VCU Coach Shaka Smart has heard worse — much worse — in his 33 years. Growing up half-black in Oregon, Wis., he learned at an early age to stand up for the marginalized, especially when that group was his own.
Taking its cues from Smart, the Rams have become only the fifth No. 11 seed ever to advance to the Elite Eight. On Sunday, they will face top-seeded Kansas with a berth in the Final Four at stake.
“One of the keys to this profession is those guys have to know that you care about them, and I think he got that at a very young age,” said Keith Dambrot, who as Akron’s head coach hired Smart as an assistant in 2003. “I think that’s what he does better than almost anybody in the country.”
A problem solver
Smart’s father, Winston, a native of Trinidad, never was supportive of his son. Winston left the family in December 1994, and Smart has not had a relationship with him since. In need of a positive male role model, Smart occasionally visited his maternal grandfather, Walter King, in Chicago, where he would follow him around town and glean.
“Maybe they’re ripping me off; I don’t know,” King would tell his grandson as he gave money to the homeless. “But the important thing is if you’re able, you reach out.”
When Smart was in eighth grade, the Persian Gulf War erupted, and in Oregon, Wis., a suburb of Madison with a population of roughly 4,500 back then, tolerance was limited, according to people who lived there at the time. A girl of Jordanian ethnicity in Smart’s class was the object of such derision that she one day locked herself in her bedroom, determined never to go to that school again.
Unprompted, Smart called the girl and talked her out of her room. With the sense that she had at least one friend, she returned to school.
“He had this sense of outrage,” said Monica King, Smart’s mother. “When you’re a black kid and you’re growing up in a predominately white environment, you grow up with that sense of outrage because you were the object of it yourself.”
Smart was among the 10 or so minority students in a high school of 1,000. During his junior year, someone spray-painted racist slogans on the wall in one of his high school’s female bathrooms. A group of boys was known to ride around town wearing T-shirts that read “White Power” in a truck that displayed a Confederate flag. Members of an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in nearby Janesville held a rally in his school’s parking lot.
One night in November 1993, Smart’s adopted brother, Alfie Olson, told Smart that he had been threatened — “You better watch it, boy” – by a tall, lanky white student while celebrating a victory by the girls’ basketball team at their high school. When Olson, who like Smart is also half-black, spotted the kid at a Subway sandwich shop, Smart confronted him.
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