By Jeri Rowe

Nearly a half century ago, he came to High Point College to play basketball.

He was one of three African-Americans on campus, a farmer's son from Maryland who grew up using a bushel basket nailed to a corn house as a backyard hoop.  When he arrived, he had never been to North Carolina before.

He was willow-thin, stood 6-foot-3 and played wide open. He started all four years, became a team captain, played for three coaches and averaged 14.7 points during his four-year career.

He earned all-conference honors as a senior, and graduated in 1973 with a degree in health and physical education. Today, he is the school's seventh all-time leading scorer with 1,589 career points.

But he's now known for his success beside the court - not on it. He is one of the best coaches in college basketball, one of only seven still coaching who has reached 500 wins and captured a national title.

He is Orlando Smith. But everyone knows him by his boyhood nickname, one he received long ago as a youngster being bathed in his grandmother's wash basin and enjoying it so much he didn't want to get out.

That is Tubby.

On Saturday night, along with a coach and two other athletes, Orlando "Tubby" Smith was inducted into the Athletics Hall of Fame at High Point University.

But ask him about college, he doesn't mention games. He talks about relationships.

At High Point College, he met his wife and formed lifelong friendships. He now sees North Carolina as home, and no matter how successful he has become, he looks at High Point, North Carolina, as the place that started it all.
 

Coming South
 
Smith grew up in Scotland, Maryland, a farming community beside the Chesapeake Bay where people worked the land and the ocean to make ends meet. Smith saw that firsthand with his father, Guffrie.

Guffrie farmed and worked many jobs to feed his wife, Parthenia, and their 17 children.

He cut hair, worked construction and sold firewood. He ran the boiler room at a nearby naval station and bought land to open a trailer park. He owned a laundromat, a barbershop and a charter bus service. Meanwhile, he drove a school bus for 48 years.

Guffrie fought in World War II and received a Purple Heart after he and his fellow soldiers were ambushed in the Italian Alps.

During that fight, when nearly every American was killed, Guffrie promised God that if he made it back to Maryland, he would be a servant to his faith and his community for the rest of his life.

That happened.

Guffrie became a staunch Methodist. He chaired various church boards, sang in the church choir and got involved in his community. He served as an election official, a Mason and a lifelong member of the local 4-H Club, the local NAACP chapter and Maryland Council of PTAs.

Along the way, he gave his children a wealth of advice. That includes these two nuggets:

"It doesn't cost anything to treat people right."

"If you gave your word to someone, you should keep it because your word is your bond."

 Guffrie remembered that when a local university came to recruit Tubby, the sixth of his 17 children.

At first, the school offered Tubby a scholarship. Later, because of a coaching change, the school withdrew the scholarship.  

Guffrie didn't like that at all. He told his son to consider the Methodist school in North Carolina, the one that had sent him recruiting letters and had offered him a full scholarship.
"You're going to High Point," Guffrie told his son.
 

Finding Lifelong Connections
 
When Smith came, he found High Point College to be a gracious place. But he missed home and wanted to go back. So, he called his dad.

"Someone bothering you, son?" Guffrie asked. "You doing OK academically? Something happen to you?"
"No, I'm lonesome," his son responded.

"Boy, you can't come home," his father told him. "Your bed has already been taken. If you've got to go, you'd better go into the Army."

Smith stayed, and High Point College grew on him.

He met Donna Walls, the college's first black homecoming queen. She was a freshman from Richmond, Virginia; Smith, a senior. He offered her a ride home in his two-tone beige and cream 1964 Chevrolet Impala.

Walls later became his wife, the mother of their four children – one daughter, Trish; and three sons, Orlando (G.G.), Saul and Brian.

"Meeting her at High Point kept me humble and resourceful," Smith says today. "She was there always keeping my spirits up, and everything I've ever done my wife and I have done together.
That is the key. I thank God every day I met her at High Point."

Smith also met fellow basketball players Carlvin Steed, Joe Colbert and Phil Butler. They became fast friends.

Their friendship blossomed at a time when the South wrestled with racism during the first years of desegregation. Steed and Colbert were black; Butler, white. None of them allowed the era's tension to sour their friendship, especially Smith, the lone Northerner of the four.  

Smith's parents raised him in a house where integrity and character superseded hate. Plus, as a teenager in Maryland, Smith worked on a committee to help calm the tension when he and other black students enrolled at Great Mills High, the all-white school.

Once again, Smith remembered what his dad told him.

"You're going to get persecuted, son," he told him. "That is part of life. But how you deal with that is what you need to remember. Be patient. Know who you are."
 
