A different kind of drive....
"Dean Smith, at 83; coaching icon integrated court on way to 879 wins" by Richard Goldstein, New York Times February 09, 2015
NEW YORK — Dean Smith, who built the University of North Carolina basketball team into a perennial national power in his 36 years there and became one of the game’s most respected figures for qualities that transcended the court, died Saturday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 83.
His family had said in 2010 that he had a progressive neurological disorder that affected his memory.
Mr. Smith’s 879 victories rank him No. 4 among major college men’s basketball coaches, and his teams won two national championships. He turned out a host of All-Americans, most notably Michael Jordan, perhaps basketball’s greatest player, but he emphasized unselfish team play, encouraging a shooter who made a basket to point to the teammate who gave him the ball.
In a statement released on Twitter, Jordan said Mr. Smith was “more than a coach — he was a mentor, my teacher, my second father,” who had taught him not only about basketball but about “the game of life.”
The odd thing is I always hated his teams because of the regional prejudice and superiority that I was raised with in all its forms, from home to school to media.
Like most successful coaches, Mr. Smith, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame and a four-time national coach of the year, was adept at diagramming plays on a blackboard. But unlike many, he ran a program that was never accused of NCAA violations, and some 97 percent of his players graduated.
I was unaware of that.
President Obama awarded Mr. Smith the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in November 2013, presenting it to his wife, Linnea, who represented him at a White House ceremony. The president cited Mr. Smith’s “courage in helping to change our country” through his progressive views on race relations.
The basketball court is great for that sort of thing.
In a statement released by the White House after Mr. Smith’s death, Obama said, “Coach Smith showed us something that I’ve seen again and again on the court — that basketball can tell us a lot more about who you are than a jump shot alone ever could.”
Mr. Smith drew on a moral code implanted by his parents in Depression-era Kansas to break racial barriers in a changing South. He challenged segregation. While still an assistant at North Carolina, Mr. Smith integrated a popular restaurant in Chapel Hill, where the basketball team, all white at the time, often ate, accompanying a visiting black theology student for a meal there.
Not to take away from the greatness of the man, but it is a different kind of $egregation now.
And he recruited Charlie Scott, an outstanding high school forward from New York City, who became the first starring black basketball player in the Atlantic Coast Conference in the late 1960s and an NBA All-Star with the Phoenix Suns.
“My father said, ‘Value each human being,’ ” Mr. Smith recalled in his 1999 memoir, “A Coach’s Life,” written with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins. “Racial justice wasn’t preached around the house, but there was a fundamental understanding that you treated each person with dignity.”
North Carolina-Duke became a classic basketball rivalry, but for all its frenzy, Mr. Smith’s rival on the coaching lines was an admirer.
It's a little hard to read above; however, I thought I'd highlight things in Carolina blue for him and not Duke blue.
“I can’t think of a time I’ve ever heard him blame or degrade one of his own players, and in return his kids are fiercely loyal to him,” Mike Krzyzewski of Duke told Sports Illustrated in 2005. “He had a style that no one’s ever going to copy. To be that smart, to be that psychologically aware, that good with X’s and O’s — with that system, and to always take the high road — that just isn’t going to happen again.”
Dean Edwards Smith was born on Feb. 28, 1931, in Emporia, Kan., where his father, Alfred, was a teacher and the high school basketball coach, and his mother, Vesta, also taught.
Mr. Smith’s parents instilled a sense of racial tolerance in him, in a highly segregated state, long before the modern civil rights movement. His father put a black player named Paul Terry on his 1933-34 team, which won the state championship, although Terry was barred from playing in the state tournament by Kansas sports officials.
When Mr. Smith was 15, his family moved to Topeka. He played basketball, football, and baseball in high school, then received an academic scholarship to the University of Kansas.
Mr. Smith was a 5-foot-10 substitute guard on the Kansas team coached by Phog Allen that won the 1952 NCAA title, and he became immersed in a basketball heritage that stretched to James Naismith, the inventor of the game, who had coached Allen at Kansas.
