Dean Smith retired on Oct. 9, 1997, to engineer giving the North Carolina job to Bill Guthridge, and SI.com columnist Pat Forde was so offended that he helped create an award in Smith’s honor.
“We are proud to honor the legacy of Coach Smith,” said Forde, announcing the creation of the USBWA’s Dean Smith Award in 2015. “Dean Smith was not simply a coach who won, but a coach who educated outside the gymnasium, who demonstrated a concern for his players beyond their athletic abilities, who had an active voice on social issues and was an agent for positive change.”
This same Forde, consistent to the core, has a major problem with Tony Bennett having stepped down from the UVA Basketball job on Oct. 18, 2024, though Tony Bennett, like Dean Smith, is not only a coach who won, but a coach who won with actual student-athletes – not one-and-done kids who pretended to attend classes for a few weeks until it was time to focus on training for the NBA Draft – actively demonstrates a concern for his kids outside the basketball complex, and is a role model for his program, for the University of Virginia, and for the world at large.
ICYMI: Tony Bennett retires
“Bennett isn’t built for college hoops in the 2020s, a time when athletes have more freedom, and a lot of adults struggle with the concept. This was the last act of a coach who craves control,” Forde wrote in his column on Bennett’s retirement, which I’m not going to link to, because Forde and SI.com, which is forever five minutes from being an ex-sports website, don’t deserve the clicks.
Forde’s contention is that Bennett, by stepping down three weeks before the season, and being succeeded by his top assistant, Ron Sanchez, is doing the student-athletes that he recruited, and Carla Williams, the AD at Virginia, a disservice by stepping down three weeks before the season.
I mean, it was OK for ol’ Deano, in fact, hey, let’s name an award after the guy on my watch, but when Tony Bennett does the same thing, it’s a cardinal sin.
This is par for the course for this Pat Forde clown, who infamously labeled Bennett a “towering fraud” after the 1-vs.-16 loss to UMBC in 2018, and didn’t accept the requisite plate of room-temperature crow in 2019, when Bennett’s Virginia team redeemed itself before the college basketball world by winning that season’s national championship.
Forde has used Bennett as a frequent punching bag over the years, lazily echoing the conventional wisdom that, Tony Bennett basketball boring, me can’t understand Pack Line, whenever he runs dry on column ideas, which for him is often.
It’s OK that Forde has never met a roll-the-ball-out-there coach that he’s not instantly admired and deemed a genius.
Not everybody understands how the actual games work.
It’s astounding that some of those types, like Pat Forde, can make a living writing about things that they will never understand, but that’s the world that we live in.
The non sequitur in Forde’s pathetic attempt at a takedown of Tony Bennett is the notion that somehow the student-athletes in the UVA Basketball program have somehow been treated wrong.
I was at Bennett’s good-bye presser today, and I didn’t see Pat Forde there asking any of the UVA players how they felt about his retirement, so it would seem to be the case that he is just presuming that they’re being held hostage.
Our guys there today didn’t talk to everybody, but I know from our conversations with a number of them over the past several months that the guys in the program were keenly aware that Bennett had been giving over the basketball day-to-day to Sanchez, the hand-picked successor who will serve as the interim coach, and that Sanchez was the point man on recruiting the transfer-portal guys who came in back in May.
Forde referred to the transfers in particular as “pawns in Bennett’s program preservation chess game,” without anything backing him up there – but it’s not like Pat Forde needs a valid reason to hate on Tony Bennett.
I’m guessing the issue is that his daughter, Brooke, a swimmer, couldn’t get in to UVA, which, I mean, no harm, no foul there – Virginia is a competitive academic school – and yeah, great for her, she won a relay medal in the 2020 Olympics, but it’s not like she’s on par with Gretchen Walsh, Kate Douglass, Emma Weber, Paige Madden.
So, a hack swimmer’s hack sportswriter dad takes out his frustrations on a coach who has a rotation shooting guard getting ready to graduate from the McIntire School of Commerce, an NBA Rookie of the Year, Malcolm Brogdon, with a master’s in public policy, who coached a walk-on into being a first-round pick in two years, who has a former student manager now coaching in the NBA.
Devon Hall and Jay Huff played in the NBA and have master’s degrees; NBA veteran Mamadi Diakite speaks four languages.
I’m leaving a lot out here.
Point being, Pat Forde is forever five minutes from being an ex-sportswriter, barely hanging on, trying to hold off the inevitable layoff that is, bad news, it’s coming, my man, though, good news, the car wash across town is hiring, and they provide the towels and everything.
I can see the name tag now.
Toweling Fraud, Pat Forde.
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Chris Graham
