IOWA CITY, IOWA — Early in Gary Williams' first game at North Carolina as Maryland's coach during the 1989-90 season, legendary Tar Heels coach Dean Smith was quietly sitting on the bench when he was assessed a technical foul by veteran Atlantic Coast Conference referee Lenny Wirtz.
"The play comes down to my end and there's a foul, and Lenny is in front of our bench and I asked what happened down there," Williams said, "And Lenny said, 'He told me his record in games I worked for him, and then Dean said, 'Just to let you know, that's the worst record of any official to work my games."
The Terps won that afternoon, giving them a sweep of North Carolina in Williams' first season back at his alma mater.
"Beating a Dean Smith team was one of the greatest thrills of my career," said Williams, who joined Smith in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last summer.
Smith, who died Saturday at age 83, had been in failing health, suffering from a condition that caused him to lose his once-encyclopediac memory. He was considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history.
When Smith went into retirement after the 1996-97 season, he was the winningest Division I coach of all time with 876 victories. Bob Knight and then archrival Mike Krzyzewski later surpassed that total.
Williams, who was 6-10 against the Tar Heels while at Maryland, said Smith never received the credit he deserved for being one of the game's innovators.
"Most coaches took things from what he did and put them into what they did," Williams said. "There's so many things about him — the 'four corners' led to the shot clock, the ACC put an experimental [3-point shot] line in one year inside the circle at about 17 feet. He said [to his players], 'You either shoot 3s or you shoot layups.' Substituting five players at a time. There's a million things he did."
The biggest impression Smith made on Williams as a coach was in the way he prepared his teams for games.
"You never played against anybody who was more prepared than Dean Smith, that as a head coach you went away knowing that to be competitive against him, you had to do the same thing," Williams said. "You had to raise your game a little bit as coach."
It was not just on the basketball court.
Williams can remember being down in North Carolina, not far from Chapel Hill, for a golf outing with friends. They happened to be at the Governors Club, where Smith was a member. Williams invited Smith to join the group, and whatever type of game and stakes the group from Maryland had set up changed immediately.
"I think Dean set the rules for the match," Williams said with a laugh. "He said, 'This is what we play down here.' He took over the match."
There are other stories tied to Maryland, too.
Smith was a chain-smoker, though he didn't like to be seen smoking. Whenever the Tar Heels came to College Park to play, Smith would have a smoke with the school's legendary P.R. man, Joe Blair, behind Cole Field House, right before tip-off.
The night the Terps became the first team to beat North Carolina at the newly-opened Dean E. Smith Center — forever known as the Dean Dome — Smith yelled at Maryland center Derrick Lewis as the teams ran off at halftime. He was upset with the way the spindly Lewis was using his elbows a little too freely while going for rebounds.
"My mother saw him do that and she called Coach Smith's office a couple of days later, asking him to apologize to me — and he did," said Lewis, now the coach at Archbishop Spalding.
Troy Wainwright, now a senior associate athletics director at Maryland, on Sunday recalled when he was a student manager working for Williams and Smith loudly complained to Wainwright about how small the visiting locker room was at Cole.
"I thought it was so cool that I was being yelled at by Dean Smith," Wainwright said.
Maryland coach Mark Turgeon met Smith just a few times early in his career, though the young coach was always made to feel like he was part of the family.
They were fellow Kansans and former Jayhawks — both played on Final Four teams in Lawrence, nearly a quarter of a century apart — and Turgeon's two mentors, Larry Brown and Roy Williams, were former Tar Heels who were raised by Smith into Hall-of-Fame coaches.
"A lot of things I do today are things they did with Coach," said Turgeon, who talked about Smith's legacy at the Maryland team breakfast Sunday in Iowa. "I've heard so many Coach Smith stories over the years, I could talk for days. He's just had a huge influence."
Smith's passing, though not shocking considering his failing health, hit Turgeon hard.
"I didn't think I'd be sad when he went," Turgeon said, a bit choked up. "But I started to think about all the things I'm doing today and I feel like I'm at Maryland today because of Coach Smith's influence."