One on One

by John Feinstein

  “No. But that’s different. They aren’t being paid to write a book.”

  “You’re right. They’re being paid to interview you on television.”

  Bonds muttered a profanity and walked away. When I told Jim Leyland, who was then the Pirates manager, the story, he shrugged. “You might ask him the same thing tomorrow and he could give you an hour,” he said. “That’s just Barry.”

  I never did test that theory.

  That day on the phone, I told the guy that under no circumstances would his friend get paid for information. “Then we’ll go someplace else,” he said. “You’ll be sorry.”

  When I read the book I was sorry—it seemed that someone had actually paid the guy. Peter Golenbock, the author, has written many very good books in a long, distinguished career. This wasn’t one of them. There were so many simple factual errors—including his saying that Thanksgiving fell on a Friday, just to give you one example—that the book had little credibility. Plus, I’m convinced Golenbock or his publisher paid for the bulk of the information.

  Tainted or not, the book brought Valvano down at NC State. The NCAA came to town to investigate the program, and the local newspapers ran wild with the story. It was a confusing story for me to deal with: on the one hand, it was pretty clear that Jim, in his search for the Next Thing, had stopped paying enough attention to his program. He’d given the assistant coaches too much responsibility and taken far too many marginal kids who had, in many cases, gotten themselves into trouble. The NCAA did find State guilty of enough violations that it was banned from postseason play in 1990, but didn’t find it guilty of the most serious charges made in the book.

  Still, it was enough to force Valvano to resign at NC State after the 1990 season. It was a sad ending to what had started out as one of the more joyous runs in coaching history.

  The fall of Valvano was difficult for me because I felt caught in the middle. I didn’t want to come across as a Valvano apologist, acting as if nothing at all had gone wrong in his program. I knew, from being around, that he had lost interest at times and had been distracted by the hundred different things he was doing while looking for the Next Thing. But I also considered him a friend, one of the smartest people I knew, and someone whom I had given advice to at times and, at least as often, taken advice from.

  Valvano’s reaction when I told him I was going to do Season on the Brink was to the point: “Don’t tell me the guy has a good side. He’s an arrogant bully. You want to know why we hear so much about his good deeds? Because he makes sure we hear about them. He’s got his handful of media guys—like you—who make sure every time he walks a little old lady across the street the world knows about it. That way, the next day, when he runs another little old lady over because he’s mad that practice went badly, it’s okay because he helped the other one out. A lot of coaches visit sick kids in hospitals, you know. We just don’t bring camera crews with us when we do.”

  When Knight turned on me after the book was published, Valvano never said, “I told you so.” In fact, he read the book and liked it, even though overall he thought it was too kind to Knight. “You showed guys like me that there is another side to him,” he said. “I still don’t like him, but I understand him a little better now.”

  Every year, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association gives out awards—two national awards and then local awards across the country. I won the local award while at the Post several times, but unless I missed it, I don’t think I’ve ever been nominated for the national award. For a long time, Frank Deford—deservedly—won the national award every year. In the spring of 1987 I was on vacation when I got a late night phone call from Valvano, who had been at the ceremony because he had received an award for cooperating with the media—or something like that.

  “I thought you should know what Deford just said in his acceptance speech,” Jim said. “He said he was honored to win the award but that it should go to the person who made the most impact on sportswriting in a given year and that there was no question that Season on the Brink made more impact than anything else last year. I know you’re a big fan of his, so I thought you’d want to know.”

  I did want to know. I was thrilled that Deford would say that about me.

  “Oh, one other thing,” Jim added. “Knight’s still an asshole.”

  As usual I was laughing at the end of a conversation with Valvano. The point of the story is this: Valvano went to a pay phone in an airport on his way to a flight to make that call. No one else ever called to tell me what Deford had said.

  So there I was in 1990 caught in this conundrum. I tried to be fair—to both sides—and probably got it wrong. Jim had gotten defensive near the end. He thought a lot of the media in North Carolina, particularly on the news side, was out to get him, a theory shared by Mike Krzyzewski.

  “Remember a lot of those guys, especially the news guys and editorial guys, were Carolina guys,” Krzyzewski said twenty years after it had all come down. “The sports guys at least knew Jimmy, knew me, were in a position to judge us as people, not just as a Duke guy or a State guy. The news people saw Jimmy as a threat to Dean and Carolina. This was their chance to take him down—and they did.”

  In his last press conference after State lost in the ACC Tournament that year, Jim sounded almost Nixonian to me. Instead of saying, yes, he’d made mistakes, he kept citing statistics to prove all was well inside his program. When I said and wrote that, Jim was genuinely angry.

  “How can you possibly compare me to Richard Nixon?” he said. “You know me better than that.”

  “How can you stand up there and say you didn’t do anything wrong? How many times did we talk in your office at three in the morning about looking for the Next Thing? About how you wished you could still be as driven as Dean and Krzyzewski?”

