Dean Smith’s hourglass, it seemed, had an endless amount of sand.
After 36 years as the coach at North Carolina, it kept trickling down, grain by grain. But it was as if the whole contraption was tilted, resting at an incline so that the sand would never get to the bottom. And so even as the coach’s hair changed from dark brown to gray to white, his position never did. He was North Carolina basketball, the constant as the new building was built in his honor and the banners in the rafters accumulated, the link from Scott to Ford to Jordan to Stackhouse.
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Until one day, he wasn’t.
On Oct. 9, 1997, Smith called it quits. He held a news conference in the bowels of the Dean Smith Center, where he announced his retirement from the game he’d given his life to. He still had four seasons remaining on his contract, enough to carry him to the summer of 2001.
What Smith left behind was arguably the most talented team he’d ever assembled: a pair of future NBA All-Stars, Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison; the program’s all-time assists leader, point guard Ed Cota; a lights-out shooter, Shammond Williams; a frontcourt enforcer, Makhtar Ndiaye; and much more. That group, fresh off a Final Four appearance, was tabbed as the preseason No. 1 team in America.
But more than just that team, Smith left behind a mound of questions.
Why would a healthy 66-year-old call it quits and relinquish the chance to coach that team?
How would his retirement alter the short- and long-term trajectory of a program built on consistency?
What if he hadn’t retired when he did? How might everything be different?
“I’ll just say this,” says Dave Hanners, one of Smith’s longtime assistants. “Coach Smith always had a plan. He always knew what he was doing.”
The little doo-doos, Smith called them, the administrative tasks just within the purview of his job responsibilities. All the scheduling calls, speeches for adoring donors, piles and piles of paperwork that accompanied seemingly everything he did.
Why bring those up? Because before we can consider what might have been, we have to understand why everything played out as it did. In other words, why Smith walked away at the exact moment he did.
“The little doo-doos got him in the end,” Hanners says. “He couldn’t generate enough energy to get through all of that.”
Some background: In the years leading up to his retirement — specifically every spring after the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament — Smith expressed a sense of exhaustion to the people around him. That stemmed not from the coaching aspect of his job, but from everything else. “He was enormously committed to attention to detail and organization,” says Dick Baddour, a longtime university administrator who served as athletic director from 1997 to 2011. “As he would prepare for a basketball practice or game, he was equally intense about attention to detail in scheduling or whatever.”
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To combat that fatigue, every summer, Smith’s assistant coaches urged him to get out and enjoy life. Recharge your batteries, they told him. Go play golf. Spend time with family. All the things he couldn’t do during the daunting in-season months.
And by the end of every summer, Smith returned freshly rejuvenated. He’d grow bored of golf, and once that happened, his staff knew he’d summoned up the energy for another go-around. The spring of 1997, it seemed, was no different. Smith was fresh off his 11th Final Four and had just passed Adolph Rupp for the most wins by any college basketball coach in history. He’d told reporters he expected to honor the remaining four years on his deal. In fact, he communicated as much to Baddour after Baddour was tapped in late June to replace John Swofford as athletic director.
“I don’t think he went in that summer thinking, ‘I’m not gonna be the basketball coach by fall,’ ” Baddour says. “He said to me, ‘I have felt this way before, but in the early fall, I’ve always gotten the energy back, and I expect that that’s gonna happen, but I do want to alert you to the possibility that it might not.’ Whether or not deep down inside he thought that energy wouldn’t come back, I don’t know the answer to that. But it is my opinion that he expected, when he first told me that, that he would continue to be the coach.”
That was the presumption Baddour and the basketball program operated under. But in hindsight, Hanners says there were clues that everything might not have been like normal.
As early as April and May, Bill Guthridge — Smith’s primary assistant for some 30 years — reached out to Hanners about doing extra study of the team’s offensive and defensive sets. “He never called me at home, unless it was something dire,” Hanners says, “but he said, ‘How would you feel about meeting me in the office early on Monday at 7 to go over some things before everyone gets there?’” Hanners obliged, trying to ease Guthridge’s feeling that he was somewhat out of touch. But looking back, Hanners now believes Guthridge already had an inclination something was afoot.
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“When Coach Smith announced he was retiring and that Coach Guthridge was taking over, then it all clicked into place for me,” Hanners says.
Smith and Guthridge had long maintained they’d retire together, the natural conclusion to a three-decade partnership in Chapel Hill. But Guthridge’s request also made Hanners realize that plan might not come to fruition.
“In that July or August period, when Coach Smith basically told Coach Guthridge for the very last time in his life, ‘I’m not ready, I’m not gonna do it again,’ then I think Coach Guthridge told him at that point that he’d really like to try,” Hanners says. “I really believe that’s exactly what happened.”
