Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Izzo will spend hours studying how other coaches, especially football coaches, conduct press conferences. If he sees something that impresses him, he will cold call a guy and commend him. “I enjoy that about my job. People who I’ve never met will take my call,” he says. “Football guys are so intriguing to me because they have to be so organized. It’s fun to talk to people who are in the same profession but a different venue. Plus, they’re not trying to cover up anything because you’re not recruiting against them.”

  Izzo has fielded numerous NBA offers over the years. The closest he came to accepting was in 2010, when the Cleveland Cavaliers pursued him. Izzo really likes the team’s owner, Dan Gilbert, and if LeBron James hadn’t left to sign with the Miami Heat, there’s a very good chance Izzo would have said yes. He is intrigued by the idea of coaching pros, but the NBA does not fit him authentically the way college does. The league is too corporate. He prefers the family store.

  Meanwhile, he recruits all the messengers he can get. Lots of coaches invite their former players to come back and work out with their current ones, but Izzo may be the only one who built a separate locker room for them. The room contains fourteen lockers plus a steam room, sauna, and shower, not to mention a flat-screen and lounge area. And lest anyone think that he gives preferential treatment to the guys who made the NBA, Izzo also has a big wall in the facility dedicated to the program’s former managers.

  Lupe and their two children are mainstays at games and tournaments, but from the time he and Lupe started dating, Tom has been reluctant to share details about his work when he walks through the door. She learns much about what is going on with the team by reading the newspaper. “Being home is his release,” she says. “When he’s home, he’s connected with the kids. He wants to know what’s going on in the house.”

  For years, Izzo’s home phone number was listed. He is so generous in granting access to the media that the United States Basketball Writers Association gave him an award. He went to the USBWA’s banquet to accept it on a Sunday morning at the Final Four, even though his team was playing for the national championship the next night. When he is on vacation at his lake house in Grand Haven, he likes to mix it up with the locals. “A lot of people come there and say, ‘Why don’t you put some trees up? Why don’t you go there and have privacy?’” he says. “Man, I don’t like privacy. I like smelling my neighbor’s cookout, y’know?”

  It’s remarkable enough that Izzo would take his team to the Final Four seven times in his first twenty-one years. What’s even more remarkable is that during an era when the top programs are dependent on the so-called one-and-done guys—players who are good enough to become first-round draft picks after their freshman season—Izzo only had three such players during that span. Instead, he has won with guys like Cleaves, who played four years in college and was unable to stick as an NBA player after being chosen 15th in the draft by the Pistons, and Green, a lightly recruited forward who also stayed four years before being selected by the Warriors in the second round of the 2012 NBA draft.

  Oftentimes, when a coach gets to that many Final Fours and comes up empty-handed, he is tagged with the “underachiever” label. That hasn’t happened to Izzo because fans recognize that many of his Final Four teams had no business getting that far. If anything, he has been seen as an overachiever. But that is its own form of insult, because it reinforces Izzo’s suspicions that his program has yet to achieve truly elite status.

  The notion that Izzo is winning the “right way” while men like Kentucky’s John Calipari, Kansas’s Bill Self, and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski are doing it the “wrong way” with one-and-dones is a false narrative, and Izzo knows it. He goes after one-and-dones with just as much zeal as they do. The difference is, he keeps losing out. Izzo does not hide his disdain for what he sees as the instant-gratification culture that has overtaken his sport, not to mention the world in general. He believes that building relationships and developing players takes time. In his view, there is no such thing as a quick fix. Work isn’t authentic unless you can smell the sawdust.

  That craving for contact has led Izzo in recent years to launch a one-man crusade against what he perceives as the evils of social media. He is far from alone in holding this view, but unlike most coaches, his primary concern isn’t that one of his players will post something embarrassing. He’s far more worried about what they are reading, good and bad. It drives him to distraction knowing that so many people are spending so much time engaging in something that is so artificial.

  “I worry about all the time spent on Twitter. I told my wife, ‘I’d rather my kid have a drinking problem. At least when he wakes up in the morning, he’s hungover,’” he says. “If a doctor is going to tell you that you have cancer, you want him to email it to you? That’s why there are no leaders on teams anymore. Kids can’t communicate. I tell my staff that I’d like to invent a uniform so I can send my guys a text during a game that says, ‘Will you please guard somebody?’”

  Izzo’s assistants cringe when he goes on these rants. They fear it will hurt recruiting. They’ve already heard the chatter from some of Izzo’s younger rivals that he is from the old school, that he might not understand the proclivities of today’s players. His recruiting has yet to fall off, but even if it did, it’s doubtful he would dial back. Izzo is not opposed to progress. He’s opposed to bullshit. “We’re teaching kids that they should have your own ‘brand.’ Be your own guy. So now at fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, it’s me me me me me. That’s the society they’re growing up in. I don’t like that,” he says. “So don’t tell me it’s because I’m old school. Fuck that old-school shit. This is not about old school/new school. It’s about right school/wrong school.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On the day the Spartans closed out the 1999–2000 regular season with a home game against archrival Michigan, Izzo told his best friend and assistant coach, Mike Garland, that all he wanted was to be winning by enough so he could just enjoy the last minute of the game. He was only half serious, but when the Spartans built a 50-point lead with four minutes to play, Garland walked up to his boss and told him to go sit with his guys and savor what was happening. So Izzo walked down the bench, sat between Cleaves and Peterson, and turned himself over to the moment. “I got to enjoy four minutes, just watching,” he says with a gleam in his eye. “It was awesome.”

