Dean Smith a true winner

Dean Smith is losing his memory.

A neurological illness is nibbling deeper and deeper into the brilliant mind that revolutionized college basketball, won two national championships and took 11 teams to Final Fours during his tenure as coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels.

It’s why Smith, 82, won’t be making the trip to the White House next week to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But even if it is bestowed long distance, the honor should be no less special and certainly no less deserved. A 3-pointer. Nothing but net.

Standing in for Coach Smith will be his wife, Linnea, three of his five children, his long-time coaching assistant, Bill Guthridge, and current Tar Heel coach Roy Williams.

There’s a painful irony in the slow fade of Smith’s memory. The people closest to him have marveled over the years at his knack for recalling even the most minute details — someone he once met ... all five players on the floor during a critical moment in a distant Carolina victory. A Greensboro resident, Don Eggleston, who played for the 1969-71 Tar Heels, had no delusions of an NBA career; his pro aspirations centered solely on law school. Yet, in a 2010 interview, Eggleston noted how Smith could remember the names of all of the former player’s children whenever the two would cross paths. Or how Smith routinely would ask about Eggleston’s stepson, Josh, who had attended the UNC basketball camp and played at West Point. “It’s difficult for me to imagine that a person who was not genuinely interested in me could remember those types of things,” Eggleston said.

But Smith’s many kindnesses haven’t just been small ones. During the turbulent 1960s he helped integrate a Chapel Hill restaurant. He signed Charlie Scott as UNC’s first black scholarship basketball player. He helped a black graduate student buy a house in an all-white neighborhood. Even as a high school player in Topeka, Kan., Smith advocated merging his school’s separate black and white basketball teams.

Scott told The (Raleigh) News & Observer in August that it wasn’t easy weathering jeers and slurs in the ’60s, but Smith helped him see it through. “He could not take away the words of those individuals, or the way those individuals acted towards me. Those things were there. What he did was give me a barometer to look at outside of the racism and bigotry.”

As Smith sees it, whether you’re black or white, a star or a walk-on, once a Tar Heel, always a Tar Heel. And his door will always be open for you. Eggleston recalled buying one of Smith’s books for his son and mailing it to his former coach for an autograph. “He didn’t just sign it,” Eggleston said. “He wrote a personal note to Josh in the flyleaf.”

That’s why it seems especially sad that fate would begin to rob Smith of so many precious names and faces. But he and his family should take solace in the memories and lessons he’s passed on to countless others.

They’ll never forget.