Touch 'em All Excerpt: Dean Smith Stories

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Larry Keith began his journey to Sports Illustrated and the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame when he was 14 years old, writing a game account in a spiral notebook after listening to a North Carolina basketball game on the radio. As his career gained momentum, he won awards and worked briefly in broadcasting. Less than a year after he graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, Sports Illustrated summoned him to New York.

“Touch ‘Em All: My Life and Career at Sports Illustrated” is Keith’s memoir, which is not about a single legendary athlete or championship team. It’s about an accomplished writer and editor who chronicled legendary athletes and championship teams for more than three decades.

Inside Carolina’s Tommy Ashley spoke with Keith about his journey, the stories and memories that shaped his illustrious career as a witness to those icons.  Watch the the full interview below and scroll down for excerpts from Keith’s book about the legendary Dean Smith…

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At Carolina, I also began a relationship with coach Dean Smith that would endure until he died. I tried to capture the yin and the yang of our association in my lead story in SI’s 100th anniversary celebration of Tar Heel basketball: “Brickbats couldn’t bow his head, and plaudits couldn’t turn it. In his 2004 leadership book, The Carolina Way, Smith chastised me for suggesting that critics would have slammed him if his Carolina-laden 1976 Olympic team had not won the gold medal. ‘I certainly never spent a minute thinking or worrying about that,’ he wrote. Well, I did.

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For Smith, it was never about “me.” It was always about “them,” the players. In that same article I also wrote, “A few years ago, while seeking artifacts for a Carolina Basketball Museum, two hoops archaeologists went to Smith’s home and found precious memories buried in closets and shoe boxes. His 1997 SI Sportsman of the Year Award was hiding behind a plant—but then, as I recall, he wasn’t overwhelmed when he got it.

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Even when I was an undergraduate, the coach was always gracious to me, and over the years we developed a good rapport, I might even call it a friendship. It started when I interviewed him to do a pre-season story for The Daily Tar Heel in 1967. I introduced myself as someone who worked in Charlotte with Ron Green because I knew how well-respected Ron was. One day during the season, Smith invited me into his film room in Carmichael Auditorium­­ (film closet, more accurately) to watch some game highlights with him. At his request, I posted a small story in the February 28, 1968 issue of the DTH, announcing that high school All-America Dennis Wuycik would be attending that night’s South Carolina game. The team lost, but Wuycik signed on anyway. I flew out to the 1968 Final Four In Los Angeles on the team plane and imagined the macabre headline: “Scott, 100 Others Go Down in Plane Crash”. That’s how important “Charles” Scott, as Smith called him, the school’s first black scholarship athlete, was to the Tar Heels. The next year, when I was at WCHL, I interviewed Smith for his pre- and post-game radio shows. One question was all he needed to begin a monologue of clichés. 

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After the team beat South Carolina in Columbia one night, he went on the regional television network while I was waiting to do his postgame show. “Coach, we have a show to do!,” I yelled from across the court. He and I were both shocked that I would challenge him like that. When I was at Sports Illustrated, he was more open, though often his comments were off the record. He could be cautious to a fault. In a December 10, 1979 letter, he commented on an article I had written about defense, in general: “[It] should help our recruiting very much and we do appreciate it,” and then added “The only problem is now other teams will try to say we can play as well defensively as Carolina.” Jeesh! When his father died, he sent me a clipping of a Daily Tar Heel story I had written that his father had saved. He sent small Carolina basketballs to my sons Rob and Ted after they were born, and a Carolina tin of popped corn when I was laid up with a bad back for part of the 1981-82 season. In 2007, he met Sandy, Rick Brewer, Owen Davis and myself for lunch one afternoon in an out-of-the-way Chapel Hill delicatessen. Strangely, nobody recognized him.

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Sports Illustrated published a special tribute to Smith when he died in 2015. Son Ted, by then an SI senior editor himself, had two articles in the issue, and I contributed my recollections, along with other writers. I concluded my comments this way: “Twenty years ago, during a New York City alumni reception, he interrupted his remarks to single me out in the crowd. I don’t think he was trying to treat me special, as much as he was seeking to make me look special, to the young person standing beside me, my teenage son Ted. Damn, I wish I had gotten around to thanking him for that.

Order your copy of TOUCH ‘EM ALL – My Life and Career at Sports Illustrated. Enter code TouchEm25 to get 25% off.