One on One

by John Feinstein

  I even managed to get a byline in the Washington Post. I had gotten into the habit of cold-calling sports editors at big-time newspapers to offer them stories with local angles. I had tried to sell George Solomon story ideas a couple of times with no luck. Finally, I took a shot at a game story: North Carolina was playing at Wake Forest and both were ranked in the top ten. I had gotten Solomon’s direct phone number from Mark Asher, the paper’s Maryland beat writer, so I was able to get through to him. I offered the story.

  “What time’s the game?” George said.

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Okay, fine. If you can get me fourteen inches with quotes by eleven thirty, we’ll take it.”

  I swallowed hard. That would give me thirty minutes—maybe—from game’s end to get the story to the paper.

  “So do you want to do it?” George said while I was doing the math in my head.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Good. O. D. Wilson is the night editor. I’ll let him know to expect a story from you.”

  I needed a strategy to get this done and I had to get it done. I was applying for a summer internship at the Post and I was dying to get it. I knew, from Asher, that sports would take two interns and one would be a woman. There were usually about three thousand applicants in all for twenty total spots. Long odds. This was a way to perhaps set myself apart from the other applicants in Solomon’s mind.

  I called Bruce Herman, the sports information director at Wake Forest, and explained the situation to him. One of the great things about the ACC in those days was the quality of the SIDs. Not only were they good at what they did, they were willing to help anyone—whether that person was working for the Duke student newspaper or the Washington Post. Bruce offered to have one of his student assistants standing by so I could hand them each page—I would need three—to be taken directly to the telecopier as soon as I finished each one.

  That would help. Keith Drum offered to feed me some quick quotes from one locker room. Carolina won a close game that ended on the stroke of eleven o’clock. I spent the ten minute cooling-off period before the coaches came out of the locker rooms writing the first five inches and handing them to Bruce’s assistant. Then I raced under the stands at the old Winston-Salem Coliseum and listened to Dean Smith for exactly three minutes. I sprinted back to the press table and wrote the second page in another five minutes. By then, Drum was there with player quotes. I handed the third page to the student assistant at 11:27.

  Damn! The last page was going to be three or four minutes late by the time it got through the telecopier. I raced to a phone and called O. D. Wilson. “Mr. Wilson,” I said, completely breathless. “The last page is on its way. I’m sorry it’s a couple of minutes late…”

  “Late?” O.D. said. “We’ve got until midnight. You’re in great shape. Good show down there.”

  I would learn later that “good show” was the best compliment you could get from O.D.

  Of course the story wasn’t in the first edition of the paper that came to Durham, since that deadline was at seven o’clock. But it was in the home edition that my parents got at their house. They were not sports section readers. So I called my mother.

  “Mom, I’m looking for a story in today’s sports section of the Post—can you take a look for it?”

  “What story is it?” she asked.

  “It’s on the North Carolina–Wake Forest game,” I said. “It’ll be somewhere inside the section.”

  “Let me find sports,” she said.

  A moment later she was back on the phone. “Here it is,” she said. “ ‘North Carolina Hangs On to Beat Wake.’ Is that it?”

  My heart was pounding. “Yeah, that’s it,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Can you tell me who wrote the story?”

  There was a pause and then a gasp. “Johnny!” was all she said.

  I’m not sure I’ve had a better moment as a reporter. I told her the whole story. “You owe your friend Keith big-time,” she said.

  She was right. I did. Still do.

  I called Solomon that day, ostensibly to thank him for giving me the chance to write the game story, but in truth fishing for compliments. “O.D. said you did really well,” he said. “Handled it like a pro. Stay in touch.”

  At that point in my life, if Cybil Shepherd had said “stay in touch” to me, it wouldn’t have been as big a deal as George Solomon saying it.

  About a month later, I was home for spring break. The Eastern Regionals of the NCAA Tournament were being played at Maryland and I had convinced the sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times to let me cover the regional for him since Notre Dame was playing North Carolina in the round of sixteen. The other game would match Virginia Military Institute (yes, VMI) and Kentucky.

  On the morning of the Sweet Sixteen games, Mark Asher called my parents’ house. When I got on the phone, he said simply, “Congratulations, you got it.”

  I was stunned. Was he really talking about the internship?

  “You mean…”

  “Yup. George just told me. It’s you and a girl from Marquette. He’s going to be at the games tonight. Introduce yourself. But do not tell him you know anything. Let him tell you.”

  “But you’re sure?”

  “Yeah. He remembered the Wake game and he asked Kenny [Denlinger] to read four or five applications he had whittled it down to. Kenny liked yours the best. I think that clinched it.”

  Years later, when Denlinger became a close friend, I asked him if he remembered reading the applications. He did. “You had some story in there about officiating in the ACC,” he said. “I noticed you had quotes from all the coaches. I thought that was impressive that someone from a student newspaper could get all those guys on the phone.

