Aug. 2, 1961: Breaking the rules
Battered by probation and scandal, the
program hardly appeared on the road to
recovery when McGuire, its charismatic
and successful head coach of nine years,
announced he was leaving for the pros in
August 1961. “Basketball at UNC under
McGuire reached a peak it probably never
will attain again,” predicted sports editor Whitey Kelly in The
Charlotte Observer.
The personal fallout seemed equally profound. “I was devas-
tated,” says Larry Brown ’ 63, then a rising junior. “Coach McGuire
was my hero. I had so much admiration for him. I thought it was
the end of my life when he left.”
Expectations of gloom proved rather misguided. On the same
day McGuire announced he would coach Wilt Chamberlain and
the Philadelphia Warriors in the NBA, UNC introduced his suc-
cessor. The personal choice of Chancellor William Aycock ’ 37 was
a retiring 30-year-old McGuire assistant, a defensive specialist
trained at Kansas who would enhance the program’s competitive-
ness and reputation for the next 36 years.
“He had this intense desire to be the best, like a guy who wants
to be the president of the United States,” McGuire said of Dean
Edwards Smith. “I’ve never seen a guy work harder.”
Smith found himself working hard just to dig North Carolina’s
program out of the deep hole left in McGuire’s wake.
Perhaps the heav-
iest blow fell on Jan.
10, 1961, when the
NCAA levied a
year’s probation on
the basketball team
for recruiting violations and lack of
institutional control,
the only such punishment in school
history. McGuire
publicly dismissed
the probation as the
result of a vendetta
on the part of Walter
Byers, the NCAA’s
executive secretary.
“There was no mid-
dle ground for Frank
McGuire,” wrote
Charlotte’s Kelly. “He
could either be as
charming as the
most polished diplo-
mat, or as vindictive
as a wronged wife.”
An NCAA investigation stretching back to 1955 catalogued the
provision of “extra or fringe benefits” for the parents of team
members;“excessive entertainment for prospect student-athletes”
documented in part by receipts McGuire admittedly manufactured
well after the fact; and “inadequate and ineffective accounting pro-
cedures and controls in regard to the expenditure of the Univer-
sity’s department of athletics.”
Less than a month after the probation hit, McGuire’s team was
involved in an embarrassing brawl at Duke, resulting in the suspen-
sion of Brown and Donnie Walsh ’ 62 and Duke’s Art Heyman.
Then in March, even as the school voluntarily sat out the ACC
Tournament because it was ineligible for NCAA play, three of its
players were mentioned in a point-shaving scandal that rocked col-
lege basketball — Doug Moe ’ 61 and Lou Brown ’ 61 were sus-
pended from school.
ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS
Dean Smith’s first team began under the shadow of NCAA probation. It
slipped to an 8-9 record after six big-win years under Frank McGuire;
more importantly, the program’s behavior was under the microscope of
Chancellor William Aycock ’ 37.
