American newspapers may go through hard times in this age of on-demand, high definition and unlimited data, but one thing they still do best is memorialize people. Little stories are the reason. Newspapers excel at telling little stories, the kind that clutch at the heart. Everyone can tell you just how big a figure Dean Smith was. Everyone can recite the remarkable statistics, detail the basketball advancements and discuss the pioneering spirit of the man.
Little stories, though. Gary Schwab woke up in Charlotte on what he expected to be a sleepy Sunday. Schwab is the senior sports editor of North Carolina’s largest newspaper, the Charlotte Observer. Charlotte’s sports department works in conjunction with North Carolina’s second-largest paper, the Raleigh News & Observer. He quickly realized this would be one of the most important days of his professional life.
There would be a Dean special section, of course. Newspapers have prepared obituaries for just such days, and the Dean Smith obituary had been written and rewritten through the years. That would have to be updated and polished. Reporters would call or email all of their sources to get a comment. Photographs would be pulled from the library. The paper would have to give an outlet for fans to speak their minds.
But beyond all of this, there had to be something more, something magical. Dean Smith was 83 years old when he died late Saturday night, and his impact … well, how do you tell the story of Dean Smith in North Carolina? How do you capture what made the man important but also common? How do you explain what made him great but also human? How do you reach out to the people who loved him and the people who despised him because of the team he happened to coach?
