Dean Smith is a North Carolina icon. In his native Emporia, Kansas, he remains an ideal

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories exploring the storied and unique relationship between two of college basketball’s historically elite programs, North Carolina and Kansas.

It has been a long time since Dean Smith’s boyhood years in Emporia, Kansas, but in some ways his hometown looks like it must’ve looked when he grew up there. Commercial Street still looks straight out of the 1940s or 50s, just with a few more empty storefronts. Around a corner the old Emporia High School is the same as it ever was from the outside — a stately and beautiful three-story brick building; a classic old school — though the inside has long been abandoned.

The gym used to be around back, and that’s where Smith, pretty much from birth, watched his father coach basketball. Even still, 90 years later, there are reminders at the current Emporia High — built in the 70s, three miles from downtown — of Alfred Smith’s legacy. A banner for the school’s 1934 state championship hangs in the gym. Along a wall in the main office, there’s a framed and fading black and white photo collage honoring those state champs.

Every player is featured, holding a basketball in various bygone basketball poses. They’re all wearing short shorts with belts and tight tops, with their last names or maybe nicknames just below: Kowalski, Captain. Pennington. Rock. Anderson. “Coach Smith,” as he’s described there, is included just below a photo of the trophy. He bears a striking resemblance to his famous son. In the bottom right of the collage, there’s a player who stands out from all the others.

And that’s probably the most important part of Alfred Smith’s legacy: That 20 years before Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark case that originated just 60 miles north in Topeka, Kansas, he wasn’t afraid to take a stand against injustice. That he fought for integration, and equality. His son was still an infant when Paul Terry became Kansas’ first Black high school basketball player at an all-white school. And there Terry is in that old photo, an Emporia Spartan. A champion.

Dean Smith remains the ideal

North Carolina and Kansas are playing a rare kind of college basketball game on Friday night in Lawrence, and it’s rarer still for them. The two programs, intertwined through decades of deeper connection and history, haven’t played a non-tournament regular season game since 1981. They haven’t played each other on one of their home courts since 1960, in Lawrence.

Smith was still a young Tar Heels’ assistant coach then. He couldn’t know it at the time but he was less than a year away becoming UNC’s head coach, and beginning one of the most celebrated and revered tenures in the history of American sports. In time, Dean Smith became Carolina basketball, molding and shaping his program to reflect his character and values. He became a North Carolina icon and arguably the most beloved figure in the history of the state.

Smith, though, never embraced the hype surrounding his team’s on-court accomplishments. He wanted to be known more as a teacher and educator; a man who helped young men reach their potential and work together in pursuit of something greater than themselves. The humility wasn’t an act but endemic to his humble Midwestern roots. In a lot of places and to a lot of people he became an idol and an icon; a legend of a sport.

In his hometown of Emporia, though, he remains an ideal. An example.

There are small reminders of Smith’s legacy around town, for those who know where to look. Around the corner from that collage honoring the ‘34 state champions, Beau Welch’s office contains a couple such mementos that honor Smith and his father and help keep alive their legacies. Welch is the athletics director and an assistant principal at Emporia High.

On Wednesday he was proud to show off the Dean Smith Traveling Trophy. Every year, the boys basketball teams at Emporia and Topeka High, where Smith spent his final two years of high school, play for the trophy.

“We play twice a year,” said Welch, who coached the boys team for 12 years. “And the second time we play them, it’s always the Dean Smith game.”

Welch, 44, helped come up with the idea for the trophy to remember Emporia’s favorite son, and to honor a man whom Welch, like a lot of others around here, grew up admiring and wanting to emulate, in one way or another. Every year on Jan. 29, Kansans celebrate “Kansas Day” — “a big day in the state of Kansas,” Welch said. Elementary school kids often have to write essays about their favorite Kansan.

And “I don’t want you to feel like this is made up,” Welch said, before offering the predictable reveal: That yes, he wrote about Dean Smith, and wanting to grow up to be a coach, just like him.

Like father, like son

When he was coaching the boys’ team, Welch often showed his players videos about Smith and built lessons around his teachings — both on the court and off. Basketball is the most prominent part of Smith’s legacy, and yet it’s only a part, along with his Civil Rights work and progressivism; his role in helping to integrate Chapel Hill and his recruitment of Charles Scott, who became UNC’s first Black scholarship athlete in 1966.

That Smith made those stands, seen as bold at the time, did not happen by chance. His father set the example. Ninety years after Paul Terry broke through racial lines that divided high school athletics in Kansas, Emporia High now plays an annual tournament named in his honor. One of Welch’s most prized mementos in his office is that of a basketball commemorating Terry’s legacy, and story, signed by Terry’s children.

It was a story that came with its share of painful moments. Alfred Smith, in an article detailed in the Emporia Gazette in 1998, long remembered a telegram he received from the principal of a rival school who instructed him to “leave the black boy at home.” And Terry, due to state laws that still mandated segregation at the time, was not allowed to play in the 1934 state championship game.

“I was devastated,” Terry, who died in 2005, said in that 1998 newspaper story. But “afterwards, I learned the situation Coach was in — he actually put his job on the line.”