  “Of course, when I walked back into George’s office I couldn’t remember your name. So I just said, ‘I like the kid from Duke.’ ”

  Doing the referees story had exposed me to the intense nature of coaching in the ACC for the first time. The big issue on the table back then was whether to go from two referees to three. So I decided to try to call every coach in the league to see what they thought. Most weren’t that difficult to track down—Drum had told me that NC State coach Norman Sloan always had lunch in his office, and if I called then he would probably answer the phone himself since the secretary was out. He was right.

  The only two coaches I couldn’t get to call me back were Dean Smith and Lefty Driesell. The secretaries took messages but told me that Coach was very busy and didn’t know when he’d be able to call back. Finally, I decided they weren’t going to call back unless I gave them an incentive.

  I called Smith and said to the secretary, “I’m sorry to bug you again, but I’m on deadline and I’ve talked to all the other coaches and I really want to give Coach Smith a chance to respond to what Coach Driesell and Coach Sloan said about him.” (Driesell, Sloan, and Smith were the power axis in the league at that point.) She promised to let Coach know. Within twenty-four hours, Dean called back.

  By then I actually had talked to Lefty and did have some quotes from him I could bounce off Dean. The reason I had talked to Lefty was I had pulled the same trick on him, telling the secretary I wanted to give him a chance to respond to what Coach Smith had said. Within five minutes, Lefty called back. “What’d Dean say about me?” he asked.

  I hadn’t expected a call back so quickly. Semi-panicked, I said, “Coach, to be honest, I haven’t talked to him yet. But I figured if I mentioned him you’d call back.”

  Lefty laughed. “Oh really?” he said. “That’s pretty smart for a Duke guy.” Lefty, of course, went to Duke.

  I asked him how he felt about three officials. “I’m against it,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if we have three officials, when we play Dean it’ll be eight against five instead of seven against five.”

  That is still one of the great quotes of all time.

  And perhaps most important, it caught Den
linger’s eye.

  THE FIRST TIME I met Dean Smith was on his forty-fifth birthday. I remember it because Duke played at North Carolina that afternoon. I was a college junior and had grown accustomed to seeing the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils, so Carolina’s 91–71 victory in Chapel Hill was hardly a shock.

  The shock came when I timidly introduced myself to the great man in the locker room after the game. I was writing a story on the remarkable emergence of Tate Armstrong as a star in the ACC that year. With no three-point shot and no shot clock, Tate was routinely scoring thirty-plus points every night. I didn’t think—and I was, of course, completely unbiased—that he was getting enough credit and, after Tate had scored thirty-six against Carolina in spite of being double- and triple-teamed most of the day, was hoping Dean would give me a couple of quotes to back up my premise.

  So I walked over to where he was standing in the corner of the locker room and waited for him to finish talking to another writer. When I introduced myself the very first thing he said was, “Oh yes, of course. I read your column last month on what Bill should do to build his program. I thought you were very fair to us, especially for someone from Duke.”

  Little did I know that line was to become a recurring theme in our relationship for more than thirty years. At that moment though, I was completely stunned. Dean Smith knew my name? He had read something I had written in the Chronicle? I would find out later that the Carolina basketball office subscribed to every major newspaper in the country, every paper in the state of North Carolina, and all the student newspapers in the ACC. One assistant coach—in those days it was Roy Williams—was assigned to look through all the papers for any story that might in some way be significant to North Carolina. He would clip those stories, put them in a folder, and Dean would read them on airplanes.

  That was why he had read the column I had written a few weeks earlier, which said that if Bill Foster needed a role model upon which to build his program, he need look no farther than down Route 15-501 to Chapel Hill and Carmichael Auditorium. The column hadn’t just been fair to Smith and Carolina, it had been gushy to the point that Foster had kidded me about it: “I always thought it was Naismith who invented basketball,” he said, “not Dean Smith.”

  Dean hadn’t invented it, but he had come pretty close to perfecting it as far as I could see. Every time I stepped inside Carmichael Auditorium, which was where Carolina played until the Dean Dome opened in 1986, I thought, “This is the way college basketball should be.” The building was packed—Cameron was half empty for most games back then—the students were clearly having fun, and the team was always very good. There was no doubt that Dean controlled everything. In fact, that afternoon, when a profane cheer had sprung up briefly early in the game after a couple of calls went against Carolina, Dean walked to the PA mike, grabbed it, and said very firmly, “We don’t do that here. We win with class. Stop it.”

  They stopped. And they won.

  So now, after recovering from my initial shock, I asked Dean my question about Tate Armstrong. He talked for about five minutes without stopping. Most of what he said was about how proud he was of Walter Davis and what a great senior leader Mitch Kupchak was. I walked away still wondering exactly what he thought about Tate.

  That was Dean. His mind worked so fast and went in so many different directions that he could take a question about a poor shooting night in a Final Four game and somehow come out on the other end talking about Larry Brown becoming a father again in his mid-50s.

  I always liked Dean, and obviously respected him greatly. The “Duke thing” was always a part of our relationship because Dean refused to let it go. Most of the time I didn’t mind—it was delivered with good humor. Once, when I met him in a hotel lobby while wearing jeans, he shook his head and said, “You Duke guys don’t like to dress up do you?”

  “Dean, we’re just driving over to a shootaround,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he answered. “Considering where you went to college, I’m surprised you’re not wearing sandals.”