After stints as an assistant coach at Kansas and the Air Force Academy, Mr. Smith was hired in 1958 as an assistant to Frank McGuire, who had taken North Carolina to an undefeated season and an NCAA championship in 1957 with a triple-overtime victory over Mr. Smith’s alma mater, Kansas, and Wilt Chamberlain. Mr. Smith succeeded McGuire when McGuire became the Philadelphia Warriors’ coach in 1961. He was only 30 years old, had never been a collegiate head coach, and inherited a program that was serving a year’s NCAA probation for recruiting violations.
Mr. Smith’s first North Carolina team went 8-9. In January 1965, he was hanged in effigy on campus after the Tar Heels were routed on the road by Wake Forest. But he began to attract talented players, and in the late 1960s his teams went to the NCAA tournament’s Final Four three consecutive times.
Yes, sometimes we forget how bad the good old days were and how needed they are today (not for Coach Smith, but bankers and politicians apply) -- self-inflicted false flag hoaxes notwithstanding.
Mr. Smith’s first NCAA championship came in 1982, when Jordan, a freshman at the time, sank the winning basket in a 63-62 victory over Georgetown.
You can blame Fred Brown for that.
His second NCAA title came in 1993, a 77-71 triumph over Michigan.
Because Chris Webber called time out.
Mr. Smith’s teams won 13 Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments and appeared 11 times in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. He had 27 consecutive 20-victory seasons and coached the US gold medal team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1983.
Mr. Smith’s 879 victories at North Carolina were an NCAA Division 1 record when he retired in October 1997. Among men’s Division 1 coaches, only Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, and Bob Knight, who has retired, have won more games.
Mr. Smith popularized the “Four Corners,” a spread offense in which the point guard does most of the ball-handling, with the other players remaining for a time at the edges of the frontcourt. He used that offense to slow things down when he was ahead in the late going or simply to assert control earlier.
That led to the shot clock.
But he prided himself on being flexible, using an up-tempo offense as well, and his teams pressured opponents with tenacious defense.
“My basketball philosophy boils down to six words,” Mr. Smith said in his 2004 book “The Carolina Way,” written with Gerald D. Bell and John Kilgo. “Play hard; play together; play smart.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Smith leaves two daughters, Kristen and Kelly; and two daughters, Sharon and Sandy, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his first wife, Ann, which ended in divorce.
For all his coaching achievements, Mr. Smith considered himself essentially a teacher.
Matt Doherty, a forward on Mr. Smith’s 1982 NCAA champions and later the head coach at North Carolina, told Sports Illustrated: “In a team meeting once, we were going over a trapping defense, and he referred to ‘the farthest point down the court.’ Then he stopped and said, ‘You know why I said “farthest,” not “furthest”? Because far — F-A-R — deals with distance.’ That’s an English lesson I got with the basketball team, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
--more--"
Related: North Carolina blue with passing of legendary Dean Smith
And on the other bench:
"Jerry Tarkanian, 84; polarizing college basketball coach" by Richard Goldstein, New York Times February 12, 2015
NEW YORK — Jerry Tarkanian, who built the University of Nevada-Las Vegas into a national powerhouse in college basketball with an insatiable will to win, created the persona of Tark the Shark, and ignited a long-running feud with the NCAA over accusations that he ran outlaw programs at three different universities, died Wednesday in Las Vegas. He was 84.
Mr. Tarkanian’s death was announced by his son Danny via Twitter.
**************
One of the college game’s most successful and colorful coaches in his 19 seasons at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Mr. Tarkanian was a baldheaded, sunken-eyed presence on the bench, nervously chewing on towels during games. In his 31 years as a major college coach, he won more than 700 games, fashioning a high-scoring running game and smothering defensive play while recruiting junior-college players that other coaches had ignored.
Mr. Tarkanian took UNLV’s Runnin’ Rebels to the NCAA’s Final Four four times, winning the championship in 1990 with the largest margin of victory in a title game, a 103-73 rout of Duke behind the future NBA players Larry Johnson, Greg Anthony, and Stacey Augmon. His teams won at least 20 games in all but one of his seasons in Las Vegas.
