EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — One was labeled a soft-love choker, the other a hard-line activist.
Dean Smith? Couldn't win the big one. John Thompson? Less approachable than a cactus.
But before 61,000 wide-eyed witnesses in the Superdome a quarter century back, their first postgame moves defined them in ways no dead-on jumper or wayward pass could.
At the close of the greatest national championship game of them all, Smith went to console Thompson, his friend. Thompson went to console Fred Brown, his guard.
Major college sport can be such a cold, impersonal place, no more cuddly than the sterile hangars the NCAA uses to house the Final Four. The head coaches of North Carolina and Georgetown changed all that on March 29, 1982, when Smith and Thompson showed a little uncommon decency on their road to the Hall of Fame.
First, the Smith reaction to finally winning his legacy-saving ring. He was 0-for-6 at the Final Four before the freshman, Michael Jordan, rose up for the shot, before Brown threw his pass to a guy in the wrong shirt.
Smith burned to disarm his critics, to prove he could beat the best of the best. So the final Superdome horn sounded like a liberating symphony in his ears, and felt like a reason to act the way Jim Valvano would a year later all over the Albuquerque floor.
"And Dean Smith's first reaction was to come down and console me," Thompson said in the first hour of Saturday morning, after doing the courtside radio calls on Georgetown-Vanderbilt and North Carolina-Southern California, the games that scheduled this evening's 25th anniversary function at Continental Arena.
"I hope I would have been classy enough to have done that," Thompson continued, "because I probably would have been doing what Valvano did. I probably would have been running around yelling and hollering, but his thoughts were to come to his friend, because he knew how I felt."
Smith helped Thompson get the Georgetown job. He had Thompson as his assistant on the 1976 Olympic team, and Big John never forgot.
He knew Smith all but integrated the ACC. Thompson knew Smith's father, a Kansas high school coach, dressed black players in the '30s. He knew Smith helped black friends and students eat in whites-only restaurants and purchase homes in whites-only neighborhoods. He knew Smith signed the first black major college player south of the Mason-Dixon line, Charlie Scott.
So the first black head coach to compete in the national championship game still keeps a picture of the victorious Smith ignoring the Carolina celebration around him so he could tell Thompson he'd done himself proud.
"I still look at the expression on his face in that picture," Thompson said. "He was truly looking at me to see that I was OK, because he had been there before. He had enough presence of mind — at a time when he deserved to be happy and run around — to come and find me first. I'm just so afraid of the fact that I might not have done that."
Oh, John Thompson would have done that. That was made clear after Brown threw away the ball and the dream season tethered to it.
Nearly every March, Brown does more interviews than Larry King. The questions and answers remain the same. He threw the ball to James Worthy when he thought he was throwing it to Eric Smith. "If I had a rubber band," Brown said, "I would have yanked it back."
He helped Georgetown win a national title two years later, and went on to build a successful family and business life. But the snapshot that stays with everyone is that of Thompson wrapping his big-bear arms around Brown and whispering a sweet-something in his ear.
"Don't worry about it," Thompson told Brown. "You've won a lot more games for me than you've lost.
Forever cast as a towering, intimidating presence, as a coach who ran an isolationist program, Thompson received more positive letters over that scene than any other he'd painted at Georgetown.
"I'm glad I hugged him," Thompson said, "because with the emotions that were involved, God knows what I would've done. I was just very lucky that I expressed my emotions in that manner.""Fred and I at times had personality conflicts, although I respected his competitiveness and how he played. I knew he was an upbeat, emotional person, and I probably was worried about how he would've reacted to all that."
When the Hoyas won it all in '84, Thompson and Brown enjoyed a different kind of embrace. They didn't talk about sweet redemption, and didn't need to. "I realized when I hugged him the second time what had occurred," Thompson said.
Twenty-five years after that wild and crazy Carolina-Georgetown night, a witness named John Thompson III, former player at Dean Smith's summer camp, will square off against Roy Williams I, former assistant on Dean Smith's bench. Patrick Ewing, '82 freshman, is expected to be back in the stands, cheering for his Hoya son.
Big John will be back in a headset at courtside. The memories will hit him like a blind pick, of course, just like they do whenever he runs into the part owner of the Charlotte Bobcats.
"I made your career," Thompson tells Michael Jordan. "You never would've gotten the shot if Worthy hadn't been in the middle, because we were so afraid of Worthy and of collapsing back into the middle (to guard him)."
Thompson laughed when he recounted those exchanges.
"That's why Mike hit the shot," he said. "It took guts for Mike to hit the shot."
It took heart for Thompson to console Brown, just as it took perspective for Smith to console Thompson. Williams chided himself Saturday for engaging in a group Tar Heel hug and leaving Illinois coach Bruce Weber hanging after beating him for the national title two years back. The Carolina coach sprinted off the floor to catch Weber and apologized for the delay.
Smith's gesture toward Thompson, Williams said, "was a great lesson for all of us." Truth is, the ball-playing talent that night in the Superdome was beyond compare.
So was the grace of the two coaches who assembled it.