breaking he had to be talked out of retirement before the season.
"Catching Rupp in the win column was a record that meant nothing to me," Smith wrote in his memoir. "I just wanted the talk of it to go away.… I don't think they should even keep coaching records. The records belong to the players."
Smith eclipsed Rupp's mark in March 1997 against Colorado in the NCAA Tournament.
Smith retired the following October, at age 66.
Smith's second wife, Linnea, accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama on Smith's behalf in 2013. She survives him, along with five children and grandchildren.
chris.dufresne@latimes.com
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