Smith ready, willing to let Knight pass

Dean Smith, like Bob Knight, was never big on milestone victories.

The double-zeroes, as they mounted up, 500, 600, 700, 800, were nice round numbers that didn't mean much. The only numbers that counted were conference and NCAA championships, and Smith always contended that those belonged to his players, not him.

At Indiana, Knight kept the balls from a few of his milestone games, marked with the dates, scores and victims, but tossed them into the back of a closet and left them to get soft and dusty.

The No. 800 ball, when it comes in the next week or so with two more victories by Texas Tech, might not get much more regard.

"I can remember the first game my team ever won. I have no idea who my team beat for No. 500 or No. 700 along the way," Knight said a few days ago. "It just never meant anything to me."

What No. 800 means, mainly, is that Knight will be 80 away from passing Smith and becoming the winningest men's coach in college basketball history.

"I'd be very happy if Bob was the one that moves up to 900 or 1,000," Smith said from his office at North Carolina. "His motivation techniques are the only things that get him in trouble. But he sure motivates. He's certainly one of the great coaches of all time."

Like him or not, consider him a genius or a bully, Knight resurrected his career at Texas Tech the past two years after he was fired after 29 seasons at Indiana in September 2000. He sat out a year, then showed he hadn't lost his passion for the game, though he had learned to tame his temper a little.

"I didn't think for a moment that he wouldn't be back coaching, because he loves it," Smith said. "And he's still good at it."

The 800 club in college basketball has gotten less exclusive this year. At the start of the season it had only Smith (879), Kentucky's Adolph Rupp (876) and Mount St. Mary's Jim Phelan (819). Tennessee's Pat Summitt last week became the first woman to join the club and Texas' Jody Conradt became the second Wednesday night. Knight's arrival will swell the ranks to six.

If there's no magic in the number, 800 certainly signifies, at the least, decades of dedication and perseverance.

Recruiting, practices and games. Late nights studying films. Bus rides, plane trips, checking in and out of hotels. Phelan said last week that he'd finally had enough and would retire at the end of this season after 49 years.

"Sometimes, it's just time," he said. "I'm not going for 50 years just for the sake of making 50. That's just a number. It just means I'm terribly old."

Knight is 62 years old and could pass Smith before turning 65, a year younger than Smith was when he retired in 1997. Once the boy wonder of college coaching at Army before he went to Indiana, Knight could go on coaching for years after that. Basketball, with all the tinkering of lineups and strategies, still fascinates him.

"As long as it does," he said, "I don't see any reason not to be involved in it."

There was a mutual friend of Knight and Smith who walked away from coaching when he might have gone on for many years and chose, instead, to stay in the game as one of its wittiest commentators.

Al McGuire, who died two years ago on Sunday, coached for 20 years, the last 13 at Marquette, and won 405 games before stepping away.

Among the several books about McGuire, Knight wrote the foreword for one and Smith wrote the foreword for another.

In "Cracked Sidewalks and French Pastry," a recently published collection of McGuire's wit and wisdom, his comments on coaching echo both the biting humor and toughness of Knight and the sensitivity and courtliness of Smith.

Aspiring members of the 800 club, or the 400 club, could still learn a thing or two from McGuire.

--"A team should be an extension of a coach's personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious."

--"My rule was I wouldn't recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house. That's not my world. My world was a cracked sidewalk."

--"I don't discuss basketball. I dictate basketball. I'm not interested in philosophy classes."

--Coaching is "a profession in which, the longer you stay, the closer you are to being fired."

--"I don't know why life has been so good, and that's legit ... I guess mainly it's because of the people I touch."

--"I'm not afraid to cry," he said after beating North Carolina for the national title. "All I can think about is, Why me? After all the jocks and socks. All the odors in the locker room. All the fights in the gym. Just the wildness of it all. And to have it end like this ... "

Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.