By Lee Strawther
The Sporting Tribune
The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award
There are those that are born followers in life and those that are born leaders. Dean Smith was a leader in every sense of the word.
Dean Edwards Smith was born in Emporia, Kansas on February 28, 1931. Both of his parents were educators and Smith’s father Alfred coached the Emporia High School basketball team to the 1934 Kansas state title. That team was also noted for having the first African American player in Kansas tournament history. Being raised with that type of upbringing definitely played a role in the man he would become.
Smith spent two years at Emporia before finishing up at Topeka High School. He lettered in basketball all four years and was named an all-state selection as a senior. Basketball wasn’t his only talent, however, as he also played quarterback and catcher on the football and baseball teams.
Smith then attended the University of Kansas on an academic scholarship where he majored in Mathematics and continued his athletic pursuits, playing varsity basketball and baseball, and freshman football. He was also a member of the Air Force ROTC on campus.
During his time as a Jayhawk, they won the national championship in 1952 and was an NCAA tournament finalist in ‘53. Smith’s basketball coach at Kansas was the legendary Phog Allen, who himself had been coached at Kansas by the inventor of the game, Dr. James Naismith. Once Smith’s playing days ended he served as assistant coach at Kansas during the 1953–54 season.
In the summer of 1954 Smith became a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in Germany where he played on a team that won the Air Force championship for Europe. Finally in 1958 North Carolina head coach Frank McGuire asked Smith to join his staff as an assistant. He accepted and served under McGuire for three years.
In the wake of a major recruiting scandal that resulted in an NCAA mandated probation however, McGuire resigned his post and the 30-year-old Smith was asked to take the reigns, which he again accepted and the rest is history.
In Smith’s first season, North Carolina played only 17 games due to a national point-shaving scandal which included Tar Heel player Lou Brown. As a result the university penalized the basketball program by cutting its regular-season schedule. It went 8–9 that year, the only losing season Smith had in his time at UNC.
From 1965 forward, Smith’s teams never finished worse than tied for third in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and for the first 21 of those years they did not finish worse than tied for second. During his tenure as head coach, North Carolina won two national championships and appeared in 11 Final Fours, and his 879 career wins ranks sixth all-time.
Smith’s early successes came in the late 1960s when his teams won consecutive regular-season and ACC tournament championships and went to three straight Final Fours, making it to the national title game in 1968 where they fell to the John Wooden-coached UCLA Bruins. They would appear in either the NCAA or NIT tournaments in every one of Smith’s final 31 years in Chapel Hill.
Smith won his first national championship with his 1981–82 team which included future NBA stars Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins. They defeated Georgetown 63-62 with Jordan hitting what would become the game-winning shot.
Fast forward a decade, North Carolina was named the top seed in the East Regional of the 1993 NCAA tourney and reached the Final Four in New Orleans. In the semifinals, Smith defeated his alma mater Kansas (coached by future North Carolina coach Roy Williams) 78–68. Two years earlier these same two teams also met in the national semis with Kansas coming out on top.
That win set up a rematch from earlier that season with third-ranked Michigan in the Finals. North Carolina would defeat the Wolverines 77-71 to win the title (Smith’s second) with the help of the infamous timeout called by Michigan’s Chris Webber when his team had none remaining.
After 36 years as coach of the Tar Heels, Smith announced his retirement in the fall of 1997 as the winningest coach in college basketball history at the time.
Smith’s impact on the game has been felt far and wide as he’s either coached, mentored or worked alongside some of the best in the game. He coached 25 NBA first round draft picks, five of whom were named Rookie of the Year.
In addition to Jordan, Worthy and Perkins, some of his most successful players included Larry Brown, Phil Ford, Bob McAdoo, Billy Cunningham, Walter Davis, Jerry Stackhouse, Vince Carter, Rasheed Wallace, and the aforementioned Charlie Scott, to name a few. Many went on to become coaches themselves with some even reaching hall-of-fame status in that regard, including Brown and Cunningham.
Getting back to the impact his upbringing had on his character, while at North Carolina, Smith promoted desegregation by recruiting the university’s first African-American scholarship basketball player, Charlie Scott, and pushing for equal treatment for African Americans by area businesses. And in 1965, he aided Howard Lee, a black graduate student, to purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood.
Smith was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1983, and in 1986 UNC’s renovated basketball arena was renamed the Dean Smith Center, or the “Dean Dome” as it’s known, in his honor. In 1997 he was named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year and in 1999 he was honored with the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award. In 2013 then-President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Smith passed away in 2015 at age 83 and was laid to rest at Old Chapel Hill Cemetery on the UNC campus. He willed a $200 check to each of the lettermen he’d coached during his 36 years at North Carolina, which included the message “Enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.” The checks were reportedly sent out to approximately 180 of his former players.
“Coach Smith was not our coach, he was our mentor,” Scott said in a tribute after his passing. “He was more than a coach — he was a mentor, my teacher, my second father,” Jordan reiterated.
“You should never be proud of doing what’s right,” Smith once said. “Just do what’s right.” He always did and he’ll be forever remembered for it.