[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 25 (Friday, February 13, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E212-E213]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         REMEMBERING DEAN SMITH

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. DAVID E. PRICE

                           of north carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, February 13, 2015

  Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to 
Dean Smith, one of North Carolina's most admired and accomplished 
citizens, who passed away on February 7, 2015. Dean Smith will long be 
remembered for his successes as head coach of the men's basketball team 
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1961 until his 
retirement in 1997. The statistics are dazzling: two national 
championships, 11 Final Four appearances, 17 Atlantic Coast Conference 
regular-season titles and 13 ACC tournament titles, 8-times ACC Coach 
of the Year, and Head Coach of the gold-medal winning USA Olympic 
Basketball team in 1976. He retired with 879 victories, which was the 
NCAA Division I men's basketball record at that time.
  Behind these statistics is the coach of whom his long-time rival 
Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University said, ``He was one of a kind . 
. . one of the greatest basketball minds and a magnificent teacher and 
tactician.'' The tributes that have come forth from his players 
uniformly praise his lifelong loyalty to them and his excellence as a 
mentor. ``He was more than a coach,'' recalled Michael Jordan, ``He was 
my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach Smith was always there 
for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the 
game of basketball, he taught me about life.''
  Dean Smith was also a powerful force for good in the community, 
working actively and courageously for civil rights and equal justice 
throughout his life. I have known Dean since my student days at UNC, 
when he was an assistant coach and an active member of Binkley Baptist 
Church, a fledgling congregation focused on social justice. His sister, 
Joan Ewing, managed my district office for eight years, and his 
daughter Kristen was on my campaign staff. I was honored to join his 
family at the White House in 2013, when he was awarded the Presidential 
Medal of Freedom. The intervening years mark an unparalleled career, a 
life well-lived, and thousands of lives positively shaped and 
influenced.
  With Dean Smith it was not a matter of a celebrity endorsing 
worthwhile causes; Dean was there all along. Long before he was a 
national figure, in 1958, he accompanied an African-American friend to 
a restaurant in Chapel Hill, thereby breaking down the barrier of 
segregation. Much later, when long-time Binkley Baptist pastor Robert 
Seymour told the story to Washington Post reporter John Feinstein, 
Coach Smith expressed some irritation: ``I wish he hadn't done that.'' 
``Dean,'' the reporter replied, ``you should be proud of doing 
something like that.'' Dean Smith looked him in the eye, ``John, you 
should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do the 
right thing.''
  This story captures the essence of what Dean Smith was about. Mr. 
Speaker, I have selected three complementary pieces to fill out this 
exceptional story, and I ask that they be included in the record.

           [From the Raleigh News and Observer, Feb. 9, 2015]

              Dean Smith Leaves a Legacy Far Beyond Sports

                              (Editorial)

       Jerry Stackhouse, the former basketball All-America for the 
     University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, remembered his 
     former coach, Dean Smith, with a personal anecdote that had 
     little to do with coaching or a game. He recalled that years 
     after he left Smith's program, he would send his financial 
     records to Smith.
       Dean Smith, who died Saturday night at the age of 83 after 
     several years of declining health, did that for a lot of 
     former players, famous and, more often than not, not famous. 
     He found them jobs, called if a child was sick, counseled 
     them through personal crises.
       And he did more. Long before integration was common in 
     North Carolina, Smith and his minister and a young African-
     American student walked into a Chapel Hill restaurant, sat 
     down and ate dinner. Chapel Hill was thereafter integrated. 
     He did, in effect, the same with the men's basketball 
     program, bringing in Charles Scott as the first black player. 
     Today, Scott remembers that Smith always called him 
     ``Charles,'' because that was his name and his preference, in 
     contrast to the more sports-friendly Charlie.


                          genuine and generous

       He lectured governors on what he believed to be the heinous 
     wrong of the death penalty. He endorsed liberal politicians. 
     He did not like criticism, but he did not fear it.
       He contributed to charities, believing in the dignity of 
     others and the obligation to share. He was a sportsman, a 
     thinker, a theologian.
       And, yes, he was one of the greatest coaches in the history 
     of sports, all sports. His records and his innovations (the 
     four-corners offense, the huddle at the foul line before 
     shots) will be exhaustively documented in the next days, as 
     the coach is widely mourned.
       But so many who played for him, and so many who never 
     played for him or even met him, will remember first his 
     humanity and his genuineness.
       For he was the most decent of men. It was bred in him at 
     birth, as his parents taught him the value of all, and they 
     lived those values themselves, pushing for integration of the 
     races in Kansas when that was not a common much less a 
     popular cause. Young Dean Smith learned well, and he, too, 
     lived those values all his life.
       If one talked to him about his upbringing, asked the 
     question, ``Coach, where did your views on life and values 
     come from?'' he would go back to Kansas and his parents, both 
     public school teachers. In 1934, his father coached the 
     Emporia High school team to a state championship, with the 
     first black player ever in the Kansas state tournament.


