Signals at key moments could make our lives a lot easier

One of the books I got for Christmas gave me an interesting idea.

It was Neil Patrick Harris's "Choose Your Own Autobiography," and it was a mixture of fact and fiction, sort of like those interactive books where every few pages, you have to make a decision that will affect your future.

You choose, and sometimes it's the right choice and sometimes a mistake.

Wouldn't it be great to have that opportunity in real life? To be given choices and be told what they are?

I can think of numerous times in my life when I had two possible scenarios in front of me, but there were other times when I had choices and didn't even realize how important they were. It's one thing to decide where to go to college or which of two job offers to take. But there were other times I didn't even realize I had choices.

It wouldn't even be a case of knowing what the choices were. Even a signal of some sort that you were at a crucial point in your life would help.

An example:

1970

In 1970, I had my first real relationship with a girlfriend. We were together from December 1969 until the end of May, when she returned home to Connecticut for the summer. We stayed in touch for the first half of the summer but then she stopped writing and calling.

I figured we had broken up, but in early September she called and said she was coming back to school and wondered if I could pick her up at the airport. Over the next day or so, she told me it had been a difficult summer and she asked me if I still cared for her. I said I did and it looked like we were together again.

She went home for a week and returned for the start of classes. The first evening she was back, she told me we had to break up.

This is where I needed the signal, just something to tell me that the next few minutes were very important and I should think carefully about what I said and did.

Because I did everything wrong.

I made the huge mistake of doing everything I could to conceal what I was feeling from her, even to the point of insulting her.

Witness our final exchange:

"I hope we can still be friends."

"Sure, why not?"

"You're taking this really well."

"It's no big deal."

"Well, I think it's a very big deal and very sad."

"Maybe you're taking yourself too seriously."

The only thing I could have done to make matters worse would have been to punch her in the mouth.

Given what she was going through, if I had been nice -- hell, if I had even been honest -- we might have worked things out and gotten back together that same fall.

L.A. 2000

Of course that never happened. In the last 44-plus years, I saw her once. We shared a hug and a minute or two of conversation in the Staples Center in Los Angeles. I was a newspaper columnist and she was a delegate to the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Now she's a judge in her home state after a long legal career.

It isn't as if I wish we had stayed together. With all the ups and downs in my own life, I doubt we would have made it through the '70s. But there is no question my poor handling of the breakup had a major negative effect on my life for years to come.

I had been struggling ever since graduating from high school three years earlier, but I had turned the corner that summer with an A and a B in two courses. I was really looking forward to the fall semester. My girlfriend and I had decided to take a class together, a class that I found almost impossible to attend after our breakup.

By November, I had pretty well gone off the track. Instead of going to classes, I went to matinees, some of them double features. By May I had flunked out and was heading into a period of about seven years before I would turn things around.

All in all, the time I wasted was probably the difference between having a good career and one that was just all right. I'm not complaining. My family life ended up being much better than my career, but it's still disappointing to realize that right choices at key times could have made me a lot more successful.

If only we really did get warnings ... or even signals.

Dean Smith was a great coach and an even better man

When an 83-year-old man dies, it can be either sad or a blessing.

When former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith died, it was a bit of both. For the last few years, Smith had been in decline from what his family described as a memory-related condition. They didn't say Alzheimer's, but I have come to see from my own experiences that there certainly are other diseases every bit as heartbreaking.

For 36 years, from 1962-97, Smith was Atlantic Coast Conference basketball to much of the nation. His team went to 11 NCAA Final Fours and won two championships. Fully 96 percent of his players earned their degrees, with some of them -- including Michael Jordan -- coming back in the summers to complete their final credits.

Dean Smith

Smith earned the highest distinction of all when you realize that the NCAA changed the rules of the game because of something he developed.

For many years, weak teams had used the stall to give them a chance to compete with better ones. But Smith's Four Corners offense was used late in games to make it even more difficult for lesser teams to compete with his Tar Heels.

