TEARS FOR THE TAR HEELS

By Steve Wulf

There are the numbers: a record 879 victories in 36 years at North Carolina, a 97% graduation rate for his players, 30 All-Americans, 27 consecutive 20-win seasons, 11 Final Fours, only three ejections, the one and only Michael Jordan and zero NCAA violations.

There are the stories: of being hanged in effigy his first year as head coach, of participating in campus protests against segregation, of late-night sessions watching videotape and of late-night calls from ex-players in crisis.

And when Dean Smith, 66, announced last week that he was stepping down from the job he has held since 1961, there were tributes from his players and his rivals and even President Clinton. "We all respect and admire you so much," the President told him by phone.

Perhaps the best testimony, though, to the extraordinary coach Smith was his own comportment last March after his Tar Heels defeated a pesky and game Fairfield University team, 82-74, in the first round of the NCAA tournament--a win that temporarily tied Smith with Kentucky's Adolph Rupp for most victories in a career. Rather than celebrate the record, Smith sought out each and every member of the opposition to congratulate him. He asked leading scorer Greg Francis, "Do you always play like that?" and told coach Paul Cormier, "I just want you to know we played very well--you brought us to the brink." Indeed, Smith seemed as pleased for the Stags as he would have been had he been their father.

But then, in a way, he was. As Tom Butters, the athletic director of archrival Duke, said last week, "Coach Smith made college basketball better. Excellence begets excellence." The lineage of basketball is even more specific. James Naismith, literally the father of the game, begat Phog Allen, the Kansas coach, who begat Dean Smith, who begat not just Jordan and scores of NBA players but also such notable coaches as Billy Cunningham, Larry Brown, George Karl, Roy Williams and Eddie Fogler. Almost all his former charges remain intensely loyal to him. Jordan, in fact, still wears his blue Tar Heel shorts under his Chicago Bull shorts. "He's a father figure to a lot of players and a lot of people," Jordan said last week.

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 up.

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 through a practice at Chapel Hill: "I thought, 'I used to be like that.' If I can't give this team that enthusiasm, I'd said I'd get out." But there is also a smiling suspicion in North Carolina that Smith waited until the eve of fall practice so that Guthridge, and not some high-profile coach, could be named the top man. Loyalty begets loyalty.

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 Carolina." He thanked his assistants and secretaries and friends and players, but when he said, "What loyalty I've had," he choked up.

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."