UNC Basketball Coach Dean Smith Dead at 83

He didn’t need to put any game face on; he wore the same face, game or no game. Almost alone among coaches I’ve known, Smith actually preferred to speak to the press in the hours before tip-off. And if that game turned out to be a loss, he got over it quickly — in part because for every loss he could point to roughly three-and-a-half victories (879 all told), but also because he truly understood that a billion people in China didn’t give a damn.

During the back half of Smith’s career men’s college basketball spawned a generation of coaches who regarded the university — with its classes and standards, with its women’s teams clamoring for resources and practice time — as irritations, barriers to their entrepreneurial striving. So they tried to set their programs apart and reserve for themselves the spoils of shoe and camp and TV deals. Smith believed that every dime his team delivered to Chapel Hill belonged to the athletic department. He didn’t begrudge the women’s soccer program spending Tar Heels basketball booty; he gloried in it.