Watching the man watching: Anson Dorrance is the improbable architect of the greatest college sports dynasty ever

UNIVERSITY of North Carolina women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance's program has won an astounding 18 national championships and 94% of its games, but these numbers are not even the most incredible aspects of his story. Imagine that this sporting dynasty has been created by a man who never aspired to coach and got the job only after a case of mistaken identity; that he initially had absolutely no idea how to instruct women: and that his program is run in such chaos that Dorrance cannot remember the names of some of his own players and often arrives late for games alter getting lost in transit.

Dorrance is the first to admit that part of the mason for his success is that he never has taken his success too seriously, an approach that is embodied in the following excerpt from The Man Watching: "One day shortly alter Delaine Marbry joined Dorrance's staff as his secretary, she tracked him down and said that he had to return an urgent business call. Alter returning the call, he asked Marbry to come into his office. 'Delaine, I'm a soccer coach,' Dorrance told her. 'How could I possibly have an urgent call?'"

Ultimately, to comprehend Dorrance's attitude toward the significance of winning and losing, one has to understand his perspective on athletics. It is another thing he learned from longtime UNC men's cage coach Dean Smith, who often was quoted as dismissing the value of basketball in the real world. Whenever Smith needed to straighten out a reporter who was treating college hoops like a conflict in the Middle East, he would sigh and say; "It's just a basketball game." Listen to Dorrance. He says it all the time. "It's just a soccer game.

"There's little about athletics that elevates you as a human being," Dorrance maintains. "If there were, there wouldn't be so many ... jerks in athletics that I've lost count. I don't think athletics is anything more than people running around, breaking a sweat, and having a good time. It's frivolous. We're not finding a cure for cancer. We're not taking serial killers and turning them into nuns. Our underlying theme has always got to be that there are a billion people in China who don't even know we're playing soccer today, so let's relax and enjoy ourselves because this isn't the end of the world."

Dorrance makes these statements as if he is reminding himself. He knows that his women do not need him to tell them it is just a soccer game. It is another difference he sees between men and women. "In our society, women value relationships, while men tend to measure their lives by athletic success and failure," he asserts. "That's why you see movies of the old high school star quarterback pumping gas somewhere, and the message is that he had a great arm, but it didn't make him a great man."

Anyone looking for a symbol of the UNC women's soccer mindset need look no further than a closet door inside the McCaskill Soccer Center. The door is decorated as a shrine of NCAA awards and lacquered newspaper articles, but from beneath it protrudes a rubber novelty foot. Whenever Dorrance is shepherding a group of visitors through the soccer office, the tour inevitably screeches to halt when a young girl shrieks at the sight of the foot and asks, "What's that?!" The coach's well-rehearsed response is, "That is the last Tar Heel who didn't pass fitness."

Comments former assistant coach Bill Steffen, "When people ask me, 'What do you remember most about working at UNC?' The first word that comes to my mind isn't winning or training or tradition, it is fun."

At the end of almost every soccer practice, assistant coach Bill Palladino looks expectantly at team manager Tom Sander and asks, "Do we have cake?" One of Sander's duties is to procure a preponderance of cakes for various occasions, everything from a player's birthday to an anomalous cake for the last day of fitness each season to a cake because they have not had one in a while. The cakes always are ceremoniously cut with one of athletic department physician Bill Prentice's tongue depressors and consumed by the fistful. In order to satisfy the players' sugar fix during games, the program developed what is very affectionately known as "the candy bag." Since 1992, before each game, Sander has filled a plastic grocery bag with candy, from Sweet Tarts to Jawbreakers to Pixy Stix, a sugary smorgasbord that he firmly believes is a lucky talisman as well as a fattening one. The candy bag briefly was banned in 1994 by Dorrance alter one reserve player who was slightly above her ideal playing weight drained the bag during a game. Two days later, the Tar Heels tied Notre Dame. snapping a long UNC winning streak. Two weeks after that, when Carolina lost at Fetzer Field for the first time ever, Sander was convinced it was "the curse of the candy bag." He surreptitiously reinstituted the candy, and it has been on the Tar Heels bench ever since. UNC players stash Starbursts in the lining of their shorts for "energy." Dorrance eats a handful of Gummi Worms before every game. Palladino favors Tootsie Rolls. Even game officials have been known to forage into the candy bag occasionally. Sander figured out that, each season, the Tar Heels consume an average of 155 pounds of sweets, and former player Robin Confer swears that her massive sugar intake led to a series of root canals shortly alter she graduated. "Whenever 1 dug into our candy bag and there weren't any Sour Gummi Worms left, then all hell broke loose," Danielle Borgman relates. "That keeps everything in perspective. What other team argues over the supply of Sour Gummi Worms?"