Of Gods and Games by Baker William J.;

Author:Baker, William J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

God is a gridiron guy, it seems. Although Steve Spurrier refused to play the preacher’s game, most sermons and explicit religious intentions come from football rather than basketball or some other campus athletic quarters. At the head of a championship dynasty at UCLA, John Wooden espoused an ethical view of life, a view that undoubtedly originated in some sort of Protestant faith. But none of Wooden’s biographers make much of the religious basis of his humane ways.

The same can be said of Wooden’s highly successful Catholic counterpart, Mike Krzyzewski. Duke’s championship coach proudly claims an immigrant youth in north Chicago, a youth in which attentive priests at an all-boy’s Catholic prep school made lasting impressions for the good. Yet Krzyzewski will not be found fishing for Catholic converts among the Cameron Crazies.

Just a few miles from Duke, Dean Smith put an altogether different spin on the religion-and-sport game as it was played by his University of North Carolina Tarheels. During his thirty-six years at the helm, the Tarheels copped thirteen Atlantic Coast Conference titles, competed in eleven NCAA Final Fours, and won two national championships. Smith corrected the flaws and honed the skills of players as diversely gifted as Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis, Bobby Jones, Phil Ford, Rasheed Wallace, Vince Carter, and the incomparable Michael Jordan. At his retirement in 1997, Smith’s 879 victories put him above all college coaches in the entire history of the game.

Not so public, his personal history holds the key to some of his more impressive professional moments. Both parents were progressive-minded public school teachers in Emporia, Kansas; both voiced impatience with the anti-evolutionist views that were as rampant in Kansas as in Tennessee in the aftermath of the interwar Scopes trial. Rational ideas about science and religion were one thing; racial integration in small-town Kansas was something else altogether. As coach of the local high school basketball team, Smith’s father came under fire for playing too many African American athletes. Townsmen and the state athletic association threatened to have him fired. As Dean Smith later summarized his upbringing, his parents simply “believed in the human family.”

That perspective stuck with him as he worked as assistant to Tarheels coach Frank McGuire in the late 1950s, prompting Smith in 1958 to become a charter member of a newly founded church in Chapel Hill, the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church. A rarity among Southern Baptist churches of that era, Binkley Memorial aggressively promoted liberal thought and a racially integrated membership. The pastor, the Reverend Robert Seymour, encouraged his parishioners to work on behalf of sensible, politically progressive public policies.

Parson and coach first collaborated in exerting pressure on the owners of Chapel Hill restaurants to open their doors to people of color. This project became easier after Smith became the Tarheels’ head coach in 1961. Scarcely did the management of the Pines Restaurant, where the basketball team usually ate its meals, wish to risk the ire of the head coach.

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