With all deference and much respect to John Feinstein…
Let me tell you another story.
This story is about a coach and a kid who the coach never knew.
The kid moved to Durham, NC in 1983. He was 7 years old. The kid was a baseball fanatic, and would go on to be influenced by some of the greatest baseball coaching minds of his generation. But, that’s a story for another day.
You see, baseball may very well have been hanging on to its place as our nation’s pastime, but if you happened to be a 7 year old boy living in Durham, NC in 1983…you quickly learned that the heart of athletic competition beat to a different drum on Tobacco Road. Once armed with this knowledge, your first (and most important) task was to choose which drum to follow.
Two shades of blue. One very contrarian shade of red. A few miles of back roads. Heels or Devils or Pack? This was every kid’s rite of passage in that particular place and time.
Choose.
So he chose…a baseball player…who happened to also play basketball. When this baseball player was playing basketball, he wore the number 23 in the lighter shade of blue. Number 23 had already done some pretty swell things by the time the boy arrived on the scene. In fact, this player had one of his baby blue Converse sneakers already out of the door. So, when the other baby blue Converse sneaker followed the first and started this player’s trek towards the far-off land of Chicago at the end of the 1983 basketball season, that boy had another choice to make. Stick with the lighter shade of blue, or realign his allegiance and join with the rest of his nuclear family who had succumbed to the power of the dark (blue) side.
And, that’s when this kid became aware of Dean Smith.
In hindsight, that last sentence is something the kid would regret admitting later. However, he would take comfort in the idea that this is actually the way that Coach Smith would have preferred to be noticed. Team first, player second, and then...somewhere down the line…coach.
The golden era of Tobacco Road basketball would help inform the kid’s ideologies, sensibilities and general take on the way the world should work. As the kid marched through childhood, several coaches would inform his worldview. Of those, three coached basketball. As a fourth grader, the kid wrote a letter to the coach of the red team. In fact, he wrote a letter to all three coaches, but only the coach of the red team sent him a hand written note back in the mail. That note, and an autographed picture hung on the kid’s wall. The words “Don’t Ever Give Up” hung in his heart.
The kid was co-leader of his sixth grade student council. The other co-leader was the daughter of the coach of the dark blue team. In those days, Bragtown sixth grade center is where all Durham kids spent a year before “graduating” and moving on to Junior High School. Most of them bled one shade of blue or another. A few bled red, but most bled blue. The kid tried his hardest not to let the coach’s daughter know which shade he bled. The kid had gone to her father’s basketball clinics. Despite his loyalty to the lighter shade of blue, the kid thought the coach of the dark blue team was a pretty incredible fellow.
Alas, blood runs deep on Tobacco Road, and the coach’s daughter was no fool. Sixth grade student council meetings at Bragtown that year were icy endeavors.
Time marched on. The kid became a young man and moved away from Tobacco Road. Things changed. Ideologies and sensibilities adjusted, as they tend to do. The coach of the red team had to stop coaching. The coach of the dark blue team became the “double standard” that he had once quipped was the mark of Coach Smith.
Through all of that, Coach Smith was unwavering in his consistency. And, much like mythical cornfields in Iowa…people would come.
Year after year, game after game, people would come. All of them, recounting the same narrative of the consistently understated coach of the lighter blue team.
Yes, he was an innovator. Yes, he was a tireless competitor. But, Coach Smith never allowed any of that to change what he was at his core. Coach and mentor to young men. Advocate for those who could not advocate for themselves. Believer in a right “way” to go about life. Sherpa on the path that ran between what his players thought might be possible and what he absolutely knew they were capable of on the court and (more importantly to him) in life.
That 7 year old kid is now a 38 year old man with two teenage daughters. The ideologies and sensibilities that were shaped by Coach Smith (and the other two coaches, but especially Coach Smith) have transformed into iron clad pillars. Those pillars are something that the 38 year old man hoped would one day take seed in his daughters’ lives as he watched them grow and form their own ideologies and sensibilities.
The 38 year old man learned of the passing of Coach Smith this Sunday while attending church service in Charlotte, NC. The pastor of the man’s church (who played basketball for Coach Smith) delivered the news to his congregation just before his weekly message.
For the second time in his life, the kid (now a man), became aware of Dean Smith. This time it had nothing to do with basketball.
You see, Coach Smith helped that Pastor become what Coach Smith absolutely knew he would. A man whose heart beats for those who have no voice. That Pastor worked for decades to encourage the hearts of others to do the same. Two of those hearts belong to the teenage daughters of the 38 year old man. You cannot find two hearts that beat stronger for the people in this world who need a little help. Legacy is as legacy does.
And the beat goes on. All because a 7 year old kid was lucky enough to have to choose a particular shade of blue.
I’d like to think that as the horn sounded, and Coach was called off of the court of this life, the players on the heavenly bench stood and applauded as Coach made his way back to them.
Decked out in Carolina Blue, of course.
From the bottom of my Carolina blue blooded heart…Thank you Coach Smith. You never knew me, but your legacy had, has, and will continue to play a part in my family’s purpose far past my days on this earth. And, that is far more important than the sum total of all of your accomplishments on the court.
Excellence in thought and word, my friend.
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