April 24, 2003
By Dallas Cogle
Nothing contented little Orlando Smith like getting in the bathtub every Saturday night as a youngster growing up in the rural town of Scotland in St. Mary’s County.
Smith was the prototypical cute, chubby preschooler during the early to mid 1950s, and the tub offered him the perfect refuge from his older siblings. That is until it was time to get out.
“He was a chubby, little boy, and [his siblings] used to tease him while he was getting out of the tub all the time. So he didn’t want to get out,” said Parthenia, Smith’s pleasant-natured mother.
Smith literally became synonymous with his comfortable porcelain surroundings each weekend – so much so that the nickname, Tubby, emerged. And Orlando was all but a forgotten part of his identity.
“When he went to elementary school for the first time, he told the teacher that he was Tubby. She said he had to have another name, and Tubby replied that he didn’t know of any other name. He said, ‘That’s what I go by,'” recalled Smith’s mother, now 77 and still a St. Mary’s County resident living in Ridge.
Now at age 51, he continues to be known as Tubby, though the baby fat is all gone and he has blossomed into a distinguished adult. His calling card has also taken on a different meaning, now synonymous with being the accomplished head coach of the University of Kentucky basketball program. His Wildcats are coming off a stellar 32-4 season, boasting the most wins and least losses of any Division I team in the country, and their 26-game winning streak that ended versus Marquette in the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament was the longest the nation has seen in seven years.
“After that boy got hurt, it took the spirit out of the team,” Parthenia said, referring to Kentucky star guard Keith Bogans’ sprained ankle that hampered his play versus Marquette. “I thought they were going to win it all, but that boy got hurt.”
The loss to Marquette, though damaging to a Kentucky team looking to win its first national championship since doing so in its head coach’s debut season (1997-98) with the program, did not keep the deserved coaching honors from coming Smith’s way. He swept all six national coach-of-the-year awards the NCAA officially recognizes, including the Naismith, Associated Press and National Association of Basketball Coaches honors, and became the first coach to pull off the feat since Bobby Knight in 1975.
The St. Mary’s County native captured nine national coaching awards all told for the past season and was named the Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year.
“We’re just extremely proud of him. We have confidence and believe in him,” said Cindy, 37, Smith’s youngest sibling who lives with his mother. “He was gone and married shortly after I was born. Sometimes, we all watch the Kentucky games together if we’re not working, and my mom likes to be in front of the TV to see him.”
The prestigious coaching accolades cap what has already been a remarkable head-coaching run at the college level, spanning 12 seasons in which Smith boasts a robust 288-109 overall mark, winning 73 percent of his games.
He has certainly made a splash in the college ranks much like he used to do during his coveted bath times that produced the name that fans and supporters know him by today.
“I think mostly everybody at that [early] age was pudgy. We didn’t have indoor plumbing in our house, so we had to boil water on the stove in order to take a bath. When I got in the tub every Saturday night, I just enjoyed getting cleaned. Back then, you just cleaned yourself up during the week until you took a bath,” Smith reminisced. “I tried to get rid of [the nickname] while I was at Great Mills High School, but it just stuck with me. Having that name was tough in school, because people naturally thought I wasn’t athletic. So it made me work harder in sports to prove that I wasn’t slow.”
Humble, modest background
Smith’s pursuit of a long-term deal with Kentucky was accomplished Friday when the university inked him to a new eight-year contract running through the 2010-11 season. According to the Kentucky Wildcats web site, the deal is worth more than $20 million and would pay at least $2.5 per year in base salary ($200,000), radio, television and endorsements and bonuses, beginning next season. The lucrative package could make the pride of St. Mary’s County the highest paid collegiate men’s basketball coach in the country.
“Money has never yet made a man rich,” Smith said. “What makes you rich is the people you have the privilege of working with… I just signed an eight-year deal and I look forward to being a part of this university for some time. I feel quite lucky that my name is on that contract.”
But nothing has come Smith’s way without plenty of hard work and dedication to his craft.”Consistency and longevity is the one thing that I learned from my dad,” Smith said, referring to his 81-year-old father, Guffrey, now in St. Mary’s County’s Bayside Nursing Center. “My dad owned and drove a school bus for 43 years, and he never missed a day on the job. He had to do it over and over and over again. He didn’t mind working. And my dad always told me, ‘You’re going to work for the rest of your life. So don’t rush it.’ It’s that level of concentration and being able to focus on the task at hand that I have passed on to my players.”
Smith first employed such a consistent brand of work ethic back in his childhood days as one of 17 children, now spanning 37 to 61 years of age, in the rural St. Mary’s County household.
“We used to pick corn and tomatoes and put them in bushel baskets,” Smith said. “They were too heavy to carry with our hands, so we had to load them onto our shoulders. We stored our corn in the corn house during the winter months in order to feed the chickens and hogs.”
In between cutting the wood that heated the house and carrying bushel baskets, Smith and his brothers made the best of their workday.
“We attached a bushel basket above the doorway to the corn house so we could shoot hoops while we were working,” he said.
Smith’s very first field-goal conversion occurred in that bushel basket at the tender age of six, opening the door to a sport that would later turn his childhood nickname into a household identity.
