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Dean Smith was born in Emporia, Kansas, in 1931. At age thirty he became head coach of UNC, and over thirty-six years there established a record (879-254,.776) as the winningest coach in college basketball history. Smith has won numerous coaching awards, including eight ACC Coach of the Year titles. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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iversity of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith tells the full story of his fabled career, and shares the life lessons taught and learned over forty years of unparalleled success as a coach and mentor.

For almost forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of North Carolina men's basketball program with unsurpassed success- on the court and in shaping young men's lives. In his long-awaited memoir, he reflects on the great games, teams, players, strategies, and rivalries that defined his career, and explains the philosophy that guided him. There's a lot more to life than basketball- though some may beg to differ- but there's a lot more to basketball than basketball, and this is a book about basketball filled with wisdom about life. Dean Smith insisted that the fundamentals of good basketball were the fundamentals of character- passion, discipline, focus, selflessness, and responsibility- and he strove to unite his teams in pursuit of those values.

To read this book i

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iversity of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith tells the full story of his fabled career, and shares the life lessons taught and learned over forty years of unparalleled success as a coach and mentor.

For almost forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of North Carolina men's basketball program with unsurpassed success- on the court and in shaping young men's lives. In his long-awaited memoir, he reflects on the great games, teams, players, strategies, and rivalries that defined his career, and explains the philosophy that guided him. There's a lot more to life than basketball- though some may beg to differ- but there's a lot more to basketball than basketball, and this is a book about basketball filled with wisdom about life. Dean Smith insisted that the fundamentals of good basketball were the fundamentals of character- passion, discipline, focus, selflessness, and responsibility- and he strove to unite his teams in pursuit of those values.

To read this book i

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A Coach's Life

By Dean E. Smith

Random House Large Print

Copyright © 1999 Dean E. Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780375408649
Chapter 1
A Kansas Childhood

I'm a Kansan, even though I've lived most of my adult life in North Carolina. I speak like a Kansan, in a flat Midwest voice free of any accent. I'm not quick to say aloud what's on my mind. I say what I think-just not everything I think-and some would say that, too, is speaking like a Kansan.

In Kansas the sky seems somehow bigger. Driving through, it feels like the longest state in the union, and it's a fact that the sun rises thirty minutes later on the western border than it does on the eastern. Lines of dark limestone hills crested by mustard-colored tall rippling grasses seem to go on forever, and so do the blacktop roads that roll up and over the hills. The monotony is broken every few miles by midwestern towns, each one much like the last. Among them is a place called Emporia, a university town of low-slung brick buildings, tree-lined streets of Victorian houses with inviting front porches, and a railroad track. That's where I spent the first fifteen years of my life, before moving to the capital of Kansas, Topeka.

The austere landscape of Kansas, its hills and prairies, belie its tempestuous history and even more tempestuous-some would say biblical-weather, which brings the state more than its share of twisters, blizzards, hailstorms, prairie fires, and locusts. I was never blown to Oz as a child, but I may have come close.

Once upon a time, as they say, a family named Smith settled in Kansas, and unlike some of their neighbors, managed not to become farmers. (Ninety-six percent of the land in the state of Kansas is devoted to farming, but farmers actually make up a small percentage of the people who live there.) I'm the son of schoolteachers.

My mother, Vesta Edwards, taught at all levels, from elementary school reading to college psychology courses. She was also our church's organist. My father, Alfred Smith, was a teacher and coach of the football, basketball, and track teams at Emporia High, as well as a church deacon. Teaching and coaching was all I ever thought about as a profession because it struck me that in addition to being very good people, my parents were also deeply happy ones. It seems fitting to me that Emporia is now the home of the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

I grew up in a small stucco bungalow that was built by my parents with the help of my mother's father, a cement mason who also poured the foundation for one of the local Baptist churches. The house cost $3,500 when they put it up in 1936, which was actually a substantial price in those days. By way of comparison, you could wander down to Gould's Cafe and buy a chicken dinner with salad, three vegetables, and a roll for 35 cents. You got a choice of iced tea or coffee and dessert too. My parents were so happy in Emporia that when my father was offered the head football coaching job at Wichita North High School, one of the largest schools in the state, he turned it down because he and my mother didn't want to leave.

