Each week until March Madness, I’ll be taking a look at the broader scene outside the Pac-12 in college basketball, assessing trends and faces in the game and previewing the next week’s best action on TV. Some weeks, the column may also run in the Times’ print edition.
When I think of Dean Smith, I gravitate to the concept of royalty, and I’m not sure why. I never quite felt that way about John Wooden or any other college basketball coach. But Smith was such a dominating figure in the game, and North Carolina was such a brand.
Two other things that might account for it: Smith coached at a prominent level longer than Wooden (whose madcap success was in a relatively short period of 1963-75), and of course, as has been properly noted in the wake of his death, Smith was a figure whose renown was also based heavily on his stance on social issues.
I first saw the Tar Heels up close in 1976 at the Far West Classic tournament in Portland (oh, those were the days). Smith had a ridiculously talented team — Tom LaGarde, Walter Davis, Phil Ford, Mike O’Koren — and it breezed to the title in the eight-team tournament. Fond personal recollection: Working in Eugene at the time, I took on a stringing job for a paper in North Carolina; might have been Greensboro — $200 for covering all the Heels’ games that week. That was pretty good cash 39 years ago, and frankly, it was stealing money, being able to follow a team that good. It went all the way to the 1977 NCAA final, where, as a favorite, it lost to Marquette and Al McGuire in McGuire’s teary swan song.
Later, in 1991 in Indianapolis, I was covering the Final Four, and that became famous not only for the memorable Duke upset of UNLV in the semifinals, but for something that happened in the first game — an official named Pete Pavia tossed the iconic Smith from Carolina’s upset loss to Kansas (coached, of course, by Roy Williams). It happened in the waning stages, probably with about a minute left, and as it developed, I was walking out an exit just after the Carolina players had trotted off. Here came Bill Guthridge, the loyal and longtime Smith assistant, screaming at Pavia, who was only too happy to repair to the officials’ quarters.
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