The NCAA responded by going to a 35-second shot clock to keep teams from holding onto the ball.

As good a coach as he was, Smith may have been an even better man.

When he recruited Charlie Scott in 1967, Scott was the first African-American to receive an athletic scholarship at UNC. Smith also integrated restaurants and a Chapel Hill neighborhood. He was a liberal in a conservative state and spoke out for a nuclear freeze in the 1980s.

He was also a man who knew his limitations. North Carolina Democrats tried to recruit him to run against Senator Jesse Helms, a race Smith might have won, but he knew he was a better coach than he would have been a senator and turned them down.

He was a coach who truly cared about the young men who played for him, and most of them stayed in touch with him long after leaving Chapel Hill.

His most famous player was Michael Jordan, who played for him for three years from 1981-84. Jordan issued a statement about Smith Sunday.

"Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence on my life than Coach Smith. He was more than a coach -- he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life. My heart goes out to Linnea and their kids. We've lost a great man who had an incredible impact on his players, his staff and the entire UNC family."

During the 18 years I spent as a sportswriter, I covered some great games involving the Tar Heels. One game at Carmichael Coliseum in 1983 between No. 1-ranked Virginia and No. 2-ranked Carolina was truly amazing. With a little more than seven minutes left, the Cavaliers had a 62-47 lead. The Tar Heels won, 63-62, with Jordan scoring the last basket on a breakaway dunk.

A year later, at the NCAA East Regionals in Atlanta, the team Smith considered the best of his 36 Carolina squads suffered a 72-68 upset at the hands of Indiana. Ironically, ACC rival Virginia beat Indiana in the next round to advance to the Final Four.

But where Smith impressed me the most of all was two years later in Ogden, Utah. It was the NCAA West Regional. It was four years since the Tar Heels had won the championship and four years since they had been to the Final Four. The national media was making a big deal out of the fact that this was the first of Smith's senior classes that had not been to a Final Four.

Carolina beat Utah in the first round, and the next day the four winners had a press conference. I asked Smith's seniors if they had been affected by the talk. Before they could answer, Smith intervened.

"That's not a fair question," he said. "How many other teams here have been in the last four years?"

My question never got answered.

The next day, Carolina crushed Alabama-Birmingham, 77-59, and when the press conference was over, Dean Smith came looking for me.

"I owe you an apology," he said to me.

I shook my head. "Coach, you don't owe me anything."

"There was nothing at all wrong with your question yesterday," he said. "It's just that I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep the pressure off my players."

Dean E. Smith Center

I told him I understood and I thanked him.

There was only one more time my path crossed Coach Smith's. In February 1989 I was covering Nevada-Reno and we came all the way across the country for a game with UNC.

It wasn't a great game. The Heels easily outclassed the Wolf Pack, but the thrill of it was seeing a game in the newest college basketball palace.

The Dean E. Smith Center.

Rest in peace, Coach Smith. You've earned it.

The real secret behind the naming of the Super Bowl

"Yesterday, when I was young(er) ..."

In January 1987, early in the two years I lived in Colorado and was sports editor of the Greeley Tribune, I was looking for a different sort of column about the Super Bowl.

This was what I found:

***

Exactly how did the Super Bowl get its name?

If you've read the official National Football League handout, there's some mumbo jumbo about Pete Rozelle walking in the desert one day and finding a burning bush. What he stopped to check out the situation, he heard a deep voice.

The Lord? It's possible, but more likely it was Charlton Heston.

"Call it the Super Bowl," the voice reportedly said.

"Yes, boss," Rozelle reportedly replied.

The rest, as the NFL would have us believe it, was history.

Being a dedicated investigative reporter as well as a sportswriter, I decided that this was probably not true. Since I had a little extra time this week, I figured I would look into it.

One phone call put me in touch with Marvin Potsterton, who worked for Rozelle was a public relations assistant in the mid-1960s.

"How did you get this number?" he asked.

I declined to answer. We dedicated investigative reporters never reveal our sources.