Remembering Joe Smith

Joseph C. Smith, one of the pioneers of women’s basketball, died Tuesday at age 65. He was an enormously knowledgeable, and sometimes contentious, observer of the sport. He will be sorely missed by those who knew him – and what follows is a tribute by fellow Full Court Press correspondent Bob Corwin.

The memory of the last time you speak to a departed friend often stays with you. If you are lucky, you may also remember how you first met – but sadly, much of what you spoke of in between, for countless hours over those years, has become lost.

My first encounter with Joe Smith, though, was so vivid that it is a good place to start. It was during the 1980-81 season after I had recently moved to New York City from the Boston area. I was still relatively new to the women’s college game, having just started following it the year before. The game I was attending featured Manhattan at (if my memory serves me) Iona. Manhattan recently had added several top area recruits and was showing promise of becoming one of the best teams in the Northeast.

At one point (perhaps halftime) several Manhattan fans (likely mostly parents) were talking optimistically with fairly loud voices about their chances of victory in an upcoming game with national power Rutgers. Suddenly, a loud voice from further away boomed “Rutgers, you (Manhattan) will lose by 50 (actually the result was around half that).”

“It sounds like this guy knows something,” I thought. “I better go introduce myself.”

Thus began a relationship which lasted for over 25 years. From the start it was easy to see this man was highly opinionated and sometimes very vocal in expressing his position on the matter at hand. What took longer to appreciate was Joe’s love of the game, his intelligence, his thoughtfulness and his concern for the players in the sport. He was a combination of purist (wanting to see the game played a high level with few errors) and pragmatist (knowing the game was a relatively small niche in the much larger landscape of sport).

A good illustration of Joe’s willingness to state his opinion boldly (where most print media comment on the sport then and now can be so sugar-coated) came in defending a la suit by then Kansas Coach Marian Washington. Joe had written in a published magazine seasonal preview that, in his opinion, Washington’s teams underperformed and she would lead a talented team to underperform again. Washington thought Joe had brought undue harm to her program and brought suit in Federal Court against both him and the magazine.

In his ruling against Washington, the presiding judge stated that Smith was entitled to state his opinion and then, deep into his statement, briefly and subtly noted that her team had not performed up to the expectations of others for that season. Not that it mattered in the case, but Joe had been proven right – and he always liked that.

He also did much good counseling players when asked on college recruitment options. He was a great believer in making the college experience an enjoyable one, something which he saw in fewer places than he would have liked. If a player did not want his help, he respected that as well.

Joe’s vast list of player contacts as well as coaches and other media members made Joe very aware of the inner workings of many of the major college programs. In my opinion, this vast network made him the most knowledgeable person in the game for more than two decades. Over those years, he was feared by numerous members of the women’s basketball coaching community, believing that he might have information which could damage their program and perhaps even help get them fired. While I can’t say he ever got any coach fired (although he thought many deserved that fate) over the decades that I knew him, he probably did impact some big-time recruiting by his association with players.

Joe made many predictions, both right and wrong, but more often the former. Most have long since been forgotten by me, but one I will always remember was that he had found an Olympic guard on Long Island, at age 13 no less, I thought this was a reach at best as I believe it is so hard to predict the lon- term future for a player at such a young age. Yet Sue Bird did in fact fulfill that prediction as we all know today.

Much more recently, Joe predicted failure for the USA at the World Championships. In the last year, he has been predicting a lack of gold for the USA in the 2008 Olympics. Unfortunately, he did not live to see whether he was right or wrong.

Sadly, Joe will not be as well remembered as other media colleagues as he did not write for a big city newspaper or appear on television (although at least a few big name analysts were regularly in touch with him). For several decades Joe was editor and publisher of Women’s Basketball News Service, putting out lists of high school and college all-Americans. Sure, we can disagree with this or that selection, but what was most important was that he was getting coverage for the sport of women’s basketball when it was less exposed than in today’s world where coverage can still be described as minimal more times than not. Going back into the 1970s, Joe was one of the few people who could give you an eyewitness comparison of the stars of the decades since then. One of his favorite pet peeves was the overuse by commentators of the word “great.” As I agreed, this word should be reserved for the few, not the many.

While I regularly talked with the man over decades, conversations usually centered on women’s basketball (high school, college and pro). I knew he was a lifelong resident of the New York City area, served in the U.S. Army, graduated from C.W. Post College on Long Island, and retired from federal government service as a career employee of the Social Security Administration. He was an ardent fan of the New York Yankees, which caused us to be on opposite sides, given my Boston area upbringing.

In the last year or so, Joe’s health slowed him down, and kept him from attending as many events as previously in person, but he still remained posted via the phone. I will miss those conversations where we agreed and disagreed so vigorously.

In my last few calls to him in the hospital, he said he was too tired to talk and said “he would get back to me.” Somteime past this life perhaps he will, but for now I have lost a friend, and women’s basketball one of its champion supporters.