[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 25 (Friday, February 13, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E213-E214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO 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 would like to submit the 
following article in my remembrance of Dean Smith.

                Carolina Athletics: The Stories Are True

                        (By Adam Lucas, 2-8-15)

       I have been sitting here staring at this screen for 30 
     minutes. And what I have finally decided I want you to know 
     the most about Dean Smith is this: it's true.
       In the next few hours and days, as the tributes to the 
     legendary man pour in, you are going to hear all of the 
     incredible stories again. Some you may hear for the first 
     time. Some you may hear for the hundredth time.

[[Page E214]]

     These stories are true, and you should remember all of them, 
     because now it's our job to pass them down. Don't embellish 
     them. They don't need it. They are good enough with just the 
     facts.
       You will hear basketball stories. You will hear former 
     players talk about how Smith would tell them exactly what was 
     going to happen in a game. He would tell them what the 
     opponent would do, how the Tar Heels would react, and how the 
     opponent would react to that reaction. Then it would happen, 
     all of it, just as he described.
       These stories are true. We know this because we sat in 
     Carmichael in 1974 when his team came back from eight points 
     in 17 seconds against Duke with no three-point line. I just 
     told that story to my children on Saturday night when we 
     drove home from the airport after returning from the win at 
     Boston College. My nine-year-old son was talking about a 
     crazy NBA comeback he'd read about.
       ``Do you know,'' I said, ``that Carolina came back from 
     eight points down in 17 seconds with no three-point line?''
       ``Whoa,'' said my daughter. ``Is that true?''
       It is true.
       Those of us of a different generation than the Carmichael 
     crowd were in the Smith Center when Smith's simple act of 
     calling a timeout so shook a top-20 opponent that they meekly 
     crumbled. I will forever believe that's what happened when 
     Smith took a timeout after Henrik Rodl made a three-pointer 
     against Florida State with less than ten minutes left on the 
     clock in 1993. Rodl's three-pointer had cut the FSU lead to 
     17 points. 17 points!
       It didn't matter. All that mattered was that the Florida 
     State players and coaches knew Smith thought a comeback was 
     possible, or else he wouldn't burn one of his precious 
     timeouts. And if Smith thought a comeback was possible, then 
     it was possible, and he's done this before, you know, and uh 
     oh, there went another turnover, and it's getting kind of 
     loud in here, and pretty soon Carolina had an 82-77 win.
       That was true. That happened. Dean Smith called a timeout, 
     and Florida State wilted.
       And yet despite all those wins, we know exactly how 
     uncomfortable Smith was with celebrating any of them. I can 
     report, with authority, that with much cajoling from his 
     players, he once did the ``raise the roof'' gesture after his 
     Tar Heels won the 1997 ACC Tournament championship, and then 
     again after earning a spot in the Final Four. It was the mid-
     1990's. Everyone made mistakes.
       Otherwise, however, the man who never looked flustered on 
     the sideline looked completely awkward in victory. He would 
     almost apologetically shake the other coach's hand. If it 
     happened to be an ACC or NCAA championship, he would try to 
     disappear while the nets were being cut, so unwilling was he 
     to climb the ladder and be the focal point of the fans and 
     players.
       Most of the time, those of us in the stands would chant, 
     ``Dean! Dean! Dean!'' when he was finally persuaded to cut 
     the final snippet. It seems a little disrespectful now. But 
     it was the 1980s and 1990s. All of us made mistakes.
       It didn't really matter, because he would act like he 
     didn't hear us. With scissors in hand, before cutting the 
     first strand, he would point to every manager, player and 
     assistant coach he could find.
       That was true. That happened after every championship, and 
     there were a lot of them.
       There are also those who will tell you those championships 
     are completely insignificant. Funny thing about the people 
     who most often say that: they are invariably the ones who 
     knew him best, the ones who most understood his true 
     character.
       ``I can't put his impact on me into words,'' Phil Ford said 
     of Smith. ``I don't know where I'd be without him in my life. 
     He's been such an influence on me, and a friend and a brother 
     and a father figure . . . Before I chose North Carolina, I 
     felt that Coach Smith would be there for me my entire life. I 
     was right.''
       Imagine that. A 17-year-old boy felt Dean Smith would be 
     there for him for his entire life, and 40 years later, he 
     still believes it. Wouldn't you like to have one person say 
     that about you in your life? Dean Smith has--this is not an 
     exaggeration--hundreds.
       ``All of that is credited to him,'' Michael Jordan once 
     said of his career. ``It never would have happened without 
     Coach Smith.''
       These quotes mean a lot to us because they are from Phil 
     Ford and Michael Jordan. But what Smith knew, and what he 
     made every one of his players feel, is that the number of 
     points they scored for him made absolutely no difference. My 
     father and I had a joke in the mid-1990s. Carolina had a 
     player named Pat Sullivan who was not at all flashy. At 
     various times, he played on teams with George Lynch and Eric 
     Montross and Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse, much 
     better-known players who were prone to occasionally doing the 
