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Like basketball fans everywhere, especially ones whose roots — and rooting interests — lay in ACC country, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Dean Smith. What a true giant he was, both on and off the court. Not only did he desegregate the Tar Heels, raise the level of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball to astonishing new levels, and recruit and coach an incredible roster of players, but he was a true gentleman both on the court and off. I had the pleasure of interviewing him one afternoon in Chapel Hill back in the early 1990s, and I was struck by his range of knowledge, his fidelity to the truth, and the breadth of his experiences, spanning the eras of both Phog Allen and Michael Jordan.

I was doing research on a book about college basketball — a book that I would later put aside to write The Secret Game. Dean insisted that I tape record our interview, no doubt his own personal insurance policy against being misquoted. But I had done my homework ahead of time, and once I started asking him detailed questions about his family and about Emporia, Kansas during the Great Depression and World War II, his guard relaxed a bit and we had a productive interview. Dean Smith did not suffer fools gladly. You’d best bring your A-game.

Three years earlier, in Myrtle Beach, I had interviewed Frank McGuire, the former head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina who had hired Dean as an assistant coach back in 1958. Back then, the two men could not have been less alike. The son of a New York City police officer, McGuire was a street-smart, larger-than-life figure in the city’s basketball scene, a fast-talking charmer who could call half the high school basketball coaches in the five boroughs by their first names, knew Manhattan like the back of his hand, and liked to hang out with one of Frank Sinatra’s former bodyguards. Smith, by contrast, was quiet and intense, little more, some of McGuire’s associates decided, than a hayseed from Kansas

In those days, McGuire did a lot of recruiting in New York City. Indeed, he brought so many New York ballplayers to UNC that some wags claimed that the last stop on the IRT was located on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Oftentimes, when McGuire and his coaching staff was in Manhattan on a recruiting trip, they’d invariably eat lunch or dinner at Patrissy’s, an Italian restaurant located on Kenmare Street, on the edge of Little Italy. When they were through eating, Frank or one of the older assistant coaches would always pick up the check, but Dean kept asking and asking if, at least once in a while, he could pay the bill. The waiters at Patrissy’s, on McGuire’s orders, simply ignored him.

Only Dean was persistent. Determined to pay what he thought was his fair share, he kept at it until one day, McGuire let his young assistant coach pick up the tab. “He blanched when he saw it,” McGuire recalled. “I wanted to teach him a lesson, a lesson about patience.” Having nowhere near enough money on him to pay the check, Dean quietly excused himself for the table. Then he went back to the kitchen with the headwaiter and worked out a payment plan. “It must have taken him six months to pay it off,” McGuire told me. But Dean was true to his word, and he eventually paid the bill.

A couple of years after I had interviewed Dean, when I was on a business trip to New York, I went and ate lunch at Patrissy’s. The food was wonderful, old school Italian—meatballs marinara, clams casino, and homemade tagliatelle—but there were hardly any customers, and you could tell, even then, that the restaurant was already on its way out. After I finished my meal, I asked one of the aged waiters about Frank McGuire, and he told me how much Frank had loved the place, and that he would always sit him at a favorite table. “That Frank,” the old man told me, “was something.” I paid my bill and got up to leave, smiling over the fact that nearly a half century later, the memory of Frank McGuire, a New York City basketball legend in his own right, still lingered in pockets of Manhattan.

Then, out of the blue, the waiter started to me about Dean Smith.

“You know something? Every time North Carolina comes to play here in New York, maybe at Madison Square Garden or someplace,” the old waiter said, “Dean Smith always comes to Patrissy’s. He’s done this for, maybe, twenty, thirty forty years. But you know what? He always comes alone. Just him. No reporters. No players. No coaches. No anybody.”

I grabbed my coat, thanked the old man, and left Patrissy’s. But as I walked along Kenmare Street, trying to figure out where the next subway stop might be, I wasn’t thinking about Frank McGuire, the flamboyant New Yorker, anymore. Instead I was thinking about a young kid from Kansas who caught a break, and then, through hard work and determination, had risen to the top of his profession. But most of all I was thinking about how Dean Smith, decade after decade, would sit all alone in a dimly lit, fading restaurant on the edge of Little Italy, paying quiet homage to those who had helped him along the way. No reporters. No players. No anybody.

It’s hard to beat that.