I really don’t like the NCAA and what it stands for, and I think it is fair to say the people in Indianapolis aren’t my biggest fans. Every time I see one of those ridiculous “student-athlete” PSAs that they run nonstop during the NCAA basketball tournament, I want to throw a rock through the television set. When I see the chairman of the basketball committee—regardless of who it is from year to year—sanctimoniously refusing to answer simple questions about who got into the field and who didn’t, I want to throw a rock at him.
The committee tends to bring out my violent side. Years ago, after they had completely screwed up the bracket and then defended everything they had done, I said on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show that “everyone on the committee should be lined up against a wall and shot.” Perhaps an overreaction. Tony pointed out to me that my good friend Jack Kvancz was on the committee. “Okay then, just shoot him in the leg,” I answered. Jack told me later he was grateful I decided to spare him.
The NCAA Tournament games now start at sickeningly late hours and the commercials are endless—ten each game at three minutes apiece, plus a twenty-minute halftime and thirty-second timeouts that last between forty-five and sixty seconds so the network can squeeze in a couple of extra commercials. (The twenty-minute halftime was requested by CBS in 2003 so it could have time to update the war in Iraq, which had just started. Now, whenever I ask why we still have twenty-minute halftimes when there are no war updates, I’m told, “Well, in some buildings it takes teams a long time to get to the locker room.” That, for the record, is a flat-out lie.)
I blame none of this on the networks. I blame it on the NCAA, which happily accepts an outrageous rights fee since men’s basketball—not football—funds most of its other sports and the NCAA itself. It would not need to demand so much money in rights fees if it would simply start a football playoff and tell the BCS schools, “If you want to play in our basketball tournament, you must play in our football tournament.”
But the NCAA won’t do that. Instead it allows the self-righteous BCS presidents to yammer on about how a football playoff would hurt the “student-athletes” academically while they ignore the fact that most of the “student-athletes” who play basketball miss being in the classroom for almost the entire month of March. Last season when I walked into the Butler locker room after the Bulldogs had upset Pittsburgh in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, one of the first things I heard was, “Hey, no school for us this week.”
Just to be sure, I asked if the upcoming week was spring break. No, that had been the previous week. “We leave on Tuesday for New Orleans,” senior Zach Hahn said. “So we might make a class or two Monday, but that’s it.”
And Butler, unlike most top basketball schools, does graduate its players.
And yet, in spite of all that, I still love college basketball. I still love walking into a packed building, whether it seats 20,000 or 2,000, on a winter night. I still love making my Patriot League drives back to Bucknell and Lafayette and Lehigh and even the seven hours to Holy Cross. Notice I didn’t say Colgate. That’s just a little too much back road driving in the snow.
It helps that I’ve been around the game so long that I know a lot of people and a lot of people know me. It certainly makes my job easier, and even now I love writing basketball columns for the Washington Post. I still get a buzz on deadline, especially after a game like Butler-Pittsburgh, even if I have under an hour to produce 1,200 words. The adrenaline flows and, most of the time, so do the words.
The list of people I’ve gotten to know through the years in college hoops is a lengthy one. When I began this book I wrote down the names of all those I wanted to go back and spend some time with. Sadly, I couldn’t go back and see Jim Valvano. There were lots of others though, and I had to keep crossing names off the list because there were so many. I finally settled on five (other than Bob Knight) that I wanted to be absolutely certain I went and saw: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Steve Kerr, Ron Felling, and Damon Bailey. I had a different purpose in going to see each one, but I knew I wanted to spend some time with them.
So that’s what I did.
I ACTUALLY WENT TO see Dean Smith before I began this book. My hope at the time—May of 2009—was that I would write his biography before writing the book you are reading now.
As I mentioned earlier, the first book I had ever proposed was one on Dean. That was in the spring of 1982. Since then, Dean had been a part of several other books I’d done: A Season Inside, A March to Madness, Last Dance. And he had been a continuing presence throughout my career.
The first time I had any clue that his memory might be slipping came when I went to talk to him during the research of Last Dance, my book on the Final Four. This was in February of 2005 and it was Dean, while telling me stories from his college days, who brought up his memory issues to me.
“I just can’t bring things back the way I used to,” he said. “Before, everything stayed in my head. Now it’s in and out.”
I joked with him at the time that half his memory was better than all of most people’s memories.
“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s frustrating, especially when you are used to doing most things by memory without having to think about it.”
I didn’t think that much of it at the time: Dean was seventy-four and even he was bound to have some memory slippage as he got older. I’d seen it in my father, who was ten years older, as he had gotten into his eighties. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember things—he just couldn’t remember everything.
Then, over the next couple of years, I began to hear that Dean’s memory had gone downhill quickly. I found it hard to believe. Dean Smith? Honestly, I didn’t even want to contemplate it. It was at the ACC Tournament in 2009 that a couple of longtime friends from Carolina asked me if I was still giving any thought at all to doing a Dean biography. By then he’d been involved in a couple of books, including a really bad autobiography in 1999 that the publisher had brought Sally Jenkins in to try to rescue after the guy who had initially written it botched it so badly that he created a book that was completely unreadable.
