Legacy of a lifetime

Marcus Paige only met Dean Smith once. By the time Paige was a Tar Heel freshman, Smith was battling a progressive neurocognitive disorder and making few public appearances. When Paige got to Carolina, he wanted to meet two people: Vince Carter and Dean Smith. And though he didn’t get to have a lengthy conversation with the legendary coach, he did get to shake his hand. “I’ll never forget that.” Paige said Sunday afternoon. “I felt like I was meeting the most famous person in the world. I was kind of starstruck when I got to meet him.”

Somehow, it seemed fitting that the day after Dean Smith passed away, the North Carolina men’s basketball team held a Special Olympics clinic in the building that bears his name. There were laughs and smiles, missed shot and made shots, and right there among the Special Olympians were the Tar Heels themselves, rebounding and passing for their visitors. In his lifetime, Dean Smith built bridges across boundaries, and here in his building, the current generation of Tar Heels were doing the same.

And then, after the clinic and the autograph session that followed, Paige and some of his Tar Heel forebears talked about Dean Smith. Though Smith’s health had continued to decline, the news of his passing was never going to come easy.

“I didn’t think I would be devastated from the standpoint, in some ways he was already gone,” Hubert Davis said. “I thought, not that I would be OK with it, but I wouldn’t be surprised, it wouldn’t be that feeling of he’s gone, the finality of it. And just hearing that, as soon as we landed after playing Boston College, we got reports that he wasn’t doing well, but you still thought he’s going to be OK. And then you wake up this morning and it’s like, Coach is gone.”

In recent years, Smith continued to come in to the basketball office on occasion, even as his condition grew worse. “And though I didn’t like seeing him that way, I didn’t care; I got to see him,” Davis said. “I got to give him a hug. I got to talk to him. And now I don’t get that chance to do that.”

“We all knew it was coming, but you never expect that it’s going to happen today,” Eric Montross said. “We could see him occasionally being wheeled into the office, or having lunch in his office, and although we knew he was diminished in his capacities, it was still Coach Smith, and so I think that the great thing about it, the piece that I think is helping all of us is that he’s given so much. He’s armed us with such an ability to go on and given us such an opportunity to be impactful the way that he was, that that gives us a lot of confidence moving forward.”

“I was very blessed and fortunate to have him in my life,” Phil Ford said. “I’ll be able to sit down and tell my grandchildren that I played for Dean Smith, which is really cool. He’s going to be dearly missed. He meant so much to me on and off the court, not only sharing his basketball knowledge, but sharing all of the knowledge that he had to make me a better person, and I can never repay him for that.”

On the way back from Boston Saturday night, Roy Williams had the opportunity to watch game film from the first half. He noticed that Brice Johnson, after a put back dunk, thanked the ‘passer’ as Smith taught his players to do. Only this time, the ‘passer’ was a teammate who had missed a shot.

“I think it was Marcus,” Williams said. “I said, ‘Brice, I’ve never had a player point at a guy for missing a shot so he could dunk it before. That’s a new one. Coach Smith always wanted you to point at the guy for passing the ball, but you were thanking Marcus for doing such a bad job shooting the ball that you were able to get the follow dunk.’” Williams did not know at the time the news he would receive later that night. “People will be doing things that they have no idea came from Dean Smith, but they’ll be doing it because it’s been passed down from coaches to coaches, players to players.”

Certainly Marcus Paige’s experience exemplifies that. Paige only met Smith once, but he’s well aware of the man’s legacy because of how it resonates, how it reaches generations.

“Just being around the program and hearing, Coach Williams has a million different stories, because he coached underneath him so long,” Paige said. “You almost feel like you know him. I almost feel like I had a personal relationship with him, and I only met him one time. Just through how everyone else lives through him and tell stories of him and tries to live and act the way that he preached when he was here. It’s just a rough day for everyone around the program, and even for guys like me who really never got a chance to be around him, just understanding the importance that he had on so many people’s lives.”

Other Smith-related stories: