Jimmy Braddock was a McDonald’s All-American at Baylor School in 1979 and signed a basketball scholarship with the University of North Carolina.
Braddock played four seasons under Dean Smith and was a junior in 1982 when North Carolina topped Georgetown 63-62 in the NCAA championship game. Smith died Saturday night at the age of 83, and Braddock joined Chattanooga’s “Press Row” Monday afternoon on ESPN’s 105.1 FM to share some memories of his former coach.
Q: You were being recruited at a time when Kentucky was coming off the 1978 national championship and Tennessee wasn’t far removed from the “Ernie and Bernie” show. Was Dean Smith the deciding factor in you choosing UNC over an SEC school?
A: “Absolutely. As a kid, I was a big basketball fan, and I was a big UCLA fan and a big John Wooden fan. Meeting Dean Smith and having him come to my house and to my games and getting to know him was really the deciding factor. He was honest, and you could tell he was a man of integrity.
“He was a disciplinarian, and he reminded me a lot of my father. I had to follow a lot of rules as a kid, so I didn’t have any problems. I actually was drawn to someone who would push me and make me follow a straight and narrow path.”
Q: Smith scheduled a road game as close to the hometown of every senior he had. What was it like coming to Chattanooga in December 1982?
A: “That was one of the things he told all the players that he recruited — if you came to North Carolina, he would schedule a game when you were a senior in your hometown. If there wasn’t a school in your hometown, he would at least schedule one in your home state. I was really fortunate in that UTC had a great program going under Murray Arnold and had players going through like Willie White and Gerald Wilkins.
“Coach Smith told me after my junior year that he was working on scheduling UTC, so he fulfilled what he promised while he was recruiting me. All my friends and family were excited, and so was I, because that was the only time I played in the state of Tennessee when I was in college.”
Q: What was Dean Smith, who won a national title in his seventh trip to the Final Four, like in the locker room after the win over Georgetown in New Orleans?
A: “Coach Smith had a great poker face, and he was business as usual, but the difference was with us players. There was such a long track back to the locker room in the Superdome. It was really about half a mile from our locker room to the court, and when we sprinted back, we were celebrating and jumping around and screaming and hollering, but within about five or 10 minutes, you could hear a pin drop.
“Everyone was completely out of gas both physically and emotionally. Then the coaches came in and talked about the typical stuff like it was any other game. That was the thing about Coach Smith. He wanted us to enjoy it. He wasn’t a man that showed a lot of his emotions in public, but I know he had to have enjoyed that one.”
Q: What have you since experienced that makes you realize what kind of influence Coach Smith still has on you?
A: “It used to happen all the time when I was coaching. I don’t know how Coach Smith and Coach (Roy) Williams could do it for so long, and I know Coach (Eddie) Fogler got out a little bit early. Coaching can be so stressful, and I was constantly hearing things coming out of my mouth that were things that I would stop and say, ‘I sound just like Coach Smith.’
“It was eerie how the things he said were subconsciously ingrained in my mind. It was like his voice was coming out of me.”
Q: You were a junior when UNC won it all and a senior when N.C. State won it all. Virginia had Ralph Sampson during your time in college, but one ACC team that really struggled back then was Duke. Mike Krzyzewski was in his early stages with the Blue Devils, so are you surprised he’s gone on to win more than 1,000 games?
A: “I may be a little surprised at the numbers, but he’s been there for a long time. I know my senior year was a rough year for them, because they got hammered in the ACC tournament by Virginia, and the word was that he might get fired after that season.
“One of the things that I’m most proud of when I look back is that of his 1,000 victories, none of them were against my North Carolina teams. I never lost a game to a Krzyzewski-coached team. They won their first game against North Carolina in ’84, which was the year after I graduated. I could tell when he was there that Duke was getting better, because the players who were starting to go there were very similar to what we had been seeing at North Carolina.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.