The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  I’ve rarely seen Rick Brewer flustered in the almost forty years I’ve known him. Now, for a split second, he was lost at sea. At last, he found land. “Coach,” he said, “everyone does you.”

  Dean finally said he’d think about talking to me and said he’d let me know after the game the next afternoon. I said that was fine, he could call me, since I was driving back that night to cover Maryland–Wake Forest the next day.

  “You mean you drove down here just to talk to me?” Dean said.

  “Yup.”

  Dean shook his head. “I wish I’d known that,” he said. “I’d have had Rick buy you dinner.”

  More classic Dean. He’d have had Rick buy me dinner.

  —

  The next day, after losing to Virginia, Dean said yes. Or, specifically, Rick said Dean had said yes. But it had to be done his way: I would come to Chapel Hill and on the Friday of the two-day North-South Doubleheader in Charlotte, and I would drive with Dean to Charlotte. That would give me about two and a half hours to talk to Dean. Then I would drive his car back to Chapel Hill (he’d come home with the team), leave it in his parking space at Carmichael Auditorium, and pick my car up so I could drive to Durham and cover the Maryland-Duke game on Saturday.

  The only bad thing about the drive was the cigarette smoke. The interview went very well—Dean was more open and honest than he’d ever been with me—and he agreed to give me names and numbers of the important people in his life. One of them was the Reverend Robert Seymour, Dean’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill.

  It was Reverend Seymour who told me the story about Dean helping desegregate Chapel Hill restaurants in 1958 by walking into the Pines, the restaurant where the UNC basketball team ate its pregame meals, with a black member of the church and daring management not to serve them.

  Reverend Seymour made it clear to me that this wasn’t something taken on lightly. “Segregation was a cherished tradition to many people around here,” he said to me. “Dean wasn’t Dean then. He was an assistant coach. The management would certainly know him, but who knew how they’d react? They might call the police. They might call Coach McGuire and complain. There could have been serious trouble.”

  Reverend Seymour was a very bright, wise man who clearly was one of the few people who had Dean Smith’s ear on a regular basis. “I hear TV announcers talk all the time about courageous comebacks or courageous decisions during a game,” he said. “What Dean did that night took real courage.”

  I couldn’t wait to see Dean again to ask him to flesh out the story. I wanted details: Was he nervous or scared? How had he expected management to react? Why hadn’t this story been told before?

  And so, the next day I walked into Dean’s office and asked him the question. He looked at me, clearly unhappy, and said, “Who told you that story?”

  I told him it had been Reverend Seymour.

  He leaned back in his chair and said, “I wish he hadn’t told you that.”

  I was stunned and said so. “You should be proud of doing something like that,” I said.

  That was when Dean Smith said something to me that I’ve repeated often through the years because it says so much about who he was. “John,” he said, leaning forward, “you should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do the right thing.”

  To this day, the line takes my breath away. The line was Dean Smith.

  —

  On the night of September 24, 2013, Mike Krzyzewski and I were talking about that line and about Dean. We were also talking about the day he and I had met in New York and Jim Valvano’s ability to completely take over any room he walked into.

  “I was a terrible speaker in those days,” Krzyzewski said—something I knew because I’d heard him speak often when he first got to Duke. “I had no confidence. To Jim, speaking publicly was like breathing or walking—he did it without even giving it any thought and knowing he was better than anyone at it. For me, it was a chore.”

  We were sitting at a table at a dinner in Washington, D.C. Krzyzewski was being honored that night with the Nell and John Wooden Leadership in Coaching Award. The only thing Krzyzewski may have more of than leadership awards is wins. I had been asked to introduce him. So we were sitting next to each other during the dinner.

  Krzyzewski is now one of the best public speakers on the planet. He is funny and polished and always prepared—much the same way he’s always prepared when he coaches. He’s in constant demand from corporate America and charities and doesn’t go anywhere for anything less than fifty thousand dollars and a private plane. Usually, it’s more than that—except for charity events for friends, which he does often and does for free.