Baddour and Smith never had a lengthy sitdown to discuss the future. It was more a series of passing conversations, regular updates about the coach’s state of mind. It wasn’t until Oct. 3, 1997 — a Friday about a week before the first practice of the season — that Baddour got an indication that Smith wouldn’t return. Baddour was scheduled to travel with the football program that day for a game at TCU, but before leaving he spoke to Smith on the phone.
“(Smith told me), ‘It’s just not coming back. I think it’s time I make this decision. I want to spend the weekend thinking about it. Dick, let’s talk on Monday, but I’m pretty sure I’m gonna tell you Monday it’s time to transition,’” Baddour remembers.
And come Monday, he got the fateful notice.
At which point, Baddour faced as unenviable a position as any athletic director in the country: Who do you hire to fill Dean Smith’s shoes?
“I didn’t really have to focus too much on a Plan B,” Baddour says. “I mean, the Plan B was there.”
That Plan B, clearly, was Guthridge. Only, given Guthridge’s age at the time (60) and the fact that he’d always said he’d retire when Smith did, Baddour wasn’t totally sure Guthridge was interested. He needed to hear that from Guthridge.
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Guthridge had once accepted Penn State’s head coaching vacancy in the 1970s, only to return to Chapel Hill before his connecting flight to State College. Other opportunities had arisen over time, and yet Guthridge always remained as Smith’s assistant. As he famously said at Smith’s retirement news conference, “I always thought we would ride off into the sun together.”
But when Baddour and Guthridge did finally meet, Guthridge expressed a desire to try his hand.
“I needed Bill to tell me, ‘Dick, yes, I want to do this,’” Baddour says, “and he was clear that he wanted to.”
The only people who came to know about that line of succession, so to speak, were Baddour, Smith, Guthridge and then-chancellor Michael Hooker, who expressed some concerns about Guthridge’s age early on. That was quelled, but the chancellor had another thought:
What about Roy Williams?
To the chancellor — and many fans — Williams was the obvious choice to succeed Smith. He’d grown up in North Carolina, graduated from the university, won a championship as an assistant under Smith and had built a successful program as the coach at Kansas. But Baddour explained to the chancellor that because of Williams’ respect for Guthridge, he’d never have taken the job over his friend.
“If I were to call Roy and ask Roy was he interested, the first question out of his mouth would’ve been, did Bill get a chance?” Baddour says. “If my answer was no, then Roy would’ve had absolutely zero interest. End of conversation.”
Revisionist history does offer some diverging paths, though.
The first is, if Guthridge hadn’t wanted the job, would Williams have taken it? That’s impossible to know, but Williams was also returning a top-five team, one that was expected to compete for a championship in its own right. If Williams had said no, then who might have been offered the job?
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“Maybe Phil Ford would’ve been the head coach then,” Ndiaye says. “Because I know Coach Smith’s plan long-term, at least at that time, was to prepare the team for Phil to take over.”
On the day of Smith’s retirement, The Washington Post reported “Smith wants his other longtime assistant, former Tar Heels point guard Phil Ford, eventually to become the coach, a source said.” Ford was arguably Smith’s best player ever, and UNC’s all-time leading scorer at the time. And as an assistant for Smith for nine seasons, he had both a championship pedigree and a deep understanding of how the program operated. Ford’s reputation was growing fast as a star recruiter, having single-handedly delivered Rasheed Wallace to UNC and playing a major role in Carter’s eventual commitment.
Hanners, one of Ford’s close friends to this day, recalls the natural coaching instincts Ford had when the two oversaw the JV team. One year against Laurinburg, Hanners’ squad was down about 18 with under nine minutes to play; suddenly, he felt Ford come up behind him. Ford whispered for Hanners to try running 21 defense — really sagging off defenders, even inside the 3-point line.
“You wouldn’t think that would work, but it did. We ended up beating ’em easily, and I thanked him later for it,” Hanners says. “(Ford) goes, ‘Ah, you would’ve seen it sooner or later.’ Yeah right. I would’ve never thought of that in a million years.”
Baddour says he never got that far down the line because of Guthridge’s interest. But there’s another alternate history — with extreme on-court implications — that might have forced his hand.
Let’s play out the most interesting of the hypotheticals: if Dean Smith does return for the 1997-1998 season, with an absolutely jam-packed roster.
“We easily could have won the championship, man,” Ndiaye says. “We’re the best North Carolina team that never won a championship. So I just feel like we got robbed.”
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Of course, it’s not like UNC had a bad season in Guthridge’s first year. That team still went 34-4, losing to Utah in the Final Four. But against the Utes, the Tar Heels fell behind quickly and were never able to catch up. They shot just 39.1 percent from the floor and made only 3-of-23 attempts from 3.
