Gophers senior associate athletic director Mike Ellis remembers when he first met legendary North Carolina coach Dean Smith, who died late Saturday night.
Ellis was a nervous teenager interviewing — along with about 80 others — for a student manager job at North Carolina in 1984 when Tar Heels assistant coach Bill Guthridge's line of questioning was broken by Smith entering the room.
Instantly, Ellis — who grew up in Butner, N.C. — was in awe over the presence of his childhood idol, the coach who had been inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame the year before. But Smith quickly directed the conversation to the prospective addition to his team.
"He immediately began asking about me," said Ellis, who went on to help manage the team for four years. "It wasn't what you thought, what I expected. I thought it would be very short, very quick, but he had a sincere interest. He asked about my family, he asked what I wanted to do. He asked about things that I never anticipated him asking about.
"But over the next four years, I understood that that was absolutely who he was."
Ellis remembers a man that took the idea of a team being a family to another level. He insisted players knew the names of their teammates' siblings. Smith's dedication went even deeper. When Ellis' father got into a car accident, Smith was as involved as anyone in checking on his condition.
"Everyone loves to talk about family — 'Welcome to our family,' "Ellis said. "And it's talk. With Coach Smith it was real. He taught you how to be a better person. That's what it came down to. And as a result, when you were around him, you wanted to stand up a little bit straighter, you wanted to be a little bit better and you didn't want to let him down. Because he for daggone sure was not going to let you down."
Ellis credits Smith for inspiring and later helping grease the wheels in his ascent from student manager to assistant coach at Virginia Commonwealth. After big victories, Ellis would find handwritten notes from his mentor in his mailbox, telling him how proud he was. Ten years after moving to Richmond, Ellis brought his wife, Terri — who had been his high school sweetheart — on campus. Smith hadn't seen her for a decade, but he came out of his office and greeted her by name.
"And I was [just a] manager," Ellis said before catching himself, saying Smith would have been upset to hear him minimize his role. "It's unusual. It's highly, highly unusual … it's not so much that he knew, it's that he cared to know. That's what amazed me. He cared to know her name because it was important to him."
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