  “Jimmy is the reason I became a good speaker,” Krzyzewski said. “When he was sick, we’d sit and swap stories in his hospital room. He started saying to me, ‘You’re a very good storyteller and you’re smart. If you worked at it a little, you could be very good. You could make a lot of money speaking. You should make a lot of money speaking.’ He pushed me to work at it.”

  He paused. “Other than Mickie [his wife] and my brother, there’s probably no one I’ve ever been closer to, especially those last few months. We said things to one another that men almost never say to one another. I cherish that time.”

  As we talked, we were interrupted frequently. People wanted autographs. Or a picture. Or to tell a story about where they were when Duke won a national championship. Krzyzewski treated each person as if the moments he spent with that person were the most important of the night. It’s one of his gifts.

  During the interruptions, I sat and thought about Valvano and about Dean and about some of the classic games and moments I’d covered and witnessed involving the three of them. When Krzyzewski turned back to me after one more photo, I asked him a question.

  “If Jim were here now and saw what you’ve become, what do you think he’d say?”

  Krzyzewski smiled, and I thought I saw his eyes glisten just a tiny bit.

  Finally, he said, “He’d say—I told you so.”

  —

  Driving home that night in 2013, all three men were on my mind. What, I wondered, would Valvano have become had he lived longer? Would he have coached again—perhaps in the NBA? Would he have become David Letterman or Jay Leno? That was Krzyzewski’s theory. Would he have done something really important, which was what he craved? I still remembered the late-night sessions I’d had with him in his office in the Case Athletics Center at North Carolina State.

  It was usually around three A.M. by the time the office cleared out. Valvano would stretch out on his couch and order me to a chair. “You’re my therapist,” he would say. “I need therapy.”

  And then he would wander all over the place verbally. Was he chasing money too much? Was he missing his daughters’ childhoods? Did he still want to coach basketball? It was all fake, he would say, except the forty minutes during the game and the final score. That was real. Nothing else. And at some point he’d say, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

  The constant search.

  I thought about Dean Smith and his extraordinary legacy. I’d never been in his office at three A.M. and he certainly hadn’t asked me to be his therapist. But I’d had long talks with him through the years, the best ones when we weren’t talking about basketball.

  I still remembered going to interview him on Election Day in 1984. When I walked into his office, he handed me a copy of the previous day’s Chronicle—the student newspaper where I’d started my career as a college freshman. It was open to the editorial page and a headline that said “Ronald Reagan Deserves a Second Term.”

  “What is going on with your old newspaper?” Dean asked, a huge grin on his face. “Ronald Reagan? Really? You must be so embarrassed.”

  At lunch that day, once Dean had stopped ribbing me about the editorial, we talked more seriously about the state of the country. “Why don’t you run against Jesse Helms,” I urged—meaning it. “I’d take a
leave of absence from my job to come and work for you.” I meant that too.

  He shook his head. “I’m too liberal to get elected in this state,” he said. “Much too liberal.”

  Twelve years later, I was again in North Carolina on Election Day. This time my lunch with Dean was much more upbeat since we both knew Bill Clinton was going to be reelected. Later that day, I went to practice at Duke and told Krzyzewski how pleased Dean and I were that Clinton was going to win that night.

  “Oh yeah,” Krzyzewski said. “I forgot. You two liberal left-wingers deserve one another.”

  I thought about all those things on the drive home from the Wooden dinner: the battles between Mike and Dean; the low moments during Krzyzewski’s early days that I’d witnessed firsthand. I remembered looking across the court at him during an awful 40–36 loss to Maryland at home in 1982 and, as he caught my eye, seeing him shake his head in disgust.

  “If I’d have been you,” he said to me after the game, “I’d have left at halftime.”

  “I had to work,” I said. “I had to stay.”

  “Me too,” he answered. “I still thought about leaving.”