     spectacular.
       It never, ever failed: Stackhouse could have had the most 
     ferocious dunk of the season and Wallace could have thrown 
     down an absurd alley-oop and Montross could have had a 
     double-double and Lynch could have had the game-winning 
     steal. Then, in the car on the way home, we would turn on 
     the Tar Heel Sports Network to hear Smith's postgame 
     comments and seemingly every time, they would start with, 
     ``Well, Pat had a good game,'' because he had set a screen 
     to free a teammate for an open shot that the teammate 
     missed.
       That happened. Pat had good games. Dean Smith talked about 
     it. At the time, we laughed, and yet 20 years later, we still 
     remember it.
       This seems like the right time to point out that without 
     ever really knowing he was doing it, Dean Smith gave all of 
     us some of the best moments of our lives with the most 
     important people in our lives. It doesn't matter whether you 
     attended every game in the Smith era or whether you watched 
     every game on television. Because of the way Smith did it, 
     and for how long he did it, we could relate through 
     generations.
       We cried in the living room (I did that, after Louisville 
     beat Carolina in 1986 in the NCAA Tournament) and we danced 
     around that same living room (my dad and I did that, after 
     Rick Fox hit the shot against Oklahoma in 1990) and we high-
     fived in the stands.
       That's what we did in 1993 in the Louisiana Superdome. My 
     dad is an accountant and therefore spends most of March and 
     April at the office. But when Carolina made the Final Four, 
     he would find a way to get to the game. In 1993, he waited 
     until the Tar Heels defeated Kansas in the national 
     semifinals. He stayed at work two more days, then caught a 
     flight with two connections from Raleigh to New Orleans. He 
     slid into his seat minutes before the national championship 
     game tipped off against Michigan, and so I can say that I 
     watched Carolina win the national title with my dad.
       We went to Bourbon Street after the game, because that's 
     what everyone told us you were supposed to do, and so there 
     we were--perhaps the two least Bourbon Street-ish people in 
     all of New Orleans, including one CPA with a pile of 
     unfinished tax returns on his desk back in Raleigh--high 
     fiving the Tar Heel players and taunting Dick Vitale (who had 
     picked Michigan to win the game), and we did all of that 
     because of Dean Smith.
       Without Dean Smith and Carolina basketball, I assume and 
     hope we would have found something else to talk about and 
     live together. But because of Dean Smith and Carolina 
     basketball, I never have to know for sure if that's true. The 
     people we cheered and laughed with on all those incredible 
     days are the people we cry with--if we're lucky--today. I 
     told my father the news this morning. Later, he texted me 
     this:
       ``I am very, very sorry. It is really very sad. He was a 
     large part of our family for many, many years and many, many 
     fun times. We had a lot of good times and he was always 
     there. It doesn't seem possible to me. It seems like he and 
     the good times ought to last forever.''
       And so that is why this news will be devastating to so many 
     of us, because there are so many families who this morning 
     will be texting and thinking those exact same words. We 
     aren't ready for it to end.
       About a year ago, I was at the Smith Center on a typical 
     weekday afternoon. A customized van was parked in the first 
     parking space outside the basketball office, and I knew. As I 
     walked into the basketball office, Dean Smith came out, being 
     pushed in a wheelchair, a Carolina hat on his head.
       It was awful, and it makes my eyes moisten even now to 
     think about it. It was not at all the way I wanted to think 
     about him. And I would like to admit something to you now: 
     from then on, when I saw that van, I would sometimes take a 
     different path into the building, because I wanted my Dean 
     Smith to be the one I remembered. I wanted my Dean Smith to 
     be the one who I mentioned my daughter's name to on exactly 
     one occasion, and six months later when passing me in the 
     parking lot, he recalled it perfectly and asked how she was 
     doing.
       That's my Dean Smith and I wanted that to be everyone's 
     Dean Smith. I don't want today's students to think of him as 
     old or sick. Understand this: this man could do anything. 
     This man could coach and this man could help integrate a town 
     or a league and this man changed the lives of hundreds of 
     teenagers who played for him plus thousands of the rest of us 
     who lived vicariously through their exploits.
       It still boggles my mind that so many Carolina fans in 2015 
     don't even remember the era when Smith was on the sideline. 
     He's as much a name on a building as a coach to current UNC 
     students. It's been hard enough living in a basketball world 
     without Dean Smith in it. Now we have to consider living in 
     an overall world without Dean Smith in it.
       I don't want to be part of that world. And luckily, I don't 
     have to. On Monday, I will pack my son's lunch, and I will 
     write a Dean Smith quote on the napkin. I don't know yet 
     which one it will be, but I know that when I see him on 
     Monday afternoon, I will ask him about it, and we will talk, 
     and Dean Smith will be the one who enabled that to happen.
       That's true. That will happen. And it will keep happening, 
     and we are the ones who get to do it. I guess that pretty 
     soon I will feel lucky for having these experiences and 
     getting the opportunity to cheer for him and learn from him 
     and admire him.
       But right now I really think I want to sit down and have a 
     good cry.

                          ____________________