  It was also unusual. The reason Izzo remembers those four minutes so well is that there haven’t been many of them. This is the curse he carries inside his PEAK profile. Getting to Us is something he does for other people. He has a much harder time getting to Me.

  This is human nature, of course. Our best qualities and our worst ones come from the same place. If Izzo experienced all of his successful moments like he did those four minutes, he might lose the authenticity he first acquired in his family’s shoe store. When I mention this observation to him during a phone conversation, he laughs. “I feel like I’m in therapy here because you’re right on the money,” he says. “I think what you’re talking about is true for 99.999 percent of successful people. I don’t know how you can enjoy your success without losing your edge. I wish I could learn to enjoy life a little bit more, but I still think I’m doing it the right way for me.”

  Izzo is inarguably one of the finest college basketball coaches in the game’s history, yet he still sees his program as residing on a tier below the likes of Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky. “That club still selects more than it recruits,” he says. “I’m not being humble here. You know what I have to do every summer. If those guys are gonna watch someone play two or three times, that means I’ve gotta be there ten times. That’s just the way it is.”

  Perhaps, but in many ways, Izzo is much more suited to a second-tier program, or at least a second-tier mentality. It has always been difficult for him to relax. Even when he is sitting in a basement lounge chair in his house and eating french fri
es out of a Styrofoam box, his legs are crossed tight at the ankles, his feet vibrating rigidly back and forth. He has a lovely vacation house on Lake Michigan in Grand Haven, Michigan, but he is not the type to take a nap on the beach with a novel in his lap. He’d rather get up early in the morning, climb aboard his utility vehicle, and grate the sand into neat, even lines. He does his neighbor’s beach, too. “I just think he likes to see the finished product,” Lupe says. “He’s always thinking and moving.”

  “I worry about him,” Mariucci says. “I worry about his health. I worry about burnout. He’s full speed ahead all the time. I know he enjoys it, but it doesn’t always show. I’m like, ‘Show me a smile once in a while.’”

  He would if he had the time. His office is, as he puts it, “a recruiting mecca.” Every coach at Michigan State brings their recruits to meet him—football, basketball, hockey, softball, women’s golf, track, you name it. The kids don’t get a quick meet-and-greet, either. Izzo sits with them, chats for a while, joshes with their families. When a good friend offered a few years ago to make a big donation to the basketball program, Izzo persuaded him to give it to women’s softball instead so they could build a practice facility.

  That’s a big reason why Izzo takes losses so personally. He’s constantly afraid of letting other people down. “It’s a big burden, but it’s also pretty awesome that I get to be in this position,” he says. “For someone like me to stay in one place this long is pretty unusual. Everybody is more transient now.”

  Like every great coach, he has learned to adapt. “It used to be that players used to trust you because of your position. They had to earn your trust, not so much the other way around,” he says. “I don’t feel that I’m owed that just because of my position. I guess that’s one of the biggest adjustments I’ve made. And you know what? I don’t blame them. Why would you trust anybody in this day and age with everybody screwing everybody?”

  Two months after the loss to Middle Tennessee, Izzo traveled to the Bay Area to visit Mariucci and his family. Mariucci hasn’t coached since he was fired by the Detroit Lions in 2005. He has a cushy TV gig with NFL Network (which is based in Los Angeles) and spends much of his down time at a vacation home near San Diego. During the visit, Izzo and Mariucci went to see Green play for the Warriors. They visited the locker room beforehand and had a grand old time. The trip gave Izzo a tantalizing hint of what life could be like for him, someday, when the grinding is done.

  He has long insisted that he won’t be one of those lifers who are still coaching into their seventies. When he got his 400th career win in January 2012, Mariucci told him he wanted to be there for his 500th. “If I’m still coaching that long, shoot me,” Izzo said, half joking. He picked up No. 500 in November 2015. He may laugh off the idea of going a long while, but he is still as good as he has ever been. “He may coach till he’s ninety,” Garland says. “Trust me, he knows what he’s doing. It’s controlled chaos. If anything, he’s adamant about what we can do to take this thing to another level. He wants to make it even greater.”

  Izzo hasn’t given much thought as to how or when he will step away, but he knows what he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want a long drawn-out goodbye like Heathcote had. He doesn’t want a court named after him, because he saw how Purdue named its court after longtime coach Gene Keady and then the fans turned on him when he won only seven games during his final season. Most of all, he doesn’t want to stay longer than he should. “You’ll never see me do a half-ass job,” he says. “The university is not going to get ripped off.”

