Guthridge Steps Into Limelight

Once, it was going to be Larry Brown, before his wandering ways made that improbable.

Then Roy Williams became the one who would replace Dean Smith, before he established his own premier program at Kansas.

Or perhaps it would be Eddie Fogler, South Carolina’s coach.

But all the while, the next North Carolina coach was sitting on the bench next to Smith.

For 30 years.

Bill Guthridge, a quiet, bespectacled assistant only six years Smith’s junior, has been chosen as North Carolina’s coach, with no interim label. He will make his debut at the helm of one of college basketball’s most storied programs at the age of 60.

“This isn’t quite the way I had envisioned this whole scenario over the years,” Guthridge said. “I had hoped Dean and I could go out together and ride off into the sunset in five or six years.”

It has been a collaboration that went beyond loyalty. Guthridge has stayed in one job for three decades. In return, Smith has given Guthridge a team that could win the national championship. There are four starters back from a Final Four team.

“It’s like you’re losing your father, but he’s being replaced with your uncle,” forward Antawn Jamison said.

“I know they’ll play very hard for him,” Smith said. “They won’t make my decision look bad. I know they’ll do it for me too.”

All those years as an assistant, and Guthridge would have remained one if Smith had wanted.

“I told him that if you want to change your mind at one minute to 2 o’clock, that would be great with all of us,” Guthridge said at an afternoon news conference. “I didn’t stay around here 30 years hoping Dean would leave so I could be the head coach.”

Guthridge--an assistant to Smith on the 1976 Olympic team along with Georgetown Coach John Thompson--turned down opportunities at Arkansas and Penn State among others, canceling a 1978 news conference at which he was to have been introduced as Penn State’s coach.

“It’s a natural, logical, great decision,” Fogler said. “After 30 years as an assistant coach, there is not a player or former coach in that program that does not have respect for Bill Guthridge. He’s a tremendous coach, a great teacher--and I’m glad his dry wit came across today.”

Like Smith, Guthridge is from Kansas, where he played at Kansas State and coached high school basketball before becoming a Kansas State assistant to Tex Winter, now a Chicago Bull assistant. He arrived in Chapel Hill in 1967, and never left.

Times staff writer Chris Dufresne contributed to this story.