  Once, he offered to buy me a jacket and tie if I couldn’t afford one. This was shortly after I started working at the Post.

  “Don’t they pay you very much there?” he asked.

  “Actually they don’t,” I said. (I was making $238.25 a week before taxes as a first year reporter.) “But that’s not why I don’t have a jacket and tie.”

  “Well, I can’t buy clothes for my players,” he said. “But I could buy you clothes—especially since you went to Duke.”

  There was only one time when it became a real issue, and it turned into one of the two serious disagreements we had through the years.

  IN 1995, DURING THE brief period that I was doing some work for ESPN (I never worked for the network full-time, thank God), I reported that Rasheed Wallace, then a sophomore, was a virtual lock to turn pro at the end of the season and, in fact, was being pushed hard by Smith and his staff just to stay in his classes until the end of the semester. My source was someone very well connected at Carolina, someone who had spoken directly to Dean about how frustrated he was with Wallace—who was a great talent, but a handful then as he was throughout his long NBA career.

  The Carolina people went nuts about the story. Wallace and his mother categorically denied it. Rasheed, his mother said, was going to stay four years. Wallace said I was trying to have my “fifteen seconds of fame” by reporting the story. If nothing else, he probably needed to stay in college to study famous Andy Warhol quotes more closely.

  In any event, the North Carolina media spent a lot more time reporting the Wallace denials and what a bad guy I was than reporting the initial story. Which was fine. But then someone asked Dean about it, and his initial answer was, “Well, we all know that John went to Duke…”

  Now that made me angry. Dean knew me better than that. He also knew I had the story right even though I certainly didn’t expect him to confirm it. In fact, he was very careful to say, “As far as I know, Rasheed plans to be back here next year.” He then went off on a Dean tangent about what a fine young man Rasheed was.

  I was going to call Dean about the Duke crack, but Carolina was coming to play Maryland that week anyway. I decided to talk to Dean about it in person. I almost always saw him before games at Cole Field House because he would walk into the tunnel leading from the locker rooms to the floor to do his pregame radio show. I would make sure to find him.

  As it turned out, he found me. I was talking to my friend Doug Doughty from the Roanoke Times when someone walked up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and saw Dean standing there. Before I could say anything, he said, “I owe you an apology.”

  I answered instinctively. “You’re damn right you do.” Then I felt badly because here was Dean throwing out an olive branch and I was being disrespectful. “I’m sorry, Dean, I’m overreacting,” I said. “But I couldn’t believe you said my going to Duke had anything to do with the story. Of all people you know better than that.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was defending one of my players, and sometimes when I do that I say things I shouldn’t.”

  “You know the media down there is killing me,” I said. “They love the idea of painting me as ‘a Duke guy,’ and you opened the door for that.”

  He nodded. “I know. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  I thought for a second. “Well, since you made the comment publicly, it would help if you apologized publicly.”

  He never hesitated. “I’ll do it after the game. In my press conference. Win or lose.”

  “If you did, that would be great.”

  He put out his hand. “Done. And I am sorry. I hope Rasheed comes back and proves your story wrong, but I know you didn’t report it for any reason other than the fact that someone told you it was true.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  Maryland won that night. I sat in the back of Dean’s press conference and listened while he talked about the game. Af
ter a while it became apparent that, in the wake of the loss, he had forgotten our pregame conversation. I got up and quietly walked out the back door. Maybe, I thought, another time.

  I was picking up final statistics when Jim O’Connell of the AP, one of my good friends in the business, walked out of the interview room. “Hey, John,” he said, “Dean says he needs you to come back inside.”

  I followed O’Connell back into the room. Dean was standing there smiling.

  “John, you left before you got your apology,” he said.

  “Dean, um, I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “A promise is a promise. I wanted to tell everyone here I was wrong to say John’s reporting on Rasheed had anything to do with where he went to college. It didn’t. We think Rasheed will be back, but that’s not the point here. John, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you, Dean.”

  “And I know you pull for all the ACC teams in the NCAA Tournament.”

  Now everyone was laughing. “Absolutely, Dean.”

  I MET MIKE KRZYZEWSKI and Jim Valvano on the same day, at the same moment.

  During my senior year, Duke played a game in Madison Square Garden against Connecticut. To show you how different times were back then, Duke-UConn was the preliminary game that night. The feature game was Fordham-Rutgers. Yes, seriously.

  On the day before the game I flew to New York with Bill Foster, Tate Armstrong, and Tom Mickle. Bill and Tate were going to make a number of media appearances, and Bill was scheduled to speak at the weekly coaches luncheon at Mama Leone’s.

  The lunches were a longtime New York tradition. Every Tuesday, all the local college basketball coaches and the media would get together at Mama Leone’s. After everyone ate, each coach would get up and talk for a few minutes about his team and upcoming games. Then everyone would stand around and gab for a while. It made for a very fraternal feeling in an era when relationships between the media and coaches were completely different from what they are now, when getting a one-on-one interview with a big-time coach can be more difficult than getting invited to the Oval Office to have a sit-down with the president.