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RIP Dean Smith

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Key, Feb 8, 2015.

  1. Key

    Key Well-Known Member

  2. Big Circus

    Big Circus Well-Known Member

    I lost my grandfather to Alzheimer's as a teenager, and that's still probably the worst experience of my (charmed) life. This man whom I had loved and admired so deeply just disappeared into himself. After he died, I remember asking my father, a stoic man, why he didn't appear to be grieving, and his response was "I lost him a long time ago." It's a horrid, evil disease, and I imagine Smith's family feels some measure of peace with their grief today. He was living, but he wasn't alive.

    I cut my teeth as a college hoops junkie during the latter part of Smith's heyday. I was a Virginia superfan who went to the ACC tournament most years, and I was a child and teenager with no perspective on anything, so as you can imagine, I loathed him. To me, he was UNC coming back on UVA after the lights went out in Charlotte, or the guy who got in a fight with Rick Barnes. He was the living embodiment of the way the Greensboro Coliseum filled up with baby blue over the course of the weekend every year. I couldn't stand him. That was before I knew the measure of the man and what he truly accomplished, particularly off the court. He was a shining example of how to act as a human being and treat others, and the way his life ended was sad and awful. RIP.
     
    Last edited: Feb 8, 2015
    EddieM, Mr. Sunshine and Vombatus like this.
  3. JackReacher

    JackReacher Well-Known Member

  4. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    George F. Will wrote this a few years ago on his Alzheimers-afflicted mother's passing ...

    "It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. Dementia is an ever-deepening advance of wintry whiteness, a protracted paring away of personality. It inflicts on victims the terror of attenuated personhood, challenging philosophic and theological attempts to make death a clean, intelligible and bearable demarcation.

    Is death the soul taking flight after the body has failed? That sequence -- the physical extinguished, the spiritual not -- serves our notion of human dignity. However, mental disintegration mocks that comforting schema by taking the spirit first.

    In the very elderly the mind can come and go, a wanderer in time, and a disintegrating personality can acquire angers and jagged edges that are, perhaps, protests against a growing lightness of being. No one has come back from deep in that foreign country to report on life there. However, it must be unbearably frightening to feel one's self become light as a feather, with inner gales rising"
     
    bigpern23 likes this.
  5. three_bags_full

    three_bags_full Well-Known Member

    Damn, that piece got me.
     
  6. Jake_Taylor

    Jake_Taylor Well-Known Member

    How should the academic scandal be treated in the obits? Nothing I've read or seen on TV has even mentioned it at all, but it seems to me like it should at least get a passing inclusion if you are making any attempt to be balanced. The man did a a lot of great things and was an amazing coach, but the fake classes started on his watch and the more that comes out the more it looks like a response to Duke winning NCAA titles.
     
  7. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    Probably not the time. That would be like mentioning altar boy abuse in the Pope's obit.
     
  8. exmediahack

    exmediahack Well-Known Member

    Four pallbearers instead of six...?
     
  9. trifectarich

    trifectarich Well-Known Member

    When would the right time be? It shouldn't be that difficult to write one more paragraph, even if that graf is the one that's not all peaches and cream.
     
  10. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    In a follow up after the burial is over.

    My point is mainly that Dean is revered like the Pope. Local news will not add a graf like that. National might, and probably would.
     
  11. Twirling Time

    Twirling Time Well-Known Member

    Jordan gives the eulogy but is held under 20 ... minutes.
     
  12. expendable

    expendable Well-Known Member

    After the pallbearers set his casket in place, they will point back to the hearse to show acknowledgement.
     
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