Sally did the best she could, but Dean simply wouldn’t open up to her—even for a book with his name on it. Because she had almost no time to try to rescue the book, Sally didn’t have the chance to talk to others about Dean, which I knew was going to be the only way to really tell the story.
“I’d still like to do it,” I said when the question came up. “But I’d need Dean to really cooperate, not just by talking to me but by telling everyone else that it’s okay to talk to me.”
“You should go see him—soon.”
I took the hint. A little more than a month later, I drove from Charlotte, where I was covering a golf tournament, to see Dean in his office in the Dean Dome. He still went in a couple of days a week to answer mail and return phone calls and to spend some time with his old assistant Bill Guthridge, who had an office right around the corner from his.
It had been a while since I had seen Dean. When I walked into his office, he was standing next to his desk while his assistant, Linda Woods, was trying to fix something for him.
“Dean!” I said, genuinely glad to see him.
My exuberance must have surprised him. “John!” he said, mocking my enthusiasm the way he might have twenty years earlier. Maybe, I thought, things aren’t as bad as I’ve heard.
When we sat down to talk, I quickly understood that things were not great. There were times when he was all there—every bit the Dean Smith I had always known. Then there were other times when I would bring up a name, one that should be familiar to him, and he’d look at me blankly. A couple of times when he was trying to remember things he got very frustrated, slamming his fist on the desk at one point because he couldn’t bring back a name.
I finally told him why I had come. I told him I truly believed he was the most important person in college basketball in the last fifty years, not because of the games he’d won but because of the lives he had touched.
More than touched—influenced.
“I honestly don’t think there’s been a book done that is worthy of the life you’ve led,” I said. “I have enough ego to think I can write that book. I wouldn’t even need that much time since we’ve spent a lot of time together through the years. What I need are phone numbers and the ability to say to people, ‘Dean is cooperating on this book.’ ”
He was all there now. “My life hasn’t been all that special,” he said. “I’m just a basketball coach.”
I knew he wasn’t being falsely modest, that’s not his way. “With all due respect, Dean, I disagree.”
He finally said he’d think about it and get back to me. I went to see Rick Brewer as soon as I said good-bye to Dean. Rick has been Dean’s PR person—officially and unofficially—for close to forty years. I told him what had happened.
“Talk to him,” I said. “Time is an issue now.”
“I know,” he said. “You should try and get Roy [Williams] and Bill [Guthridge] to talk to him too.”
Both were out of town. I left a message with Linda Woods for Bill and left one for Roy too. Roy actually called me back from vacation. I told him why I had called. “As soon as I get back, I’ll go see him,” he said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.” Bill said the same thing.
Before either of them could go see him, though, I got a call from Rick: “He said yes.”
Honestly, I was stunned. I had expected a polite blow off.
“I went to see him and he said to me, ‘Well, if I’m going to do something like this, John’s the one I trust to do it.’ ”
“He didn’t say, ‘Even if he’s a Duke guy’?” I asked.
Rick, who is as loyal to Carolina blue as anyone who has ever lived, laughed. “No,” he said. “But I’m sure he thought it.”
I WAS GOING TO spend the first week in July in Chapel Hill, but a health issue came up: not Dean’s health, my health. I had to have open-heart surgery on June 29 after a routine stress test uncovered seven (not a typo) blockages in my arteries. I recovered well and rescheduled my trip for the second week in August. The first thing Dean said when I walked in was, “How’s your heart? Are you sure you’re okay to do this?”
I told him I was fine. Our sessions together went as well as I could have hoped. Again, there were good moments and bad. He remembered every detail about the night he met his first wife, Anne, at a graduation dance at the University of Kansas. That was good. When I asked him to talk about Bob Spear, who had started Dean’s college coaching career by hiring him as an assistant at the Air Force Academy, he looked at me blankly. “Tell me some things about him,” he said. “Maybe it will come back.” That was bad.
What I realized after we’d had three sessions over two days was that I was going to need two hours to get one hour of material most of the time. I didn’t want to push him too hard in terms of time because I could see him getting tired after a couple of hours. Dean, being Dean, kept pausing and tapping his chest as we talked. “Your heart okay?” he would say.
He told Linda to give me any phone numbers I needed, and I began collecting them so I could start making calls. It was after I left Chapel Hill that the issues began to crop up. His family was concerned that the time he was spending with me might be too difficult for him. I understood, and as I said, I could see him getting tired at the end of our first session, so I had cut the next two short.
I talked to Linnea, his wife, and Scott, his son. (Dean also has four daughters. Scott and two of the girls are from his first marriage; the two younger girls are from his marriage to Linnea. All five are adults, and Scott referees basketball as a part-time job.) The short version of the story is simple: they were concerned about Dean’s health. I understood, still thought the book could be done, but didn’t feel I could argue with them at any great length because he was Linnea’s husband and Scott’s dad—not mine. Plus, they were around him more and had to know the situation better. Sadly, I decided to abandon the project.