Five of us lived in the two-bedroom house, which had just a single bath with hardwood floors and a second-floor sleeping porch, which became my room. My sister, Joan, was born the year before the stock market crash in 1928, and I was born in 1931, and between us and my Grandmother Edwards, who moved in with us when she was seventy-two, the house was pretty crowded. That was what you did in those days: You took care of your grandparents. It wasn't unusual for three generations to live in one small house.

Emporia was a town of only about fourteen thousand, but it had prosperity and a cultural life unusual for a place of that size because we had two colleges, Kansas State Teachers College (later Emporia State) on the east side of town, and a Presbyterian university called the College of Emporia on the west side of town. Also, the legendary newspaper editor William Allen White was building a national reputation with his Emporia Gazette, and became a friend of my father's, who was a pallbearer at his funeral. All of this inspired someone to get a rather exalted view of the place and to name it "The Athens of Kansas." Emporia was the third largest feeding station for cattle and sheep in the nation at the time, and the Santa Fe railroad ran right through town.

The main avenue in town was Commercial, an old-fashioned main street anchored on one end by the campus of Emporia State and on the other end by a public park with a baseball diamond and bleachers, where we played American Legion baseball-and where I fractured my leg sliding into second base when I was fifteen. Also on Commercial, halfway between Fifth and Sixth Streets, was the Red X Pharmacy, a department store called Newman's, and three different movie theaters: the Granada, the Strand, and the Lyric. There was a barber shop where my father and I got haircuts every Saturday night, and a sporting goods store called Hassingers, where my father bought most of the uniforms and equipment for his teams. I purchased a baseball glove for a dollar and paid in installments, 10 cents a week.

Looking back on it, my mother was uncommonly strong opinioned and well educated for a woman of her place and time. At first glance she appeared quiet, perhaps, and she usually had the look of someone about to offer you a piece of apple pie. When you looked closer you saw a woman who radiated intellectual energy; her eyes were piercing and suggested that she didn't tolerate nonsense. My mother was meticulous, highly organized, punctual, and relentlessly frugal (the opposite of me, with the exception of punctual). She handled all the household finances like a drill sergeant, to my frustration. She earned her master's degree from Emporia State in educational psychology in 1946, the same year Joan graduated from high school, and she was an educator in the true sense of the word. She had one uncompromising rule: I had to read a book a week. I tried to satisfy her with sports books and stumbled onto a series by a writer named John R. Tunis, who wrote The Kid, The Kid Comes Back, and All American, now regarded as classics.

When we were small, my mother gave up teaching for a few years in order to be home for us in the afternoons, but she always worked. She was the church organist, and while I was in grade school, she was director of the weekday Bible schools for Emporia. For a salary of $75 a year she would line up the Bible teachers and choose the curriculum.

Later, when I was in the ninth grade, she became superintendent of schools for Lyon County. The gentleman who had occupied the position resigned before his term was up, and it's an indication of the regard in which my mother was held that she was chosen to complete his unexpired term. After serving eighteen months she had a chance to run for the job and win it in an election, but she said she wasn't the type to run for political office, so she went back to what she was best at, which was educating.

My father matched my mother's strong personality, although he also seemed unassuming. He was measured, slow to anger, soft-spoken, and easy to smile, but he was also implacable. He had a way of persuading people to do what he wanted them to. When he and my mother were in their eighties and disagreed over whether to move to North Carolina-my mother didn't want to leave Kansas-I predicted to my sister, Joan, "He'll win. It may take a while, but he'll win." And he did; they moved to Springmoor Retirement facility in Raleigh. I have my father's hooked nose, sharp...