Bob McKillop and Tubby Smith are forever connected to Dean Smith and North Carolina

Sometime in the late 70s, when he was the head coach at Hoke County High School in rural North Carolina, Tubby Smith received something in the mail.

It was a check.

It was from Dean Smith.

Tubby Smith had sent his son, G.G., to attend Dean Smith’s basketball camp on North Carolina’s campus a few weeks prior. The check, as Tubby Smith remembers, was “a refund.” Dean Smith had learned late that Tubby Smith was a high school coach, and the head coach at one of the bluest bloods in college basketball insisted that his fellow coaching kin didn’t need to pay for his son’s attendance.

Per Dean Smith, the honor of coaching another coach’s son was all his.

“I get teary-eyed when I think about how special he was,” Tubby Smith said after sharing that story. “Coach Smith was really a servant coach.”

Tubby Smith and Bob McKillop were given the highest honor the U.S. Basketball Writers Association bestows — the Dean Smith Award — on Tuesday night in the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Greensboro. The award is given annually to a coach who “embodies the spirit and values of the late Coach Smith,” per the association.

Tubby Smith won the award in 2021. Bob McKillop won it in 2019. Scheduling complications caused by the pandemic and other factors delayed the ceremonies. But the stories that were shared on Tuesday, particularly ones involving the original patriarch of Tar Heel basketball, seemed untouched by time.

McKillop’s tales certainly felt that way.

McKillop was the head coach of the Davidson men’s basketball program for 33 years before retiring in 2022. His tenure at the private college in the 15,000-person town 30 minutes north of Charlotte is peerless in achievement and impact: 634 wins, 23 conference championships, 10 NCAA tournament appearances. He was the coach begging his team to back on defense while the rest of the country watched his team’s wondrous Elite Eight run through the 2008 NCAA Tournament — a run orchestrated by an undersized yet transcendent talent named Stephen Curry.

But McKillop, as he recalled Tuesday, met Dean Smith before he’d earned acclaim at the college level. He first got acquainted with him when he was a high school coach in New York.

“Dean Smith recruited one of my high school players, Matt Doherty,” McKillop told The Observer. “And I got to know Coach Smith attending clinics during recruiting visits that he took to the New York area. He was incredibly gracious to me in terms of being such a welcoming mentor: He was a guy who would not just shake my hand and look to talk to somebody else who maybe had better players. He would actually spend time with me.”

McKillop’s acquaintanceship with Dean Smith would turn into a mentorship of sorts. McKillop emulated what he could. That included in-game tactics, yes, but also cultural pillars that surely impacted McKillop’s success at Davidson: Sharing a “thoughts for the day” before practice. Raising a fist during a game to indicate that a player was tired. Using a slogan that stays season-after-season, decade-after-decade, that encapsulates what the program is about. (For Davidson, that slogan was “Trust. Commitment. Care.” For UNC, it was “Play hard. Play smart. Play together.”)

McKillop picked something up from Dean Smith that was a bit more personal, too.

“He would always call Matt Doherty ‘Matthew,’” McKillop began. By virtue of growing up on the same New York playgrounds that Doherty, McKillop knew Doherty for most of Doherty’s life. And he always went by “Matt.”

That is, until he arrived in Chapel Hill.

So Bob, did you ever tell Dean that Doherty preferred “Matt”?

“No, I never did,” McKillop said. He then chuckled: “Because I would call Matt Doherty ‘Matthew’ when he did something wrong.”

Tubby Smith saw a mentor in Dean Smith, too.

Tubby Smith grew up on a farm in southern Maryland, the sixth child of an eventual 17 kids, before going on to play college basketball at High Point in central North Carolina. He’d go on to have an illustrious coaching career thereafter — winning 642 games and a national championship in 31 years as a head coach at Tulsa, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas Tech, Memphis and High Point.

Tubby Smith retired in 2022 and will be remembered as the first Black coach at Kentucky and as the third Black coach to win a national title.

He, like Dean Smith, will be remembered as more, too.

“Coach Smith was one of my favorite people,” he said, “not just one of my favorite coaches.”

Tubby Smith and McKillop share more in common than this award and their love for the man the award is named after: Both started as high school coaches. Both ended their careers coaching on courts named after them. Both coached two sons, and both saw their eldest sons succeed them when they retired.

Both, too, are forever connected to North Carolina, even if they weren’t born here. They find a similarity with their late mentor in this way: Tubby Smith arrived in the Tar Heel state from southern Maryland. McKillop was born in Queens. And Dean Smith came to North Carolina by way of Emporia, Kansas — before leaving behind a trail of stories after a legendary career.