                           time for everyone

       Though Smith held strong opinions, he understood that those 
     who didn't agree but

[[Page E213]]

     were loyal fans and alums of the institution he represented 
     were due respect as well. It was the way he treated everyone, 
     whether a big booster of the university's athletics program 
     during a golf game or a kid on a playground. Everyone got 
     time, and everyone got a smile.
       His way, and his skills, he shared generously. Said one 
     high school coach, exiting a Smith-taught clinic for coaches: 
     ``What that man knows . . .''
       Make no mistake. He was a ferocious competitor, and he 
     hated to lose. But he won well. Oft-cited in his obituaries 
     was his reaction to his team's victory in the 1982 national 
     championship against Georgetown. It was an emotional, hard-
     fought and close game. But when UNC won, Smith's first move 
     was to hug John Thompson, the Georgetown coach. Class, all 
     the commentators said.
       Yes, but that was simply the man. When coaches against whom 
     Smith had competed got into trouble or needed help in finding 
     another position, he would make the calls himself to other 
     schools, and his blessing was gold. A seeming multitude of 
     his former players became coaches themselves.
       But they also became teachers and doctors and principals 
     and successful people in work and in life. Dean Smith took 
     great pleasure in that, primarily in their happiness. Always 
     he would be ``the coach.'' Always he was first the man, and 
     the friend.
                                  ____


                    Grantland: Dean Smith, 1931-2015

                  (By Charles P. Pierce, Feb. 9, 2015)