“It’s hard, man. It’s one game,” Jamison says. “That first five minutes, you can have all the confidence in the world, but if you go down 23-8 or 13-4, you just put so much pressure on yourself. We didn’t play well for just five minutes, and that decided the game.”
Really, a championship — or not — is the only major differentiator between Smith and Guthridge. Making the Final Four is a tremendous accomplishment… but it’s not what you chase. It’s not what gets remembered for the rest of your life, at least not at a place like North Carolina. And so those players, all of them, kick around the questions to this day.
“Coach Smith would be more likely to draw up something in a timeout, or draw up a play maybe we hadn’t worked on, where as Coach Guthridge was going to rely on what we’d done in the past,” says Brad Frederick, a forward on that team and now a UNC assistant coach. “One of the things that made (Smith) so special was his ability to be innovative — so certainly, I think we would have had some other ways to attack in a game that we struggled, against Utah in the Final Four.”
Guthridge led UNC to the Final Four in his first season, but the team fell short of a championship. (Jed Jacobsohn / ALLSPORT via Getty)After that loss, Carter and Jamison turned pro. Williams and Ndiaye both graduated. The team fundamentally changed, that opportunity disappearing into the ether.
But the season, and that loss specifically, never faded from their collective consciousness. In fact, most of that team reconvened in St. Louis in 2005 for Williams’ first championship game at North Carolina. And as the confetti fell on UNC’s first title A.D. — After Dean — Guthridge burst into tears alongside his former players.
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“I’m like, Coach, we won it, congrats!” Jamison remembers. “And he said, ‘I’m not crying because we won. I’m crying because I failed you guys. Because that was supposed to be something that we accomplished together.’”
Ndiaye remembers taking his son for a campus tour years later, and Guthridge coming out of the Smith Center to greet him. As they were chatting, Guthridge, who died in 2015, grabbed Ndiaye’s arm. He held tight. Then Guthridge’s voice wavered as he began to apologize — I feel like it’s my fault.
Ndiaye comforted his coach, who had become a friend in time. What happened, happened. But it was all as a team, no one man’s fault or wrongdoing for the group’s shortcoming. Ndiaye even tried cracking the ice by joking that Guthridge’s years as head coach probably hadn’t hurt his wallet. “But I know that’s something that bothered him to his death,” Ndiaye says. “The fact that he felt like he failed us.”
The flip side of reality offers another interesting scenario: What if Guthridge had led that group to a win over Utah, and then over Kentucky in the championship game.
“He would’ve been gone. He’d have retired with a championship trophy, and then let someone else step right in,” Ndiaye says. “Think about it: You’ve been an assistant coach for 30-plus years. You come up one year, and that year you win the national championship. You accomplished something that takes some other people 20-plus years to do. Why would you stay? For what? What’ve you got to prove then?”
That possibility isn’t one Baddour had previously considered. And althoug he believes that scenario puts more emphasis on winning than it does on building relationships and teaching — the things Guthridge and Smith both loved — it’s not out of the question.
“I would lean a little bit toward the side of Bill saying, ‘Look, I’m not on the front end of my career, it’s great to have done this, what a way to go out,’” Baddour says. “Yeah, I’d say that was more likely than unlikely.”
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And if that had transpired?
“I would’ve gone to where I went two years later,” he says. “I would’ve gone to Roy.”
Whether Williams would have returned at that time is impossible to say. He would, however, have just lost his three best players at Kansas in Paul Pierce, Raef LaFrentz and Billy Thomas. And with Guthridge having gotten his shot, there would have been no issues of whose turn it was.
But if Williams had said no, as he did two years later, would Ford have been tapped for the job then? He had interviewed for the Texas job, which went to Rick Barnes, after the 1998 season, after all. There were reports that Michigan was interested in him at the time His only drawback was a DUI arrest in September 1998, after which he was temporarily placed on leave.
“Everybody would have loved Coach Ford to get the opportunity,” Frederick says. “He was like Coach Guthridge in that both of them loved and bled Carolina blue so much that they never wanted to leave the program.”
Or perhaps someone else from Smith’s coaching tree, such as George Karl or Eddie Fogler? The possibilities were endless, but Baddour is certain of one thing: keeping things in the family was a must.
As things went, by the end of the 1999-2000 season — which concluded with a surprise Final Four run, Guthridge’s second trip in three seasons — Smith’s right-hand man was finally ready to step away himself. He’d been given a five-year contract when he took over for Smith, because the administration feared recruits would stop coming if they thought Guthridge could retire at any moment.
“I remember telling the chancellor that,” Baddour says. “Let’s say you’ve got a 35-year-old guy. Well if he’s got a five-year contract, you know he’s gonna coach five years. And I said, I can’t say to you with certainty what Bill’s gonna do, but this is how we have to approach it. And then Bill can decide along the way what he wants to do.”
