Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cunningham, a basketball Hall of Famer who played on Smith's first Tar Heel team, says, "The most overused cliche in sports might be 'We're a family,' but at North Carolina, the team truly is a family. Coach Smith treats the last guy on the bench the same way he treats the best player on the team, and he is as concerned about their education as he is about winning. He takes as much pride in the doctors and lawyers he coached as he does in the All-Stars...
...Smith has had his critics, people who say he should have won more than two NCAA titles, who joke that Smith is the only man ever to hold Jordan to under 20 points a game. But his no-I-in-team system was built to sustain excellence at the expense of occasional brilliance. "Dean is the best teacher of basketball that I have observed," UCLA legend John Wooden once said. And that teacher provided Jordan, who helped Smith win his first NCAA title in '82, with the lessons he needed to become a player not even Naismith could have dreamed...
Thirty-six years is a long time at any job, much less coaching basketball in the high pressure of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and for the past few years Smith has been talking about retiring to spend more time with his wife, psychologist Linnea Smith, his five children and their grandchildren. "We were always able to talk him out of it," said successor Bill Guthridge, his assistant for 31 years. "This time we couldn't do it." Smith said he realized it was time to go two weeks ago, when he was watching his protege, Larry Brown, push the 76ers...
ESPN first broke the story of the coach's resignation on the evening of Oct. 8, but by then, Smith had already told his players--past, present and future. That night, hundreds of North Carolina students were camped outside the Dean Smith Center, chanting, "We love Dean! We love Dean!" As one would expect from a man who wears a tie even in practice, Smith showed up two minutes early for his 2 p.m. press conference. He tried to make it sound routine when he announced, "I have decided to resign as head basketball coach at the University of North...
Asked at the press conference what his epitaph might be, Smith offered, "He knew a little basketball, did a good job and lived happily after...