  We argued at length. He was angry and, according to Jim, so was his wife, Pam, who felt I had betrayed their friendship. I understood. One of the tough things about journalism is that when you do it for a long time, no matter how much you try to stay at arm’s length, there are always going to be people you like and people you dislike. Some will become your friends, because we’re all human.

  I taught a journalism class at Duke for three years. The first question I asked on the first day of the semester was always the same: What is objective journalism? After the students gave their answers I’d tell them they were all wrong; there’s no such thing. None of us is objective. We all have biases that we grew up with or that develop through the years. The key is understanding that you’re biased and trying as hard as you can to put those biases aside and be fair.

  Looking back, I think I may have tried too hard to put aside my bias—and my friendship—with Valvano. If it all happened again now, I’d probably say something like, “Look, I’ve known Jim Valvano for years. He’s a friend. I have a bias in this. I think he may have made mistakes in his job like we all do, but I also think there are people out to get him. And the kid who started all this was looking to make a buck.”

  Back then I said a lot of that, but called him Nixonian.

  Jim went to work for ESPN and ABC after leaving NC State. He was great at it—as you might expect—but I knew, even though we didn’t have our post-midnight chats anymore, that he was still searching. I missed listening to him talk. What I heard on TV was smart and clever, but it was TV talk.

  In the summer of 1992 I was sitting at my computer with SportsCenter on in the background. I was getting ready to go downstairs and start the grill to make dinner. Bob Ley was anchoring that night and, as he was about to close the show, I saw a picture of Valvano pop onto the screen. I moved my hand away from the off button.

  I don’t remember his exact words, but paraphrasing, this is what he said: “There is no way to deliver this news except to do it directly—the way Jim Valvano would want us to do it. Jim has been diagnosed with cancer.”

  In 1992 cancer was no longer an automatic death sentence, but it was still, as it is
today, a very frightening word to hear. I honestly don’t remember who I called, but it didn’t take very long to find out that it was serious. Valvano was being treated at Duke Hospital, and no one I talked to ever said, “They caught it early; they think he’ll be okay.”

  In fact, Valvano’s description of how he learned he had cancer was chilling. He had been experiencing serious back pain and went in for tests. The doctor showed him a scan of his back.

  “It’s all black,” Valvano said to the doctor.

  “That’s right,” the doctor answered. “The black is where the cancer is.”

  It had spread throughout his entire back.

  As it turned out, Valvano had nine months to live. Tragically, it was then and only then that he found the Next Thing. Cancer was the Next Thing. Valvano knew as soon as he saw the pictures of his back that he was going to die. He knew research and research dollars wouldn’t save his life. But they could save other lives. That’s where the idea for what became the V Foundation came from. He enlisted the support of ESPN, which he knew had the money and the power to aid the cause, and of his friends—most of them coaches—starting with Mike Krzyzewski.

  Since his death a lot of myths have grown around Valvano. One is that he was close friends with Dick Vitale. He wasn’t. They were colleagues, and Vitale was genuinely torn apart by Valvano’s death and has worked night and day since his death to raise money for the V Foundation. But they were never close.

  The other myth is that Krzyzewski and Valvano were longtime friends. They weren’t. “Until Jimmy stopped coaching we were more rivals than we were friends,” Krzyzewski said. “Remember, we coached against each other in New York [Iona and Army played every year] and then when we came to the ACC at the same time. We socialized with our wives at ACC meetings on occasion, but not very often. I think we respected each other as coaches, but it didn’t go any further than that until he left NC State.”

  Once they were no longer rivals in recruiting or on the court, Krzyzewski and Valvano did become friends. Krzyzewski believed Valvano had been railroaded out of State, and Valvano appreciated the support. But they only became close after Valvano got sick. He was going to Duke Hospital on a regular basis for treatment, and whenever he went, he called Krzyzewski, who would walk from his office on one end of the Duke campus to the hospital at the other end to spend time with him. As the stays became longer and more frequent, so did the time the two men spent together.

  “It got to the point where we could talk about anything, we could say anything to one another,” Krzyzewski said. “We almost never talked about basketball, but we talked about everything else there was to talk about. Jimmy was very smart and very honest. We talked to each other in ways that you can’t talk to your parents or your wife or even your brother. It became something remarkable in my life and, I’d like to think, in his.”

  When Valvano was honored at the first ESPY Awards in March of 1993, Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski flew to New York with Jim and Pam Valvano. “Jim was in the bathroom sick the whole flight,” Krzyzewski said. “By that point he could barely walk. I was convinced there was no way he was going to be able to make it through his speech that night.”

  Of course Valvano did make it through—memorably. He talked that night for eleven minutes and fifteen seconds. He talked about Krzyzewski: “What you need to know is that he is ten times a better person than he is a coach—and we all know how great a coach he is.” He talked about the three things his parents had urged him to do every day of life: laugh, think, and cry. He talked about the need for more funding for cancer research and about what it felt like to be dying and, in a moment that still gives you chills even if you’ve seen it a hundred times, said, “Cancer cannot rob me of my mind, it cannot rob me of my heart, it cannot rob me of my soul. Those three things will live on forever.”

