RIP Dean Smith

[Key]

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/12296176/dean-smith-former-north-carolina-tar-heels-coach-dies-age-83

RIP to a coaching legend.

 

[Big Circus]

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.

 

[JackReacher]

This was a tremendous piece from last year by Tommy Tomlinson.

Precious Memories -- The Dean Smith story

 

[User 11148]

I lost my grandfather to Alzheimer's as a teenager, and that's still probably the worst experience of my (charmed) life. This man who I had admired and loved so fiercely 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.

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"

 

[User 1019]

Damn, that piece got me.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

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.

 

[Vombatus]

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

 

[exmediahack]

Four pallbearers instead of six...?

 

[trifectarich]

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

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.

 

[Vombatus]

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.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

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

 

[expendable]

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

 

[User 4332]

If the academic scandal is mentioned at all, it should be made abundantly clear that Dean Smith had nothing to do with it, and the exhaustive Wainstein report found no evidence that he, or Bill Guthridge, were aware of it.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

I wonder if Calipari's obit will mention vacated Final Fours and NCAA penalties. He has a similar defense.

 

[albert77]

I have an uncle going down with Alzheimer's and it's just a sad thing to see. The weird thing about him, though, was the last time I talked to him, about 9 months ago, he could relate accurately in detail events that happened 60 years ago, but couldn't remember what he had for lunch three hours earlier.

 

[User 4332]

No he doesn't. The situations are very different. The "no show" classes didn't start until two years after Smith retired and UNC gave a former federal prosecutor carte blanche to get to the bottom of it. That prosecutor found no evidence Smith did anything wrong and it's not even clear if any of Smith's players benefitted.

The behavior that caused UMass and Memphis' Final Fours to be vacated occurred while he was coach and neither university did anything comparable to what UNC has done to investigate the matters.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

No he doesn't. The situations are very different. The "no show" classes didn't start until two years after Smith retired and UNC gave a former federal prosecutor carte blanche to get to the bottom of it. That prosecutor found no evidence Smith did anything wrong and it's not even clear if any of Smith's players benefitted.

The behavior that caused UMass and Memphis' Final Fours to be vacated occurred while he was coach and neither university did anything comparable to what UNC has done to investigate the matters.

Head coaches know better than to let anything get traced back directly to them. That's my point. Fifty-four Dean Smith players took paper classes and it all started on his watch. That has to be a part of his legacy, even if it's a small part compared to his activism and on-court contributions. Especially when you consider that at least one former UNC player is essentially saying the institutionalized academic fraud undermined some of the civil rights work Dean Smith did.

 

[User 4332]

Head coaches know better than to let anything get traced back directly to them. That's my point. Fifty-four Dean Smith players took paper classes and it all started on his watch. That has to be a part of his legacy, even if it's a small part compared to his activism and on-court contributions. Especially when you consider that at least one former UNC player is essentially saying the institutionalized academic fraud undermined some of the civil rights work Dean Smith did.

You clearly don't understand the findings of the Wainstein report. Have you even read it?

 

[Jake_Taylor]

You clearly don't understand the findings of the Wainstein report. Have you even read it?

I read it months, but I'm sure not as intently as you. What I came away with was that he couldn't interview Smith or Guthridge, but the program's academic advisers at that time were aware of the paper classes. I know nothing was directly tied to Dean Smith, but things rarely are directly connected to head coaches and they all make sure they can claim ignorance. If the standard was to nail the head coach no program would ever get punished for anything.

Maybe I'm missing something and no being fair, but I think it has to be included as a small part of what was, for the most part, an overwhelmingly positive legacy.

 

[MTM]

Was Sam Gilbert mentioned in John Wooden's obit?
Coach seemed to keep his hands clean as that was going in under his watch.