John Smith came from Friendly High School in Fort Washington, Maryland — part of the same Washington, D.C. metropolitan pipeline that delivered Johnny Dawkins, Tommy Amaker, Billy King, and Danny Ferry to Durham. He was a 6-foot-7 forward in the high school class of 1985, the same class as Ferry and Quin Snyder. But unlike those classmates, Smith did not make any high school All-America teams. He missed most of his senior season due to academic issues. He arrived at Duke as perhaps the most anonymous recruit on the roster — a project, a depth piece, a long shot.
If you were building a profile of the least Google-able basketball player in Duke history, you could hardly do better than a 6-7 non-All-American forward from suburban Maryland named John Smith. There is no Wikipedia page. There is no feature story. There are no post-career interviews. And yet this is one of the most remarkable stories in the Duke Brotherhood — precisely because of how improbable it is.