Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski receives USBWA’s Dean Smith Award as rivalry comes full circle
It was certainly an odd juxtaposition, Mike Krzyzewski standing in front of an image of Dean Smith holding four fingers in the air. Their rivalry was one of the defining dynamics of the ACC’s greatest era, two of the great coaches of all time fighting over every inch of ground, on and off the court.
Yet just as it was a little jarring when Krzyzewski accepted the U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Dean Smith Award from author and USBWA Hall of Famer John Feinstein on Saturday night at the Emily Krzyzewski Center’s Mother’s Day Ball, it was entirely fitting.
The Dean Smith Award honors coaches for their honesty and integrity and for the impact they have made on their community and the lives of their players, and this gala celebrating the accomplishments of the Emily K Center — something so close to Krzyzewski’s heart, and so important to its community and the public-school students it supports — was a particularly appropriate place for Krzyzewski to receive this award.
Accepting an award honoring coaches who uphold the same principles Smith lived by was also perhaps the final iteration of Krzyzewski’s evolving relationship with Smith, the one-time enemies having become confidants by the time Smith died in 2015. The emergence of that friendship late in Smith’s life was more of a kinship, really, between two coaches who came to realize that they were among the very few people in the world who could understand the lives each other has lived.
“How proud I am of this, and how proud I was to be Dean’s friend,” Krzyzewski said Saturday. “We were fierce competitors. He helped me grow up. Sometimes you have to be smacked a little bit. I didn’t understand until we started winning some championships. Then I understood fully. And he knew I understood fully. And we became great friends, not good friends, great friends.
“Dean was the best man that has ever coached college basketball. He was one of the great coaches, but there was no better man than Dean Smith. The program that he built at UNC has stood the test of time. It was built to last and it has flourished.”
Saturday’s presentation at the Washington Duke Inn followed a reception in Greensboro last month when past Dean Smith winners Bob McKillop (2019) and Tubby Smith (2021) were finally formally presented with their pandemic-delayed honors.
That was a remarkable night, celebrating two coaches with deep roots in North Carolina who built equally lasting but very different legacies, especially as they shared their memories of Smith and the life lessons they continue to teach.
Other past winners of the Dean Smith Award include John Thompson, Fran Dunphy, Tom Izzo and George Raveling, all of whom certainly represented Smith’s spirit in different ways, but putting Krzyzewski and Smith in the same sentence puts a different spin on things — to the point where Scott Williams, one of several former Smith players who attended the event in Greensboro, thought the announcement of Krzyzewski as the winner was an April Fool’s Joke.
It was most certainly not, and while there weren’t any former UNC players at Saturday’s event, Smith’s son Scott and his wife Kelli were there representing the Smith family, a reminder of how, while those around the rivalry may have found the moment hard to comprehend, those who knew the two men best did not. Perhaps the most resonant example of that: Krzyzewski was one of the very few outsiders allowed to attend Smith’s private funeral at Binkley Baptist Church.
“I told Scott, ‘It’s so appropriate that this is happening tonight. Your dad would believe in the Emily K. This would be his thing,’” Krzyzewski said. “And I would like to think that tonight — I’m getting emotional now — it’s our thing.”
Those words would have seemed utterly improbable 30 years ago, when the two great coaches were still scrapping over every inch of basketball ground like it was the end of the world. But this full-circle moment underlined how much had changed, how the territory they found in the end wasn’t what they fought over, but the common ground they shared.
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