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

• Author: Crothers, Tim
• Position: University of North Carolina - Biography

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...