Dean Smith, meanwhile, grew up in an environment in which his father was not afraid to take such risks, when a moment called for it. In the 1944 Emporia High yearbook, a young Smith, who would’ve been about 12 or 13, is in the basketball team photo, holding what appears to be a glass water jug — perhaps a sign that he might’ve been the Spartans’ waterboy that season.

His father is standing on the opposite end of the second row. Along with the morals he imparted upon his son, Alfred Smith’s educational record undoubtedly left an imprint, too. An old yearbook details his academic credentials: degrees from Kansas State Teachers College and the University of Kansas, along with time at Huntington College and Wisconsin University.

His bio, preserved for eternity in those pages, speaks to his competitiveness, too:

“Coach Smith is interested in all athletic contests and is a ping-pong fan. He says he hopes to be good enough some day to beat his son in ping-pong.”

Three years later, Dean Smith was old enough to be among those players as a player. In one of the pictures he’s wearing an Emporia jersey. In another, among his classmates, he’s wearing what appears to be an argyle sweater — with the kind of pattern that would repeat itself decades later along the sides of his team’s basketball jerseys at North Carolina.

Nowadays, anyone who walks into the main office at Emporia High first must pass by a wall dedicated to the members of the Emporia High School Hall of Fame. It is impossible to miss the intention behind two of the members’ photos and bios, placed side-by-side in a prominent position. There, when you walk in, is Paul Terry. And right next to him: Dean Smith.

Long live the ‘Four Corners’

Parts of Emporia appear to remain frozen in time, the way a lot of small towns do, but it’s not difficult to see the changes. The abandoned businesses, in some places. The breweries and music spots that have filled old warehouses and theaters. The day after the election, there was still a sizable Trump/Vance campaign sign in front of Dean Smith’s old high school, and all around now there are fewer and fewer who actually knew him.

Ron Slaymaker is among those who did. He’s 88 and a basketball coach, himself — even still. For 28 years, Slaymaker coached the men’s team at Emporia State, which borders downtown. He was the NAIA National Coach of the Year in 1986, when his team went 31-5, and he once spent a summer as an assistant under Mike Krzyzewski during the 1987 World University Games.

Given their Emporia ties and basketball connection, Slaymaker and Smith became friends. They wrote letters to each other and visited on those rare occasions Slaymaker might find himself in North Carolina, or Smith back home in Kansas. After he retired at Emporia State, Slaymaker spent a while refereeing.

But then he was called to coach again, and after several a friend needed a favor:

Could he fill in for a bit as the girls’ basketball coach at Topeka High?

Well sure, Slaymaker told him. He’d be happy to.

And that’s how, nine years after Smith’s death and almost 50 years after he popularized a particular slow-down strategy, Slaymaker’s girls’ basketball team at Topeka came to run the Four Corners. When the moment is right, Slaymaker calls the play the way Smith would’ve, back when Phil Ford was running his offense: Slaymaker simply raises his hand, four fingers outstretched.

His girls know what to do.

“You know, I think I was a Dean Smith fan,” Slaymaker said, a little tongue in cheek, of how he came to start running Four Corners. In a state that’s only now starting a voluntary trial run for a shot clock in high school, the Four Corners is not necessarily a bad strategy — though who knows how many teams, anywhere, are running it in 2024? Well there’s at least one Kansas high school girls’ team that uses it, coached by one of Smith’s old friends.

Preserving history

These days, there’s perhaps no one better to offer a tour of Dean Smith’s Emporia than Slaymaker, who’s still sharp and independent and full of stories. Wednesday, he drove down Washington Street and parked outside Smith’s old childhood home, a humble cottage with a small porch and old trees lining the street, their leaves lighting up with fall color.

Smith was born in another house a little farther down Washington, but spent most of his childhood in this one, at 1217, where the woman living there now said her real estate agent made a point of mentioning that when the place was on the market — that this is where Dean Smith grew up. It’s not far from the old and original Emporia High, where Alfred Smith turned the Spartans into state champs.

The building has been vacant for a long time, and it looks too pretty — and too historic — to just be sitting there like it is. The city has had plans for it over the years, Slaymaker said, but nothing has quite stuck. The latest rumor was maybe condos, or apartments — or something else useful, “but I don’t know what,” he said.

Perhaps one day it will find another purpose, but for now it waits.

It was, at one time, an idyllic place to go to high school in an idyllic small American town. A young basketball coach once won a championship there and played a role in deconstructing a state’s racial barriers. His son grew up watching his father coach there, and then played a season, himself, in that building, before heading off to Topeka and then to Lawrence and then, ultimately, to Chapel Hill.

That long journey — to playing at Kansas under Phog Allen to the two national titles and 879 victories at UNC, where he also happened to coach the greatest player in the history of the sport — all began here.

When they tore out the old basketball court at Emporia High many years ago, Slaymaker saved several large panels of it. He wanted to preserve the history and the memories. In Emporia, people hold on to pieces of Dean Smith any way they can.

Next: A trip to Lawrence, Kansas, and an exploration of Roy Williams’ ties to KU and UNC.