  What he really means is that he would never rip himself off. So he grinds and he grinds, searching for contact, meeting every obligation, eyeball to eyeball, always doing what is best for the family business. He’ll go as long as he can smell the sawdust. He’ll go as long as he can feel the guilt.

  Mike Krzyzewski

  “I BELIEVE IN ETHNIC PRESSURE.”

  What’s my name?

  Even at the age of five, the boy believed in being prepared. He and his family were about to ride the bus across town to see relatives. The boy knew that as soon as he walked in the door, his uncle Joe, the cop, would ask him to say his own name. The answer was not so obvious, because the boy’s name was different from his father’s. For some reason, so was Uncle Joe’s, although Joe’s children—the boy’s cousins—used the same name his dad did. Looking back, it all seems rather confusing, but at the time it was just normal life in the 1950s as a Polish kid on the South Side of Chicago.

  It’s not that the boy’s dad was ashamed of his heritage. William Kross was nothing if not proud. He bowled in a league with his buddies, and whenever he won a tournament, he would bring home that trophy and display it alongside the others in his living room. His decision to use a different surname was purely practical. He worried that if he used his real one, the one with all the consonants, it would be harder to support his family.

  And it worked. For many years, William was employed as an elevator operator in Willoughby Tower downtown, nodding hello and goodbye dozens of times each day to all those well-heeled professionals with their plush offices and easy-to-spell last names. He later owned a tavern, which he would open at five o’clock each morning so the truckers and blue-collar guys could down a few shots before heading to work. When he came home, his wife, Emily, would leave for her job as a cleaning lady at the Chicago Athletic Club. They weren’t struggling, exactly, but it wasn’t an easy life, either. Using an anglicized surname just made things a little less hard.

  His two sons used their real name, but it was hard to spell and weird to pronounce, especially for a five-year-old boy. So knowing his uncle’s question was coming, the boy would ask his parents exactly how to say it.

  “Mike . . . Sha-SHEF-ski,” they told him. He practiced it out loud.

  Mike’s grandparents had emigrated from Poland and Austria and entered America through Ellis Island. His family lived in a mostly Polish neighborhood on the top floor of a two-level flat on Cortez Street. More family members lived in the apartment below. Mike didn’t deal with a whole lot of discrimination in those days; consonants were plentiful in the world he knew. If anything, he was a beacon in the neighborhood, an excellent student, a terrific athlete, a natural-born leader. His parents understood, however, that consonants could be a problem in the world beyond. They didn’t teach their sons how to speak Polish and didn’t want them learning it at school. Mike didn’t discover until many years later that it was because his parents didn’t want him to develop an accent. He left that neighborhood with a distinct Chicago twang, but there was nothing Polish about it.

  Mike, of course, would go on to become a highly successful basketball coach, famous and wealthy beyond his parents’ wildest dreams. He would face plenty of adversity in his career, but it was never due to his name. If anything, he used it as comedic foil. On the day that he was announced as the head basketball coach at Duke University—a move that shocked the public, for he had never been mentioned as a candidate—the first thing he did was crack a joke about it. “First of all, it’s pronounced Sha-SHEF-ski. K-R-Z-Y-Z-E-W-S-K-I,” he said. “And if you think that’s bad, you should have seen it before I changed it.”

  Unlike his father, Mike never changed his name, although many people simply call him Coach K. Yet the experience of growing up in an immigrant family imbued him with a healthy mix of pride and defiance. It set in motion the dynamics that enabled him to become one of the greatest coaches of his generation in any sport. It is at the core of how he gets his teams to Us. Krzyzewski’s ethnic roots straightened his back, the better to carry his family’s legacy on his shoulders, not to mention a very healthy chip. He is grateful and humble and always just a little bit pissed off. The lingering image of Krzyzewski, now past his seventieth birthday, is not of him celebrating big moments, or the sheepish grin he wears when he snips yet another championship net. It is the petulant pose he strikes on the sideline, hands on his hips,
lips tight, an angry, disapproving scowl etched on his chiseled face.

  What’s my name? His PEAK profile emerged from his search for that answer. The persistence required to overcome stereotypes. The empathy born out of the risk his grandparents took to immigrate to America, following “the courage of their convictions,” as he often says. The authenticity that comes from taking on all those consonants, regardless of the barriers they might erect. The knowledge of who he was and where he came from, and learning from his parents’ example that the only way to improve your lot in life is to work hard and do your best, never complaining, never apologizing for who you are.

  Many years after leaving that neighborhood, Mike received the ultimate honor in his profession by being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. His father, William, was not alive to see it, but he probably would not have been all that surprised. He knew his son was intelligent and hardworking, and that there was no limit to what he could accomplish in the United States of America.

  But Mike . . . Sha-SHEF-ski? Getting into the Hall of Fame? That would have blown him away.

  * * *

  • • •

  To understand how Mike Krzyzewski leads, we have to begin with the night he earned his most important victory.