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And for as much as he did enjoy those three seasons, the same obligations that wore Smith down got to Guthridge as well. Which put Baddour on the search for a long-term replacement for the first time. Williams famously turned him down, opting to remain at Kansas, where he’d built a Carolina-esque family dynamic (at Smith’s alma mater, to boot). At that point, Baddour turned to Matt Doherty, who had been the coach at Notre Dame for just one season. Doherty was criticized from the moment he was hired, for breaking somewhat from Smith and Guthridge’s “family” dynamic; that scrutiny only intensified in his second season, when UNC bottomed out to a program-worst record of 8-20.
The following year, with the program bordering on a mutiny, Doherty resigned. Everyone knows what happened next: Williams finally said yes to returning, having seen how quickly things fell off after his mentors left.
“It’s funny, I talk to (Williams’) players, and with the thought of the day, and the way things are run, and I go to their practices,” Jamison says, “it’s Coach Gut, Coach Smith in a younger body.”
In Williams’ second season in Chapel Hill, he won his first national championship — the one the ’97 team witnessed. Fast-forward to present day, and he has surpassed Smith in both national championships and wins. So was Williams always fated to end up back at North Carolina?
“Had it worked out where there wasn’t a down year or whatever, maybe things end up differently,” Frederick says. “But part of me, at the end of the day, thinks Coach Williams was destined to end up back here. Having grown up in North Carolina and gone to school here and worked here, I think it was probably just destiny.”
There’s a world where Ford got his chance to be UNC’s head coach, and maybe still would be in that position. (Robert Willett / Tribune News Service via Getty)And that brings us full-circle, back to the original what-if:
What if Dean Smith had finished out his contract, which ran through the end of the 2000-01 season?
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For starters, Baddour says he still would have offered Guthridge the job first. Although four years further down the line, there’s skepticism Guthridge, at the age of 64 or 65, would still have been interested in taking a crack.
“My guess is he would not have been, and then the first call, yes, would’ve been Roy,” Baddour says. “Without question, every opportunity that I would have to hire Roy Williams. I would have been as vigorous and go after that as hard as I could possibly go.”
But if Williams had declined the opportunity, as he initially did a year prior? It’s very much a possibility, everyone admits. If he had, then that’s where the what-ifs really go wild.
What about Ford? “He’d have been a lifer,” Hanners says. “He was no different from Coach Smith or Coach Guthridge. He bought into everything.” In that scenario, Williams never leaves Kansas — and Ford probably never leaves North Carolina. Heck, he might still be the coach at North Carolina.
Or does Doherty get his chance regardless? He’d have been two years into a rebuild at Notre Dame, and perhaps less reluctant to leave. (An aside: if Doherty stays, does Mike Brey, succeeded him and still remains in South Bend, get that job, or is he elsewhere too?)
Then there are the other options from Smith’s tree: Karl and Fogler and even Larry Brown. There’s no right answer, no certainty. Only different alternate realities.
There is one final thing, though, that seems to be consensus, the one aspect of this entire hypothetical that no one can seem to get over: that the reason there are still enduring questions about what Smith could have accomplished in those extra four seasons is because those are the same questions Smith himself always carried.
“It’s funny that we’re doing this story,” Jamison says. “I talk to Coach Williams all the time, and I asked him, ‘What’s the best advice Coach Smith ever gave you?’ And he said, ‘Antawn, Coach Smith told me just coach ’til you can’t coach anymore.’ The only thing he regretted was he felt like he stopped coaching too early.”
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Jamison’s teammates and Hanners and Baddour all agree. Smith, after all, kept an office in the arena for several years after retirement. He would sneak into practices, hide way up in the rafters so as not to be seen. That not-wanting-to-step-on-toes thing? It was very, very much real — and something Smith had to balance with the sentiment that maybe he had left too soon.
Guthridge would still call on Smith, after all, to speak to the team at certain times. Coaches, both within the program and across the country, still came calling to Chapel Hill every summer to pick his brains about X’s and O’s. He was instrumental in helping lure Williams back to North Carolina.
“His desire to be a coach I don’t think ever stopped,” Hanners said. “He stopped when he did because he was afraid his memory wasn’t as good as it was or had been. He saw his memory issues coming long before the world did. And I think he probably had second thoughts, because at what point was it really a danger? That was probably six or seven years later where somebody else might recognize it. We certainly had no idea; he was still the smartest guy, could recall everything he was seeing.”
Of course, Smith did retire. And everything that happened, for better or worse, led the program to where it is today.
With Williams, it was the restoration of the family, three national championships — and potentially many more years.
“There’s no way you could dream,” Hanners says, “anyone would necessarily do better.”
(Top photo of Dean Smith: Getty)
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