Category: Victory Village

Dean Smith: No Detail Too Small

Bob Quincy
Bob Quincy: He didn’t want to deal with Coach Smith’s “suggestions.”

Bob Quincy, the director of sports information at University of North Carolina and my boss for three years when I was a student there, did not like Coach Dean Smith messing with the basketball brochure, telling him, in effect, how to do his job.

For those of you who are not from around here,  Smith, who coached UNC from 1961 to 1997, was one of the best basketball coaches that ever was or ever will be.  Maybe The Best.

Oh, I know. Some of you are saying, “Huh? What about Mike Krzyzewski?  Duke’s Hall of Fame coach.”

What about him?

Coach K is a terrific coach, no doubt about that, and his won-lost record against Smith proves it: Coach K won 14, lost only 24 against Coach Smith,  a winning percentage of 36.8. Beating Coach Smith a little over a third of the time is a sign of greatness.

Billy Cunningham, L, Bob Lewis, the best players on that years' team. That's me in the space suit..
Billy Cunningham, L, Bob Lewis, the best players on the team, and  me in the space suit.

Every year the UNC Sports Information Office published brochures about the various Tar Heel athletic teams –including the schedule of games, thumbnail sketches of players and coaches, individual and team statistics, information about opponents, and so forth.

Quincy compiled the brochures that mattered, like football and basketball, and, as his student assistant, I did the brochures that didn’t matter all that much, like swimming and cross country.

When Quincy began working on the  1964-65 basketball brochure Coach Smith told him he wanted some changes.   Bob couldn’t deal with that so he sent me to see the coach.  My instructions were simple: Go, ask, and come back with a list.  

Coach Dean Smith
Coach Dean Smith

Coach Smith  was as nice and polite as could be to me.  We sat at a table in his office. He offered me a soft drink. He complimented Quincy on what a good job he had done on the last basketball brochure.  And then he began telling me the changes he had in mind, and there were lots of them. It seemed like no detail had escaped his attention.

One change stuck out because it seem so odd; Smith wanted the thumbnail sketch of an assistant coach named Donnie Walsh to say he was a Catholic.  Walsh, a former UNC star, was working part-time, helping coach the junior varsity basketball team while he went to law school.

I wasn’t there to question the changes the coach wanted but I asked anyway, “Why?”

Coach Smith said he used the basketball brochure as a recruiting tool, that he sent it to the families of prospects. He told me, words to this effect:  “I’m a Southern Baptist but some of the boys I’m recruiting are Catholic. I want their parents to know that Coach Walsh is a Catholic, too, and that he’ll have their boy in mass every Sunday.”

Postscript: Quincy did not include the Catholic identification in Walsh’s bio in the 1964-65 UNC basketball brochure.  I don’t know why.  Maybe Coach Smith changed his mind.  Maybe the omission was accidental. More likely, Quincy, who had a temper, just got his back up and didn’t do it.

NOTE: By the way, while researching this post at UNC’s Louis Round Wilson Library I came across a UNC Athletic Department payroll. Would you like to guess how much UNC paid Coach Smith in 1965-66?

His salary was $12,000 a year — $97,263 in 2018 dollars.

And how much is Roy William, the current UNC basketball coach, paid? According to a story today in The News & Observer, Williams’ total compensation, including his Nike “shoe contract” and other outside income, is at least $3.9 million — 40 times the salary UNC paid Smith.  William could also earn another  $1.04 million in bonuses.

[For most of Smith’s career his teams wore Converse shoes.  Did Smith have a Converse “shoe contract” in 1965-66?  I don’t know. I doubt it.]

Is the fair to compare Smith’s salary, when he was just getting started, with Williams, who is nearing the end of a outstanding career.

No, it isn’t.  But Williams isn’t being paid twice what Smith was paid. Or three or four times.  Williams earns 40 times as much, which seems a little excessive.   And compared to other top coaches in the country, like Krzyzewski, Williams is underpaid.

Coming Monday:  The Ouija Board

The Peacenik Band

NOTE:   Yesterday was the second anniversary of The Final Edition.  I’ve posted 208 stories, two stories a week for two years.  It’s been fun and the party is not over. I have enough stories to post for another year or so.

The 10 most read posts, so far, include four newspaper stories; two hiking stories; two stories about my father; one about a river trip and one about Snowbird.  Here they are :  1. Here, Take My Blackjack, 2. PIZZA, PIZZA, PIZZA! Paddling the Roanoke;  3. Hiding in a Privy [Video], 4. This Was Not A Real Job, 5. Those Mean Old Newspapermen, 6. It’s A Good Life, 7. Squelched, 8. “Oh, Copyboy?”  9. The Good Fairy, Part I and 10. The Nankoweap: Don’t Look Down, Part 3

OK, here goes, first day of Year Three:

*  *  *

Medics rush Lt. Col. George Eyster on a stretcher toward a helicopter after he had been shot by a Viet Cong sniper at Trung Lap, South Vietnam, Jan. 16, 1966. Eyster, 43, of Florida and commander of the "Black Lions" battalion of the U.S. 1st Division, died 42 hours later in a Bien Hoa hospital. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)
Medics rush Lt. Col. George Eyster on a stretcher toward a helicopter after he had been shot by a Viet Cong sniper at Trung Lap, South Vietnam, Jan. 16, 1966.  He died 42 hours later.

In 1965-66, when the United States was ramping up the fight in Vietnam and an anti-war movement was gathering steam here at home, I worked at The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina. 

I was the DTH sports editor the first semester of my senior year and managing editor the second semester, after the editor, Ernie McCrary, asked me to restore order on the news side. I fired a few left wing reporters, hired some reporters I liked better, and we went on down the road.

I thought the paper had given way too much space to hippies, what they were doing, saying, the whole 40 yards. So I issued an edict of sorts: no more stories about hippies. Unless one of them killed somebody, of course.

Pat Stith
Pat Stith: I played cards that afternoon.

So there we were one Saturday afternoon. The veterans –that’s anyone who had worked a summer or two for their hometown newspaper– were playing hearts while the rookies struggled to put out the paper by themselves.

It was pretty late in the day when the boy I had put in charge came to me with a problem — he had a hole on page one the size of a Mack truck and no obvious way to fill it. Since we did not publish papers with big white holes on page one, or any other page for that matter, something had to be done.

I heard the solution, then I saw it.

On the lawn in front of our newspaper office a jug band was doing its thing, playing and singing anti-war songs. A small crowd had gathered. It was news.

So I ordered up a photo and we ran it on page one, five columns wide and five or six inches deep. It was enormous. I didn’t like having to do that but, at that time of day, with deadline looming, I didn’t figure I had a choice.

Page 1, The Daily Tar Heel, March 27, 1966
Page 1, The Daily Tar Heel, March 27, 1966

I wrote the cutline. [Oh, don’t tell me, I know. This was not one of my better days.] The cutline said,  “PEACENIKS GATHERED at the foot of the war memorial here yesterday to sing about freedom and how they didn’t want to fight for it in Viet Nam.”

[Was I for the war in Vietnam at that time? How did you guess? I bought the government line: “Stop ’em over there or fight ’em over here.” Years later, in 1988, I read “A Bright Shining Lie,” a Pulitzer prize winning book by Neil Sheehan. It made a Vietnam peacenik of me, about 20 years or so too late.]

Postscript: The next day the jug band members, and their friends, and their friends’ friends, lined up outside The Daily Tar Heel office, waiting their turn to give me hell. 

Coming Friday: Take That, You Bean!