  When some fool in the production truck actually turned on the blinking light to let Valvano know his time was up, Valvano pointed at the blinking light and said, “Can you believe this? I’ve got tumors running through my entire body and someone is trying to give me the blinking light to get off?” He then saluted the light with an eloquent Italian profanity and gesture. Everyone watching was laughing and crying at that moment.

  As soon as Valvano finished, everyone in the audience leaped to his or her feet—one person, Krzyzewski, jumping onstage to help Valvano down. “He had told me he knew the speech would exhaust him so much he wouldn’t be able to get down the steps on his own. He said, ‘When I finish, come get me because I don’t want to fall on my face.’ ”

  I watched that moment with tears in my eyes because it was apparent Jim was very near the end. Three days later, Jim and I talked for what would be the last time. After his resignation at NC State, I had written a column saying, as I have often said, that when coaches take credit for success, they have to take the blame for failures.

  A year before the ESPYs speech, in February of 1992, we were both working at a game in St. Petersburg, in the building now known as Tropicana Field. Jim was doing TV. I was doing radio. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. Jim had suggested we walk back under the stands. This was about ninety minutes before tipoff. No one was around.

  He was angry. He couldn’t understand how I could—his word—attack him the way I had. I was his friend. Plus, I knew that a lot of the book was inaccurate, so he wanted to know how I could lend it credence the way I had.

  I reminded him that I had pointed out how inaccurate the book was on more than one occasion. I also told him that he knew there were a lot of things we had talked about in private through the years that I had never written or repeated and never would write or repeat. That wasn’t good enough. He had needed me there, and I hadn’t been there.

  “Jim, do you really think if I had come out and said you were blameless in the whole thing it would have made any difference?” I said. “People would have just said I was one of your apologists. The things I did write in your defense would have been meaningless.”

  “It would have made a difference,” Valvano said, “to me.”

  Ouch.

  Even though I still believed I had done what I had to do, I felt terrible. I had that sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when, deep down, you know the other guy is right. Valvano clearly felt betrayed. We shook hands. I wondered if we’d ever talk to each other again.

  We did. We saw each other at games after that and Jim was always cordial. But it wasn’t the same. Then came the news of his illness. I wrote him and told him how horrible I felt hearing the news and how no matter what had happened between us I would always consider him a friend. He wrote back saying that meant a lot and he felt the same way.

  I’ve written before about the last time I saw him. It was in Chapel Hill, the final Sunday of the 1993 regular season. Jim was doing Duke-Carolina for ABC. By then people knew how sick he was, and the security around the TV-announce location at midcourt was almost presidential. I was walking to my seat, hoping to at least be able to wave hello to Jim as I went by. He spotted me and waved me toward him.

  “John, come over here for a second,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

  I took about one step in Jim’s direction and was shoved backward by a security guard. I’ve had bad experiences with security guards around the world, but never more so than in Chapel Hill. Once, when I walked over before a game to say hello to Dean Smith, one of them started pushing me away until Dean saw what was going on and waved the guard off. Rather than just let me go as he had been instructed to do, the guard—who had to be a hundred—said, “You’re lucky Coach Smith was here.”

  To which I replied—always calm when confronted—“You’re lucky I didn’t knock you into the fifth row.”

  Like I said, security guards and I have never done terribly well together. Tony Kornheiser has suggested for years that I write a book strictly on my run-ins with security people. “That book I’ll read,” he likes to say.

  Now, as the guard and I started to
square off, I heard Jim say, “Hey, do me a favor, pal, and leave my friend alone.”

  Unlike the guy with Dean, this one simply stepped aside. Valvano waved me to an empty seat next to him, the one where I knew the floor director would be sitting once the telecast began. Brent Musburger, who was doing play-by-play, was on a headset talking, I presume, to the truck.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” Jim said. “I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again.”

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Look at me. How do you think I feel?”

  He was hauntingly thin, and when I looked into his eyes they had none of the spark I had always seen.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. I was mad at you because I wanted you to be my apologist and that’s never been who you are. In fact, what you did was really an act of friendship. You wouldn’t let me off the hook. I could have used more of that.”

  He had his hand on my arm as he spoke. I remember thinking I wasn’t going to see him again. I was trying to think of something to say, but nothing brilliant was coming into my mind. I wished we could be back in his office at three o’clock in the morning so he could explain to me again why perestroika was a work of genius or why he loved listening to Red Barber call Yankee games when he was a teenager.

  “It means a lot to me that you would say that,” I finally said.

  “I’m glad I got the chance.”

  I hugged him and could feel just how frail he was. He must have seen something in my eyes because he said, “Pretty scary, isn’t it?”

  “There are about a zillion people pulling for you.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I gave his shoulder a final gentle squeeze and stood up just as the floor director arrived.

  That was the last time I saw Jim alive. He died on April 28 in Duke Hospital—eight weeks after the ESPYs speech. His family was there and so was Mike Krzyzewski. I was teaching at Duke at the time, and I heard the news on the radio while driving into campus. I went straight to the basketball office. When I arrived, Krzyzewski was there.