       One year, when the Final Four was being held in Atlanta and 
     it coincided, as it occasionally does, with Easter, my family 
     and I went to services at the Ebenezer Baptist Church--the 
     new one, across the street from the imposing place in which 
     both Reverend Martin Luther Kings once preached, and in which 
     Alberta Williams King, the wife of Martin Sr. and the mother 
     of Martin Jr., was shot to death while playing the organ in 
     1974. The old church, still majestic, is now a National 
     Historic Site. After the services, we walked across the 
     street and into the sanctuary. It was cool and dark. Very few 
     people were there.
       As part of the experience of the site, recordings of 
     sermons from both Reverend Kings are played in the sanctuary. 
     Looking around, we saw a solitary figure sitting far in the 
     back, his elbows on his knees and his hands folded. His eyes 
     were closed. And he was listening to the recordings with 
     great intensity. It was Dean Smith. I left him alone with his 
     thoughts. He'd earned his private moments in this sacred 
     space.
       Before discussing his career as one of the three greatest 
     coaches in the history of college basketball, we must deal 
     with one aspect of Smith's life that trumps all the 
     championships, all the wins, all the losses, and all the 
     great players who came his way. The fact is that, when this 
     country was finally forced through blood and witness to 
     confront the great moral crisis that grew out of its original 
     sin, Smith was a winter soldier of the first rank.
       His father integrated a high school team in Kansas in the 
     early 1930s. Smith himself walked into a Chapel Hill 
     restaurant as part of the first great wave of protests in the 
     1950s. He tried to recruit Lou Hudson, and then he did 
     recruit Charlie Scott, blowing up the color line in the 
     Atlantic Coast Conference forever. He brought Scott home to 
     dinner, and he brought Scott to church, always the most 
     segregated place in America, even, alas, today.
       It's hard today to imagine what profound moral choices 
     these were when Smith made them. It's hard today to imagine 
     how easy it would have been for him to make a different 
     choice, to go along and get along. Smith would have been a 
     great basketball coach if he'd gone along and gotten along. 
     He might have won 879 games eventually, after other coaches 
     had made the choices and changed the world. But he would not 
     have been the man he was, and that makes all the difference 
     today.
       Smith died on Saturday. He had been ill a long time with a 
     form of dementia, and that is a fight in which I happen to 
     have a particularly nasty dog. I know from my own family's 
     battles with this cruelest of all diseases, a disease that 
     disappears the individual long before it kills the body, that 
     the work of the kindest mercy is to become the memory that 
     the person has lost. It is something atavistic in us, almost 
     visceral, that awareness that the tribe needs to remember--
     and that the collective memory is always plural. We tell 
     their stories, even to them, even while they are still alive, 
     because we are their surviving memory, because the person 
     already is lost.
       So that is the memory I have of Dean Smith. That, one 
     Easter morning, I saw him in a sacred place and that the air 
     in the place was cool and solemn and as thick with history as 
     the morning sunbeams were thick with dust. He was deep in the 
     shadows, eyes closed, lost in his thoughts, listening to the 
     powerful words of preachers long and sadly dead. I left him 
     alone there and walked back out into the sunlight.
       Let's talk about the coach for a moment, though, because 
     that was the heart of his story, the thing that enabled the 
     world to hear the rest of it. There is the undoubted 
     excellence. There are the wins. And there is the incredible 
     array of talent that ran through his North Carolina program. 
     (In the World Tournament of Alumni, I'll take a five of James 
     Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Vince Carter, Michael Jordan, and, 
     what the hell, George Karl and go play anyone, except maybe 
     John Wooden's boys from UCLA.) But one of the most remarkable 
     things about it is that, except for two of the most 
     monumental mistakes in the history of college basketball, 
     Smith might have had the game's most obviously unfinished 
     career. He won his first national title in 1982, when 
     Georgetown's Fred Brown tossed the ball to Worthy as the 
     Hoyas were after the last shot. He won his next one in 1993, 
     when Michigan's Chris Webber had the mother of all vapor 
     locks in the same situation. What it would have been like to 
     have Smith retire without a national championship I have no 
     idea--especially not in the win-or-die way we measure 
     excellence these days--but it would have certainly been one 
     of the greatest statistical anomalies of all time.
       In style, Smith was the bench jockey's bench jockey. He 
     rarely rose, but he chewed on officials with the best of 
     them. (Wooden was very much the same, according to a lot of 
     people who played against his teams.) In fact, Smith remains 
     only the second head coach ever to be ejected from a Final 
     Four game (Al McGuire was the first), when he was asked to 
     absent himself from the Hoosier Dome late in a semifinal 
     against Kansas in 1991. He was the most famous sneak-smoker 
     prior to the arrival on the national scene of Barack Obama.
       All of which brings me to another Dean Smith story. On 
     March 28, 1977, which actually was a rainy night in Georgia, 
     his Tar Heels were contending with McGuire's last Marquette 
     team for a national championship. The Warriors had led by 12 
     at halftime, but they had frittered away that lead and North 
     Carolina had caught them and tied the game. These were the 
     days before the shot clock, children, and Smith had devised 
     the four corners offense, which was essentially a very 
     elaborate game of keep-away. His point guard, Phil Ford, 
     happened to be a master of it. With Marquette on the verge of 
     collapse, Smith went into the stall, and he did so with star 
     freshman forward Mike O'Koren on the bench. Astonished by 
     Smith's move, McGuire had his team lay back in a zone, which 
     allowed his players to catch their breath. Finally, with 
     O'Koren at the scorer's table hoping desperately to get back 
     in the game, a North Carolina sub named Bruce Buckley took 
     the ball to the basket. Bo Ellis slapped the shot away, and 
     you could feel the momentum shift back again like the works 
     of a great iron clock. Marquette won. It was the best sports 
     night of my life, and I sent Smith a Christmas card every 
     year after for the next five years. Really, I did.
       He was very much an eccentric in his own way, and had his 
     best days before the game was so homogenized and 
     commercialized that the eccentricity was bled out of it. He 
     coached at the same time as Bob Knight at Indiana, and Abe 
     Lemons at Texas, and McGuire at Marquette. It was a game for 
     poets then, not for the slick salesmen of the modern era. 
     Some of them were beat poets, and some of them wrote epics. I 
     always thought of Smith as one of those all-American 
     craftsmen-poets--Longfellow, maybe, or Edgar Lee Masters. His 
     lines were always perfectly metered. Lord, how his game 
     always rhymed.
       As I grow older, I grow impatient with the impermanence of 
     memory, with history now considered to be whatever came over 
     your iPhone 15 minutes ago. It is inadequate to what we are. 
     It truncates the collective memory, and that is never a good 
     thing. We are each other's stories, all of us. We keep other 
     stories alive so we can be assured that ours will stay alive 
     too. That is the most devastating thing that happens with the 
     disease that took Smith's life. If we're not very careful, 
     and if we don't make sure to keep the memories we have that 
     are lost to the person with the disease, it breaks that cycle 
     of collective memory and we are all less for that. I learned 
     that watching this disease invade my own family, and it is 
     why I try so very hard to remember my father's voice, even 
     though it's mainly lost to me now.
       So remember Dean Smith however you wish--as a coach, as a 
     teacher, as a reluctant celebrity, or as a friend. For me, I 
     will remember him in the cool shadows of the sanctuary on a 
     bright Easter morning, listening to the words of men long 
     dead and gone. I remember him there now, for his sake and for 
     my own. I remember him there in the small piece of a very 
     sacred place that his life had earned.

                          ____________________