'Tubby Never Met A Stranger'
 
These life lessons helped Smith embrace college life in the South. A number of civil rights groups, including the Black Panthers, contacted him while he was in college because they wanted him to get more involved in the era's racial struggles.

But like his father, Smith wanted to work from within the system to make change. In the process, he discovered lifelong connections.

Smith found a second home with the Steed family. They lived on High Point's south side. Smith found an older mentor in Colbert, a Vietnam veteran a decade older than him. Smith found another brother in Butler.

Butler had a hand in recruiting Smith. He worked at the High Point YMCA with Gene Littles, then a basketball star at High Point College. Littles had written the very letters that coaxed Smith to the South.

But Littles couldn't type. Butler could. So, at the High Point Y, Butler typed out the recruitment letters Littles wrote to Smith, and Littles signed his name.
Those are some of the letters Smith's dad remembered.

At High Point College, Smith also ran track. Coach Bob Davidson heard that Smith had run hurdles in high school, and he recruited Smith to be the fourth hurdler in the school's shuttle hurdle relay team.

Smith's team set a school record.

"Tubby never met a stranger," Davidson says today. "He was a fine young man. He did all the things you're supposed to do and made a big impression on everyone he came in contact with. He was a good talker, but he was never loud. He never was one to beat his own drum."

With basketball, Smith played first for Bob Vaughn and then J.D. Barnett. In his senior year, he played for Jerry Steele, the former Guilford College coach who also had coached in the ABA with the Carolina Cougars.

Steele's experience as a coach made Smith nervous. Once again, he called his dad.

"You know you don't get a second chance to make a first impression," his dad told him.

Like he had done his entire career at High Point College, Smith played hard.

Steele remembers.

"We would start practice at 3 o'clock, and Tubby would've already been through a workout," Steele says today. "He was an extremely hard worker, and that picked up the rest of the team."

Steele knows where that drive came from: the Smith family farm off Fresh Pond Neck Road.

"He told me once about the 17 kids in his family and what it was like growing up," Steele says. "He said you always had to get in front of the line to get anything. Had he not done that, he knew he would've been left out.

"But you could tell he was appreciative of everything that fell his way," Steele continues. "He didn't complain. He always came early and stayed late. That told me he wanted to play."

And play he did. But after college, he wanted to coach. In 1973, a few months after graduation, he started coaching at Great Mills High, his alma mater. And like he had done his whole life, he asked for advice.

This time, he went to Steele.

"Take any job you can get," Steele told him, "and do something with it."

Smith did.
 
A Coaching Legend Is Born

Smith has come a long way since his days at Great Mills High. His accolades are many. Here are a few:
 

Named National Coach of the Year three times. Won a national title with Kentucky in 1998. Took five different schools to the NCAA Tournament – Tulsa, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota and Texas Tech – making him one of only two coaches all-time to take five different schools to the NCAA Tournament.

Helped coach the USA Olympic basketball team to a gold medal in 2000. Coached 13 NBA draft picks; 22 former players have gone on to play in the NBA. Received the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award. That happened last month.

 "Some guys just have a presence," basketball coach Rick Pitino told the New York Times in 1997 about Smith, one of his former assistants. "They light up a room, and their voice carries. Some assistants take losing as hard as the head guy. I found all that out about Tubby. I watch him on the sideline now on TV and when he goes out of his mind, and his eyes bulge out of his sockets, I think, 'Hey, that's me.'"

In April, Smith became the head basketball coach for the University of Memphis. If he takes Memphis to the NCAA Tournament, he'll become the first college coach ever to take six teams to the Big Dance.

Many think he can. And that is significant in a city like Memphis. But his potential success has more to do than just winning games.

"Smith still means something in the South, especially to black families who watched him lead the Kentucky Wildcats to the national title in 1998 as the first black coach in the program's history," ESPN's Myron Medcalf wrote in a column last month.

"The kids Smith will covet at Memphis won't remember that run, but their parents will. And in a city that acted as a key hub in the civil rights movement, it's not insignificant."

At 64, after four decades of coaching, Smith will lead yet another team. He says he does it because he still loves the game.

"I grew up in a household where there were 17 of us, and you learn to share, you learn to get along, you learn to care," Smith says today. "That is why I think I have a lot of gas left in the tank. I know I can still get it done."
 
A Ride, A Call, A Pocket watch

For Smith, it's the relationships that count. And some of the most important in his life started in High Point. Basketball was simply the reason they began.
First, to Phil Butler.

In 2010, Butler drove to Indianapolis for the Final Four and met up with Smith. Smith's Minnesota team wasn't in the Final Four, but Smith had scored tickets and he wanted Butler to come up.
When Butler got ready to leave, Smith stopped him.