  I watched in amazement as Krzyzewski went from a seemingly overmatched young coach to a basketball icon: Coach K to almost everyone, a man who has risen to the pinnacle of his sport and won more championships than almost any other coach in history. To this day, I kid Krzyzewski that he needs me around more since I’m one of the few people who still remembers when his name was Mike.

  By the time I turned into my driveway on that September evening in 2013, I knew what my next book would be: the story of these three remarkable men. The fact that two of the four coaches on college basketball’s Mount Rushmore and a coach who had and has a unique place in basketball history were competing with one another and living alongside one another for an entire decade is an amazing story. The fact that I was there to witness that extended moment in time and was lucky enough to get to know all three men made me—I believed—uniquely qualified to write about all three: about their rivalries and their relationships and how they evolved through time.

  I couldn’t talk to Dean or Jim but, fortunately, I’m a hoarder and I still had most of my tapes and notebooks from that time long ago. Plus, I was fortunate that their wives were both willing to talk to me at length, as well as Valvano’s brothers and many of their former players and assistant coaches. Mike was available to talk and did—at length.

  The last time we spoke for an extended time, wrapping up some final details, he spoke emotionally—again—about both Jim and Dean. When we finished, he looked at me and said, “The whole thing really is an extraordinary story. I’m glad you made me think about it all over again.”

  I’m glad too.

  Dean, Jim, and Mike. Or, as their loyal followers would call them, Coach Smith, V, and Coach K. They were hardly the Three Musketeers—their most intense duels were against, not alongside, one another.

  But in the end, they did become comrades—linked together in basketball lore, forever.

  1

  Sitting in the tower that had been built for him, Mike Krzyzewski had a spectacular view of his kingdom.

  It was a late spring day and, from the sixth floor of the corner of Cameron Indoor Stadium that houses the Duke basketball offices, Krzyzewski could look out his window at the patch of the Duke campus that is called Krzyzewskiville. The sign that tells visitors they have arrived in the township named for the coach sat six floors down and about a hundred yards away from Krzyzewski.

  If he wanted to, Krzyzewski could close his eyes and picture what Krzyzewskiville looks like in winter, jammed with tents and students, all waiting for the chance to get inside to watch Duke play North Carolina in what is annually one of the games on the college basketball schedule.

  Or, if he didn’t want to use his imagination at that moment, he could turn to one of the photos on the wall of his office that depicted Krzyzewskiville in winter, every inch of it packed with supplicants.

  At this moment, however, Krzyzewski wasn’t looking out the window and he wasn’t gazing at a photo. He was leaning forward in his chair, his voice soft but filled with emotion.

  “I miss them,” he said quietly. “I miss them both for different reasons and for the same reason. They were completely different people and they were different as coaches too. But competing against them was always the same—really hard. If you beat them, you knew you’d truly done something, because it was never easy. And when they beat you”—he paused to smile for a moment—“which they did often, it made you really, really want to find a way to beat them the next time.

  “They both made me better. If I hadn’t had to compete against them, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. That’s not me trying to say something nice or say the right thing. It’s just a fact.”

  When Krzyzewski talked about where he was, he wasn’t talking about his palatial office, the one jammed with trophies and plaques and magazine covers and photos. He wasn’t even talking about preparing for his thirty-fifth season as the basketball coach at Duke University. He was talking about being the winningest coach in college basketball history, about the then four national championships and the two Olympic gold medals.

  Now he’s simply Coach K to almost everyone in the sport of basketball. But once upon a time he was Mike Krzyzewski, the coach who was greeted on March 19, 1980, the morning after he was hired at Duke, by a headline in the student newspaper that said “Krzyzewski: This Is Not a Typo.”

  No one knew the name. No one knew how to spell the name. And no one knew how to pronounce the name. Lefty Driesell, then the coach at Maryland, gave up early. “I just call him Mike,” he said. Even Bob Knight, who coached Krzyzewski for four years in college and hired him as an assistant coach when he got out of the army, got the name wrong. Knight called his former point guard “Kre-shefski.” Once, when it was pointed out to him that the correct pronunciation was actually “Je-jevski,” Knight shook his head and said, “It’s not my fault if he pronounces his name wrong.”