That's why you can't blame them for losing to Duke the next season as they were chasing history.
His death came just days after that of another coaching legend, Dean Smith of the University of North Carolina....
(See article above)
When Mr. Tarkanian was named the coach at UNLV in 1973, its basketball team played home games at a convention center holding about 6,400. Ten years later, UNLV opened the 18,500-seat Thomas & Mack Center to showcase the Runnin’ Rebels. The student mascot paid tribute to Mr. Tarkanian by wearing a shark costume.
But Mr. Tarkanian was targeted by the NCAA as a rebel in his own right for recruiting players with questionable academic qualifications.
The flip side of Dean. What a good match-up!
All three universities where he coached — Long Beach State, UNLV, and Fresno State, his alma mater — were placed on probation. Mr. Tarkanian fought back with two lawsuits against the NCAA, contending that he had been deprived of due process. In one case, he was awarded $2.5 million in a settlement.
In May 1991, The Review-Journal published photos, believed to have been taken two years earlier, showing three UNLV players socializing with a convicted sports fixer at his home. After the 1991-1992 season, Mr. Tarkanian resigned under pressure and had a brief, unhappy professional coaching stint in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs in 1992.
Mr. Tarkanian had a 509-105 record at UNLV.
When Mr. Tarkanian retired from college coaching in 2002 after seven seasons at Fresno State, he was still embittered by the NCAA.
“They’ve been my tormentors my whole life,” he said at a press conference. “I’ve fought them the whole way. I’ve never backed down. And they never stopped.”
Upon Mr. Tarkanian’s retirement, Jim Calhoun, Connecticut’s future Hall of Fame coach, called Mr. Tarkanian “one of the best teachers of defense in the last 25 to 30 years of basketball.”
Mr. Tarkanian was born Aug. 8, 1930, in Euclid, Ohio. His mother, Rosie, was a refugee from the mass killings of Armenians growing out of World War I....
Foul!
--more--"
Speaking of those guys:
"Lawmaker pushes for background checks on high school referees" by Bob Hohler, Globe Staff February 09, 2015
Sports referees who officiate games in Massachusetts high schools would be subject to criminal background checks under proposed legislation on Beacon Hill aimed at promoting student safety.
The measure, inspired in part by a Globe investigation of school referees with criminal records, would require the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association to administer the screening for its 374 member schools.
Look who is disrespectfully causing trouble for the referees.
Under the current system, nearly everyone who works in a school is subject to a criminal background check. Sports referees are a rare exception.
“This is to prevent that one tragic situation from happening,’’ said state Representative Carole Fiola, a Fall River Democrat, the bill’s sponsor. “We don’t want to turn around one day and say, ‘How did we not know there could be a problem?’ ”
A Globe report published in December found a small number of referees on the MIAA’s published list of 7,600 certified athletic officials had serious criminal records, including sexual assaults against minors, illegal gun possession, and trafficking narcotics in a school zone.
Then throw them out of the game.
Related: Foul Called on Perverted Officials
That's a new refrain coming from the stands.
Ten days after the story appeared, a Massachusetts high school basketball referee, Julio Resto, allegedly murdered his wife, Gloria, also a school basketball official, in their Waltham home.
See: Putting This Blog to Resto
“I was a little in awe that there were not criminal background checks being done on the referees,’’ Fiola said.
“I have spent a lot of time volunteering in the classroom, and even under the watchful eye of a teacher, I needed to have my background checked,’’ Fiola said. “I think we need parity in terms of also checking the referees.’’
Richard Pearson, the MIAA’s associate executive director, said the organization is aggressively addressing the issue, exploring the most efficient ways to implement a statewide screening program.
*****************
Some referees argue that the checks should not be required because game officials rarely have unsupervised contact with students, but Fiola serves on the board of the Durfee High School Athletic Foundation and has two daughters who played interscholastic sports for Durfee.
“I have huge respect for referees, but there generally is not much supervision of them when they are in the building before and after games,’’ she said....
?????????
--more--"
What, no foul call?
