Tribute to Dean Smith, former UNC basketball coach, and one of the great ones. But not for the reason you think.

Here is a tribute to Dean Smith, but not for his genius as a basketball coach, but for his courage and willingness to take a hard risk.  He is the closest person I know who was a real-life Atticus Finch, although he was not a lawyer.

We all lost a true friend with the passing of Dean Smith, the former head basketball coach of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Those of us who attended other ACC universities which were regularly bested by the Tar Heels in basketball came to respect him, grudgingly, as a coaching genius.  But all of us came in time to admire him as a person of character, courage, and humility, and well beyond his example on the basketball court.

If Dean Smith had been a lawyer, he would be favorably compared with Atticus Finch, the iconic but mythical southern lawyer who stood up for the hard thing at a hard time and in a hard way.  Except that in a very real and concrete way, Dean Smith did stand up for the hard thing at a hard time and in a hard way.

I remember as a student at the University of Virginia in the late 1960's when the basketball team of UNC, after an afternoon game in Charlottesville, walked in to a concert after the game that evening.  One of the UNC players who had been recruited by Dean Smith was Charlie Scott, the first African American UNC basketball scholarship athlete, on whom all eyes were fixed.  It took real courage, and great risk, to recruit a player of color in the South back then, and the mood of the crowd that night would have told you that.

At the end of a moving memorial tribute  to Coach Smith recently, Coach Smith's daughter asked the most important question of the day (and of all days): what are we to do with this, this shining example of a leader who took a stand when he did not have to do so, and to take a stand which involved risk?

Coach Smith's daughter told us to do something good for someone else if the memory of Dean Smith is to live on.  To do so for the right reason.  And to do good for goodness’ sake, as our parents and our faiths have taught us to do.

In this high season of faith, I offer this thought: not one of us got to where we are without the help of others.  Perhaps the best thing we can do to honor this wonderful man passing before us is to do what he did all of his life, despite his tremendous success: To stand up and remember those who gave you a chance.  To point in a measurable way to those who gave you an assist.  To acknowledge in a tangible way for all to see the other persons who made your success possible.  And in the process for us to be, each in our own way, good for goodness’ sake, too.

 Isn’t that what Dean Smith taught to his managers and assistant coaches, to his stars and scrubs, and to all the rest of us?

God speed, Dean Smith.

Mike Wells