Column: Dean Smith crafted championship culture
Long before "branding" became essential, you could spot North Carolina's basketball team a thousand miles away.
The Tar Heels of Dean Smith were a law of nature. They weren't consistent. They were permanent.
From 1975, which was the first year the NCAA tournament welcomed conference runners-up, they made that tournament every year until 2002, four seasons after Smith retired. From 1967 until 1987, they finished first or second in the ACC every year but one.
They showed up in coats and ties. Their scorers always pointed to their assist men. They shot 50 percent or better, they did not transfer (and none of them were transfers), they stayed out of trouble, they graduated.
The special ones thrived in the pros. The others became lawyers and doctors and such, and all of them remained joined at the hip to the coach who died Sunday morning, at 83.
The president of the university could be sitting in Smith's office, but he would have to leave if a player knocked. The players all returned to Chapel Hill every summer for a weekend. They were, and are, as tight a brotherhood as sports has ever had,, and all because one man was what all coaches claim they are. Smith was a player's coach, and it helped that he believes that players were people.
Even Smith's retirement was designed to reward loyalty. He had always said he would leave the game if he had trouble putting the golf clubs back in the trunk at the end of the summer. But in 1997 he waited until mid-October, right before the beginning of practice, when he announced he was leaving.
The university had little choice but to appoint Smith's top assistant, Bill Guthridge, when it might have been tempted to hold a showy national search. Guthridge took North Carolina to the Final Four two of the next three years.
Yet, despite the unanimous love from all the corners of the sports world Sunday, Smith was a polarizing figure in the testy ACC. Back then, coaches did not take shoe-company cruises in the off-season. They were scrapping for precious NCAA tournament spots, and each regular-season game was an event. Smith was loathed by Lefty Driesell, Norm Sloan and Tates Locke, among others, and any victory over Carolina triggered a party.
Impervious to such wasted emotion, and convinced that everyone else's opinion was none of his business, Smith outlasted them all without having to change. If you were irked that the Tar Heels seemed so special, well, live with it. They were.
These days North Carolina is recovering from a phony-grades scandal. College schedules last from early November to early April and include games on aircraft carriers in Asia. ACC membership has doubled. The best players never become sophomores.
It is not Dean Smith's game anymore. Could his brand of community and discipline win today, in such a graceless age? Like everything else about his program, you can count on it.
Mark Whicker is a columnist for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. Archive .