This doc offers some great fresh insights that haven't been presented in the same way, along with many others that are repeats and familiar. Sam's narration just doesn't hit. He sounds like he's reading a script, not like his voice just belongs on the underlying audio track. The pacing and background audio track is also odd, uneven and at times distracting. That all leaves this doc as just okay.

If you expect this to be a razzle, dazzle video showing lots of Basketball you will be disappointed. It is more a study in how Coach Dean Smith approached living his life.

Because of the strength of this video from Showtime I also reviewed Showtime's video on Paul William "Bear" Bryant. Both coaches are similar in one respect. They took the steps to have non-white people play for them at great risk. There is racism today but back then there was a real risk that they could have been harmed. Yet they did what they thought was right.

One interesting aspect of the video that many today would not understand is that Coach Dean Smith started amassing his large winning career using what is called the four corner offense. I am not going to tell you how it works. He was unique in other ways in his approach to coaching basketball.

What the video didn't show is that he did not get his degree from Kansas University on a sports scholarship (grant). He majored in Mathematics with the help of an academic scholarship.

It also didn't show that he spent a lot of his free time studying Philosophy while working as a coach. Do not be so surprised since Mathematics is not really a Science. Mathematics is the queen branch of Philosophy.

If you have an hour to spare, watching this video will help you understand how Dean Smith developed as a human being. It isn't all about coaching.

This Dean Smith documentary is a Showtime original and gets a lot of great basketball people from Dean's basketball life to chime in with people like: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Roy Williams, Larry Brown, Coach K, Antwan Jameson and many others. The film goes back to his roots in Kansas and how he and his dad helped integrate his high school team, his college career at Kansas and being coached by Phog Allen, and his assistant days under Frank McGuire.

The film then goes into his first years losing at North Carolina, his recruiting of the 1st black player and finally his success in winning 2 National Championships and winning the most games of any college coach. It then goes into his post career political stances and finally his death. Sam Waterson narrates and in my opinion they should have gotten a sports commentator to bring more enthusiasm to the narration.