The following summer the family went public with the fact that Dean was not in good health and struggling with memory issues. One thing that hasn’t changed at all is the way I feel about his life: there still hasn’t been a book worthy of who he was during those thirty-six years as North Carolina’s basketball coach.
I hope someday that will change.
I HAVE TOLD THIS story often, and it came up again in December of 2010 when Mike Krzyzewski was about to win his 880th game—one more than Dean Smith won during his career.
It happened in March of 1993 on the same day that I last saw Jim Valvano alive. Duke, the two-time defending national champion, and North Carolina, which would win that year’s national title, were closing out the regular season against each other in Chapel Hill.
They were ranked, I believe, number two (Carolina) and number five (Duke) in the country. Early in the game, both coaches were on the officials, each trying to get an edge for his team. Lenny Wirtz, a veteran referee who had worked a lot of Duke-Carolina games, finally called the two of them to the scorer’s table.
“Look, fellas, I know it’s a big game, I know you’re both wound tight. But take it easy a little bit. Let us work the game.”
Krzyzewski looked at Wirtz and, with a smile on his face, said, “Lenny, there are twenty-one thousand people in here who are all against me. You three guys are the only ones I can talk to.”
Wirtz laughed. Smith did not. “Lenny, don’t let him do that,” he said. “He’s trying to get you on his side.”
Krzyzewski looked at Smith and waved his hand dismissively. “Come on, Dean, stop it. I was kidding. You’re full of shit.”
With that, the two men stalked to their benches. When Krzyzewski got to within earshot of his assistant coaches, he said, “If I ever start to act like him, don’t ask any questions, just get a gun and shoot me.”
The irony in the story is obvious: over the years Mike did act more and more like Dean. He succeeded Dean as the ACC’s target coach and heard over and over how his team got all the calls, that there was a double standard for ACC officials—one for Duke and Krzyzewski, the other for the rest of the league. It was the exact same charge he had leveled against Dean and Carolina all those years earlier.
“I actually think it’s tougher for Mike,” Dean said to me in 2005. “There’s so much more media attention now, and the coaches are under such a microscope—especially him.”
That comment is a pretty fair reflection of how the relationship between Krzyzewski and Smith changed after Dean retired in 1997. Nowadays, Krzyzewski and Roy Williams aren’t exactly close friends, but Krzyzewski has nothing but nice things to say about Smith and their rivalry.
In fact, in 2010 amidst the spate of stories written in North Carolina as he was about to go past Dean’s win total, Mike bristled when the “get a gun and shoot me” line came up.
“Whatever was said was said in private,” he told Ken Tysiac from the Charlotte Observer. “I certainly always respected Dean.”
I don’t doubt that. But he repeated the comment to me right after that game. In fact, in the ensuing years when he would say or do something Deanlike, I would occasionally leave him a message saying simply, “We’re rounding up the guns.”
What Krzyzewski figured out as he got older was that more often than not, being like Dean was a good thing. That’s not to say they aren’t very different people: Mike has always been more blunt, more in-your-face than Dean, who was the master of the subtle shot (unless you knew him and realized the shot wasn’t really that subtle).
Once, I asked Dean what he thought about Muggsy Bogues, the tiny (5 foot 3) Wake Forest point guard. “He does a great job of fouling you without getting caught,” Dean said. “The refs miss it because he’s so smart about using his size to foul down low where they don’t see it.”
Krzyzewski would have said the same thing only differently: “The refs let him get away with fouling because he’s short.”
They’re both from the Midwest, but one grew up
in a small town (Emporia, Kansas), the other in a big city (Chicago). They both served in the armed forces: Dean in the air force after graduating from Kansas, Krzyzewski in the army after going to West Point. No one I know has ever heard Dean curse. No one I know has ever heard Krzyzewski not curse. Dean’s liberal on all issues: he marched in favor of a nuclear freeze, opposed the war in Vietnam, and can’t remember ever voting for a Republican for president. Krzyzewski voted for Barack Obama in 2008—perhaps his first vote for a Democrat. He hosted fundraisers for Elizabeth Dole when she ran for the Senate in North Carolina and has photos of both Presidents Bush on the wall of his office. When President Clinton came into the Duke locker room after the national championship game in 1994, he posed for a photo with President Clinton. When it was sent to him, he put it in a drawer of his desk.
“He was an Arkansas fan anyway,” he explained.
What they share—besides being great coaches and fierce competitors—is loyalty. Both take the same approach to their players that my mother took to her children: I can criticize them, but you can’t. They are the same way with their friends, especially those they have known a long time.
I was covering the ACC when Krzyzewski first came into the league, and I witnessed a lot of his early struggles up close. That’s why, even as he has become more and more insulated through the years, I can still call him directly and know I’ll get a call back.
It’s why I rode the bus that day going to Greensboro, en route to Krzyzewski’s 880th win—much to Mike Cragg’s shock.
We talked that day about his relationship with Bob Knight, which isn’t nearly as lovey-dovey as it may appear now. “I love Coach Knight,” Krzyzewski said that day. “I really do. But I also recognize him for what he is and for what he’s not. I think once you do that, you can appreciate the good things he brings to the table in a friendship and not worry about the rest.”
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