“He made his first basket in a tomato basket. It was a bushel basket, and that’s how he got his start,” his mother said.
With so many children running around the house, Smith and his siblings could not help but turn just about anything into a competition. They loved playing dodgeball, kickball and, of course, basketball. But a few years after making his first basket, Smith realized hoops was his sport of choice.
“We used to watch NBA and college teams on TV. My dad drove chartered buses to Baltimore Bullets games, and he took me one Sunday to see Baltimore play the Philadelphia Warriors. I was just a little guy, maybe 10 or 12 years old,” said Smith, who witnessed firsthand such Baltimore greats as Gus Johnson and Kevin Lockery. “Wilt Chamberlain was playing for the Philadelphia Warriors at that time, and watching that game really inspired me.
“I wanted to go to the NBA, but I wasn’t good enough. So I decided to do the next best thing – coaching.”
Smith began his organized basketball career as a ninth grader under head coach Cecil Short at George Washington Carver High School, an all-black institution in St. Mary’s County due to segregation. Carver only offered two sports – basketball and track – and Smith took part in both. By the following year as a sophomore, desegregation had taken effect and Carver was consolidated with Great Mills, where Smith finished his remaining three years in high school.He became a solid baseball player during his time at Great Mills, pitching and manning other positions across the diamond. But nothing could take the place of basketball, playing for then-Great Mills head coach Gene Wood.
“I enjoyed baseball, but I was better at basketball and I liked it just a little bit more,” Smith said.
He graduated from Great Mills in 1969 and returned there to kick off his head-coaching career on the hardwood in 1973 after earning a college degree at High Point in North Carolina. Smith registered a 46-36 overall mark during his four seasons at the helm of the Great Mills basketball program, just the start of what would be an illustrious career path.
His impact
Wherever Smith has patrolled the hoops sidelines, the winning results speak for themselves. After leaving Great Mills, he landed a head-coaching position at Hoke County High School in North Carolina and sported a 28-18 tab in two seasons. From there, Smith moved on to the college ranks in 1979 as a seven-year assistant for Virginia Commonwealth University, which manufactured a 144-64 record during that time with three Sun Belt Conference championships and five NCAA tournament appearances.
His next stop was South Carolina in 1986. During the course of Smith’s three years as a Gamecocks assistant, South Carolina produced a 53-35 showing. Then, in 1989, Kentucky came calling, courtesy of then-head coach Rick Pitino. Kentucky was mired in NCAA probation and player defections at the time, and Pitino felt Smith was the man for the job of assisting the program back to its feet.
Kentucky improved to 14-14 in 1989-90, and the following year, Smith was promoted to Pitino’s associate coach. With Kentucky still on probation the next season, the Wildcats sported a 22-6 mark, a final ranking of ninth in the AP poll and an SEC-best 14-4 record.
Smith’s performance on Pitino’s staff did not go unnoticed, and he received his first collegiate head-coaching position the following year at Tulsa. In four seasons at Tulsa, Smith recorded a 79-43 record including two Sweet 16 appearances in the NCAA tournament. He then accepted the Georgia coaching reins in 1995, compiling a 45-19 mark there in two seasons with an NCAA tournament appearance in each.
Then, in 1997, Kentucky came calling once again. This time, it was for head coach and Smith returned to the Wildcats.
“I never worked or played for any big-time coaches. I just worked myself through the ranks. I moved my family eight times,” said Smith, whose stomping grounds have included Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Georgia and now Kentucky. “My family was willing to make the sacrifice and ready to move each time.”
Smith kicked off his second Kentucky tenure with a national championship in 1998, becoming just the second college head coach ever to win a title in his first year at a program. Since then, Kentucky has ventured back to the NCAA tournament every season with Smith and the Wildcats at least advancing to the round of 16 four of the five times.
“It’s been amazing when you consider how many opportunities there are to trip up. There are a lot of great coaches who haven’t reached this level,” he said. “I always look at myself as a teacher first. We influence a lot of players, and our classroom is on public display. We were graded 36 times this year.”
No matter where he has coached, the trademark fierce, icy stare always accompanies Smith. Most of his players would agree that it never fails to convey his message.
“He got that trait from his father,” Parthenia said. “His father used to give that stare to all 17 kids to keep them in line. He used it most of the time in public, but we were blessed when it came to our kids. To hear some people’s story, indeed, I have a lot to be thankful for. I thank the Lord.”
“Dad’s face used to get so strained when he looked at me hard,” Smith added in a nostalgic tone.
Smith returns to St. Mary’s County a few times each year to visit family, relatives and friends and take part in a golf tournament that benefits the community. While Kentucky is his present home, his roots hold a special place in his heart.
“There is no place I love more than my home in Southern Maryland,” he said. “St. Mary’s County is so wonderful to look at it when I fly over it. I’m always in awe of it, and there’s just so much history in that county.”
Dallas Cogle is a sports writer for Southern Maryland Newspapers – Maryland Independent in Charles County, The Enterprise in St. Mary’s County and Calvert Recorder in Calvert County.