"How you getting home?" Smith asked.

"Tubby, I drove up here," Butler responded.
 

Smith asked Butler to take him to the airport. At the airport, Smith changed his mind and ended up going all the way to Butler's home in North Carolina.

"He didn't want me making the trip by myself," says Butler, who lives at Badin Lake less than an hour from High Point University. "And it was after the season, he was winding down, getting back into his comfort zone and living a normal life a little bit. We spent two or three days together, and it was just great.

"He knew he could be Tubby, and I could be me."

Next, to Joe Colbert. He went with Butler to see Smith coach at Georgia, Kentucky and Minnesota. Meanwhile, Smith calls him several times a month to check in and say hello.
Colbert, now 74, lives less than three miles from campus.

"If you have two or three friends your whole life, and I mean true friends, that is a [great] accomplishment," Colbert says. "Tubby will call and say, 'Old Man, how you doing? You feel alright?' That means so much to me."

And then, there is Carlvin Steed.

Five years ago, Steed died from cancer. Smith spoke at Steed's funeral and gave Steed's only son, Andrew, a gift. It was a pocket watch, a Steed family heirloom that Steed had given Smith.

"That was a very thoughtful thing," says Carlvena Steed Foster, Carlvin's sister. "None of us had thought about the watch at that moment. But Tubby had. He told me Andrew needed to have it because Carlvin treasured it, and Carlvin had given it to Tubby because he valued their friendship.

"Tubby has that same sense of family."
 
Helping Coach Steele, Helping HPU
 
It was two summers ago when Smith stopped by to see Steele, his former coach.  Steele's health was failing, and he was using a walker. But Steele's health problems melted away as the two traded stories at the Steele house.
 

But before Smith left, he took aside Steele's wife, Kitty.

Their conversation still makes Kitty tear up.

"What impressed me so much was that when he was leaving that day, he told me, 'If you need anything, you let me know,'" she says. "I was so touched by that. Jerry was already having health problems, and Tubby was concerned enough that he worried we might have a need.

"Since then, he's called and said the same thing," she says. "It shows you how down to earth he is. I think he probably knows Jerry coached before the big money for coaches came in. Still, he says that. He has always said that."

Smith and his wife, Donna, have given more than $2 million through the Tubby Smith Foundation to assist underprivileged youth in communities throughout Kentucky, Minnesota and Texas.
At his college home at High Point University, he and his wife have provided the new locker rooms inside the James H. and Jesse E. Millis Athletic and Convocation Center.

Scott Cherry, HPU's current basketball coach, is reminded of that every time he and his team walk in and out of the locker room. It's the plaque he sees, imprinted with the faces of Tubby and Donna Smith.

It's right by the door.

It makes Cherry remember the conversations he's had with Smith. Smith supports Cherry and tells the people who need to listen the importance of building the program and attracting talented players to relatively young Division I school.

"Anytime you have alumni who have gone on to great success - that is huge for the program," Cherry says. "Whether it's Michael Jordan at North Carolina or Tubby Smith at High Point, you can tell a player that there is a person who graduated from this university who went on to great success.

"You can tell them, 'You can do that, too.'"
 
A Motto To Remember
 
Ask Smith about his own philanthropy, and he pauses. Then, he talks about history.

His own history.

"Two people couldn't raise 17 kids by themselves; it took a community," Smith says. "Someone helped me, and someone helped our family so that is what you do. You reach out to those who need help. Again, we are here to serve one another. Dad taught me that long ago. People don't need a hand out they need hand up."
 

On Saturday night, when he was inducted into the HPU Athletics Hall of Fame, he spoke to a room full of former teammates. There were Butler and Colbert as well as Steve Allen, Mick Clark, Reick Foebler and John Kirkman.

And of course, there was his wife, Donna, the former homecoming queen from High Point College. He called her his MVP.

Smith now joins Davidson and Jerry Steele, two of his former coaches, in the HPU Athletics Hall of Fame. Smith put his induction into context Saturday night.

"This is a significant honor," he said at the end of his 10-minute speech. "By that I mean I don't think I have ever received a greater honor. There is no better thing.

"High Point's motto states, 'Nothing without divine guidance,' and that is a good mantra for all of us young and old to live by," he continued. "It is through the instruction received from my parents growing up and here at High Point University that I've been able to reach farther, reach further and go higher.

"With proper guidance, support and inspiration, nothing is impossible. And that is something you can see at this university.''

Smith will always hold that close. A farmer's son raised beside the Chesapeake Bay learned to love the game of basketball by shooting at a bushel basket nailed to a corn house.

Only in America, Smith likes to say.

High Point University helped make that happen.

#GoHPU