I awoke this morning to terrible news. The first piece of information that entered my brain this morning was that former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith had died.
I've been a long-time fan of Tar Heel basketball and that love was born within me largely because of my admiration of Dean Smith as a coach. In those early years, I had no idea that I would grow up and coach teams of my own.
Looking back, satisfied that I have done the best I could for my teams and players over the years, I can only be thankful I had Dean Smith as a template. Anyone who knows even a little bit about coach Smith knows his players speak with him with reverence and how they credit him with the positive influence he had on their lives. What many people might not know is that coach Smith had a positive influence on a number of people he never met, myself included.
It was financially inhibiting for me to attend the University of North Carolina, but I have always considered myself part of the Tar Heel family because of the important role coach Smith played in my life. I don't know what kind of weird kid you have to be to have a coach as your sports hero, rather than a player, but I valued everything coach Smith did and everything he represented.
It's easy to say he broke what some thought was an unbreakable wins record, went to a ridiculous number of NCAA tournaments, Final Fours or how he coached Michael Jordan or planted a coaching tree that includes the likes of George Karl, Larry Brown and Roy Williams.
But that's not what I admired about coach Smith. Sure, I like winning, but that's not why coach Smith impacted me so strongly. As a kid, you hear about concepts like class and integrity. You know they are good things but it never settled into my brain fully until I started to learn more and more about coach Smith and his approach to life.
He crafted his life on the foundation of a specific set of ideals, call them values, if you'd like. Here are the things I believe in, that I hold true. Coach Smith allowed those values to shape his actions, never acting in a way that contradicted those values, even if it diminished him in some way--like, he'd never violate one of his values just to land a prized recruit. If it didn't fit his value structure, it didn't fit his life. Period.
I later learned that Aristotle set up this same framework as the only true path to what he called self-mastery, becoming the best human you could possibly be.
Guided by values, coach Smith coached to a process. His wasn't a method of 'here's how we'll win this game,' rather, it was a method of 'here's how we're going to do things.' Coach Smith believed that there was a proper way to do things and that the process of doing things properly was the path to success, that defending the proper way, using the right technique for screens and passes, these things cause defensive stops and rebounds and made shots and those things cause winning.
I've tried, to whatever extent possible, to implement these principles into my own life. I try not to focus on results more than process, I try to value the people in my life as much as I can and as long as I can, and I try to let my own values guide my actions.
I only know how great a man coach Smith is, all these years after being exposed to him for the first time as a 12-year-old, by understanding how difficult it is to remain committed to this approach to life. Cutting corners is easy. Looking for shortcuts is easy. Quitting, after all, requires no effort, literally.
But coach Smith never did things the easy way. Instead, he created his own path, forged a new path for all of us and did things the Carolina Way.
A part of me died on Saturday morning. However, because I was smart enough, or lucky enough, to stitch that part of myself to coach Smith, in some very small way, a part of me will live on forever, as coach Smith will live on in us all.
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