LOPRESTI: Remembering Dean Smith—and one of his biggest defeats

Remembrances of Dean Smith rolled through a sport after his Feb. 7 passing, as they should with one of the faces on college basketball’s Mount Rushmore. We heard of his mightiest feats, his biggest victories.

But what about his most infamous, inexplicable, unexplainable defeat? The one with Indiana University’s fingerprints all over it? There seemed one Hoosier in particular to call about that.

Dan Dakich was on the line. When he got the news about Smith, surely March 22, 1984, came to mind, right? Right.

“It was the only game I ever played in where I said, ‘Damn, we beat Dean Smith.’ It’s usually, ‘We beat Purdue or Illinois,’” Dakich said. “It was the only time in my life I felt that way.”

Everyone in Indiana who knows the difference between a three-point line and a cafeteria line can relate what happened. How North Carolina rolled into the Sweet 16 ranked No. 1, with five future NBA first-round picks, one of them named Michael Jordan. And there was Indiana, with freshman Steve Alford and lots of unheralded guys.

How Jordan scored only 13 points in what would be his last college game, partly because of foul trouble, and partly because of Dakich’s earnest defense. How Indiana shot 65 percent and Alford scored 27 points and the Hoosiers won 72-68. Smith was so shaken afterward that he was curt and cold in the post-game press conference. Dean Smith was never curt and cold.

“Somebody just put on Twitter the lineups from that game,” Dakich said. “It was like, ‘Wow.’”

Playing for the Tar Heels that day were Jordan, Sam Perkins, Kenny Smith, Brad Daugherty and Joe Wolf. All destined to go in the first round of the NBA draft. Starting for Indiana were Alford, Dakich, Uwe Blab, Stew Robinson and Mike Giomi.

How to compare the star power of those teams? Try this: Those five Tar Heels would eventually score 69,887 points in the NBA. The entire Indiana team—namely Alford and Blab—would score 1,249.

Wow.

Smith won 879 games, but it could be argued that was his worst loss. Meanwhile, Dakich became a folk hero. The Man Who Stopped Michael Jordan.

It wasn’t that simple. But 31 years later, he still hears about it.

“Life goes on. You get kids and jobs and being fired, and all the other stuff that happens in life,” he said. “But I went to the IU game yesterday and I must have been introduced to a dozen people—‘This is the guy who stopped Michael Jordan.’

“I’m shocked that still happens. But if you’ve got to be known for something in your basketball career, that’s good enough for me. If you really want to know the truth, I get embarrassed at times about it.

“Here’s the thing, and I’ve said this forever: We didn’t view it as an upset. We had Coach Knight. That’s the beauty of college basketball. It can be system-oriented—particularly when there was no shot clock and no three-point line—where one system could go beat another system, regardless of who was on whose team. We knew we beat the No. 1 team in the country; we’re not idiots. But we were Indiana, and Indiana was supposed to beat North Carolina.”

Dakich never met Smith, a man he admired for his civil rights record off the court and ingenuity on it. He bumped into Jordan on the IU Golf Course a few months after that game, during the 1984 Olympic trials in Bloomington. They ended up in a foursome. Let Dakich explain:

“We get to the fifth hole—I’ll never forget this—and we were betting, and he says, ‘Hey, I just signed my Nike deal today. You want to double the bets?’ He was horrible. I said, ‘Man, I’ll bet whatever you want.’ It gets kind of dark and we were on the 16th hole playing, and I rounded it to $6,000. Then we went to Wendy’s and he said [to] come by the Olympic practice the next day. So I went there and he tried to give me all the free stuff he had—jeans and Polaroid cameras. I said, ‘Dude, six grand.’”

Dakich is still waiting for his $6,000.

He said he doesn’t think much about their basketball meeting, unless someone brings it up. Which a lot of people do. No, for the memory that will never leave him, jump ahead two days: Virginia 50, Indiana 48 in the regional championship. The Cavaliers took the lead for good in the final two minutes after an IU turnover—by Dakich. His 15 minutes of fame stopped two minutes short of the Final Four.

“I don’t even think about the Jordan game,” he said. “But I run now a little bit and I replay those last moments from Virginia in my mind—what I should have done, what we could have done. Thirty-one years later, there is not a day—I promise you—that goes by without me thinking about that game.”

It is one of Dakich’s Nightmare Five, the other four being a couple of high school tournament games he lost as a player at Andrean and an overtime regular-season defeat by Penn State and buzzer-beater loss to Minnesota in the Big Ten tournament that he took when he was Indiana’s interim head coach in 2008.

“I think about those games every … stinking … night.”

The North Carolina game does not get mentioned that much among great tournament upsets—except in Indiana—because it came in the Sweet 16 and not the Final Four, and the Hoosiers lost two days later. But it must be mentioned now, amid the reflection on the mile markers of a legend.

Dean Smith’s bad day.

“He had enough good ones,” said the man who helped give it to him.•

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Lopresti is a lifelong resident of Richmond and a graduate of Ball State University. He was a columnist for USA Today and Gannett newspapers for 31 years; he covered 34 Final Fours, 30 Super Bowls, 32 World Series and 16 Olympics. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mlopresti@ibj.com.