  Back then, during his early years at Duke, Krzyzewski could only wish that his biggest problem was having his name mispronounced. Every single day he found himself competing against an icon and a rock star. The icon was Dean Smith, who had already coached the U.S. Olympic team by the time Krzyzewski arrived at Duke and had taken the University of North Carolina to five Final Fours even though he was not yet fifty.

  Carmichael Auditorium, where North Carolina played home games, was exactly 10.1 miles from Cameron Indoor Stadium. That alone made it hard to find room to breathe for a young coach moving into the rarefied air of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

  There was also the rock star: Jim Valvano, who arrived to coach at North Carolina State nine days after Krzyzewski was hired at Duke. Krzyzewski and Valvano had coached against each other during the previous five years when Krzyzewski had been the coach at Army and Valvano had been the coach at Iona. Krzyzewski’s last Army team had gone 9–17, one of the reasons why his hiring stunned almost everyone at Duke and in the basketball world. Iona had been 29–5 during Valvano’s final season there and had been the last team to beat Louisville—which would go on to win the national championship. The Gaels, led by Jeff Ruland, a six-foot-eleven-inch brute of a center, beat the Cardinals in Madison Square Garden—by seventeen points.

  Valvano, who had always dreamed of coaching, as he called it, “the 9 o’clock game in the Garden” (the second game of a college doubleheader), had his players cut down the nets after they won the game. Valvano was funny—fall-down funny. At one of his first press conferences after taking the N.C. State job he told a story about his early days at Iona.

  “I was at a party,” he said. “I’m so excited about my new job that I’m running around the room shaking hands with everyone saying, ‘Hi, I’m Jim Valvano, Iona College.’ I was on a roll. Finally, this woman looks at me and says, ‘Young man, aren’t you awfully young to own your own college?’ ”

 
That sort of story was only a tiny piece of Valvano’s humor. “Never, and I mean never, have I met someone who took over every single room he ever walked into like Jim Valvano,” Linnea Smith, Dean’s wife, said, smiling at the memory. “He didn’t own the room, he became the room.”

  Which might explain why, when Mickie Krzyzewski, the wife of the new Duke coach, heard the news that Valvano had been hired at N.C. State, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh shit. Here we go again.”

  Her response had nothing to do with her husband’s 1–4 record against Valvano and Iona. It had everything to do with the fact that he owned a college. And every room he walked into.

  —

  Thirty-four years later, Mike Krzyzewski, like everyone who ever knew him, can’t help but laugh when he thinks about Valvano.

  “He loved to gig Dean,” he said, his eyes a little misty but with a huge smile on his face. “And he could do it in a way that no one else could. He actually made Dean laugh—which wasn’t easy.”

  Each spring, the Atlantic Coast Conference holds meetings for everyone associated with the league to discuss ongoing business and its past and future. In the 1980s, there were eight schools in the ACC. On the first morning of the meetings, the basketball coaches would get together.

  “Dean was always late,” remembered Bobby Cremins, who arrived at Georgia Tech one year after Krzyzewski and Valvano were hired at Duke and N.C. State. “I don’t know if it was a seniority thing or a control thing, but he’d always come in a few minutes late.

  “One year, as usual, everyone is in the room except Dean. Jim says to Mike and me, ‘Come on, we’re leaving.’ We go into the hallway and Jim finds a bellboy. He gives him twenty bucks and tells him to come find us in the bathroom once Dean walks into the meeting. We go and wait in the bathroom.

  “A few minutes later, the bellboy comes in and says, ‘Coach Smith’ ”—Cremins actually says “Smit” with his Bronx accent—“ ‘just walked in.’ Mike and I are ready to go, but Jimmy says, ‘No, no, wait.’ So we wait five more minutes—maybe more than that. Then we walk in and Jimmy says, ‘Dean, you’re here already? You’re early!’ Dean just cracked up. Couldn’t stop laughing.”