The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Valvano made everyone laugh. Smith made opponents cry. It wasn’t just the trips to the Final Four or the parade of great players who showed up in Chapel Hill every year. It was the way he won games, his teams often digging holes impossible to crawl out of, then somehow finding a way to do it. Around the ACC, games like that were attributed to the Carolina piss factor: you were winning, you were winning, you were about to win, you knew you were going to win, and then something insane—a miracle shot, a ball ticking the bottom of a scoreboard, an impossibly bad call—would happen and you would somehow lose and you went home pissed.

  Even though he had not yet won a national championship, Smith was an iconic figure in the state of North Carolina. He coached at the school most kids in the state grew up rooting for and wanting to play for and the one that had, by far, the most fans. N.C. State had a lot of fans, but not the way Carolina—as it was called by everyone in the ACC—did. Duke had very few fans. It was a private school and drew most of its student body from out of state.

  Most alumni of Carolina and State had grown up in North Carolina, gone to school there, and stayed there after graduation. Duke was just the opposite. Many in the state referred to it as “the University of New Jersey” because there were times when it seemed as if half of the school’s six thousand undergraduates came from there.

  Valvano got his first lesson about Smith’s iconic status early. Soon after arriving in Raleigh, he went to get a haircut. The story Valvano told, which he always swore was completely true, went like this:

  Barber: “You the fella who replaced ole Norman Sloan?”

  Valvano: “Yes I am. Jim Valvano. Nice to meet you.”

  Barber (ignoring Valvano’s introduction but sighing deeply): “Well, I sure hope you have more luck around here than ole Norman did.”

  Valvano: “Hang on a second. Didn’t Norman Sloan win the national championship a few years ago? Didn’t he go twenty-seven and zero one year and fifty-seven and one for two years?”

  Barber (chuckling at Valvano’s lack of understanding): “Oh sure, he did that. But just imagine what ole Dean Smith would have done with those teams.”

  Everyone put Smith on a pedestal so high that he often found it embarrassing. He was, by nature, shy and private. If he had never been interviewed during his thirty-six years as Carolina’s coach, he would have been thrilled. When the university trustees came to him in 1985 and told him they were planning to name the new twenty-one-thousand seat basketball palace that was about to open the “Dean E. Smith Center,” he balked.

  “You should name it for the players,” he said.

  That name would have been a bit unwieldy.

  “They really had to sit down and explain to him why this was the right thing to do,” Linnea Smith said. “He was embarrassed by it.”

  It didn’t take long for both Valvano and Krzyzewski to understand what they had walked into when they had moved south. On an early recruiting visit to the home of a player in California named Mark Acres, Krzyzewski had the sense not long after arriving that this was a player he wasn’t going to convince to come to Duke.

  Still, he had to go through the ritual of trying to sell his school, his program, and himself to the family. Finally, as the evening was winding down, Krzyzewski turned to Acres’s mother, who had said nothing all night, and asked her if she had any questions at all about Duke or the basketball program.

  She shook her head. “The only thing that matters,” she said, “is that Mark goes to college someplace where he can be close to God.”

  Krzyzewski figured he had nothing to lose. “Well,” he said, “if Mark comes to Duke, God will be coaching ten miles down the road in Chapel Hill, so you might want to think about it.”

  Mark Acres went to Oral Roberts. Most people in North Carolina would tell you that he was a lot farther from God there than he would have been in Durham.

  Jim Valvano died in April 1993. He was forty-seven—eleven months older than Krzyzewski—when he died in Duke Hospital on a beautiful spring morning after fighting cancer for eleven months.

  Krzyzewski was in the room when Valvano died. He still shudders slightly at the memory. “The doctors had told us it wouldn’t be long,” he said. “I still remember Jimmy kind of shaking just a little bit, enough that we noticed. And then he was gone.”

  Gone, but certainly not forgotten. Valvano lives on in video, in memory, and in legend. Every March, during the NCAA Basketball Tournament, he can be seen again and again sprinting around the court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, seconds after North Carolina State had stunned Houston in the 1983 NCAA championship game.

  “I was looking for someone to hug,” he said whenever he retold the story. “Dereck [Whittenburg] was my designated hugger. I couldn’t find him.”

  The designated hugger is fifty-four now, seven years older than Valvano was when he died. With the score tied at 52–52 and time about to run out, Whittenburg had thrown a desperation shot in the direction of the basket. It came up well short. But, as it started to drop, six-foot-seven-inch Lorenzo Charles leaped above everyone, clasped the ball in his huge hands, and dunked it as the clock went to zero.

  “I will never—ever—say that was anything but a pass,” the designated hugger said one rainy night, sitting in a Raleigh restaurant named for Valvano, directly under a photo of the coach. “If V was here now, he’d tell you we ran the play just like he drew it up.”

  The designated hugger laughed at the memory.

  On Jim Valvano’s tombstone are the words he spoke on March 3, 1993—eight weeks before he died—in a speech that has been replayed millions of times through the years: “Take time everyday to laugh, to think, to cry.” Valvano said his father, Rocco, had taught him that. “If you do that,” he added, “that’s a pretty full day.”

  Fittingly, twenty-two years after Valvano’s death, when those who knew him best talk about him, they always laugh, they always cry, and, somewhere along the way, they think too.

  “It’s been very difficult for the men who have coached basketball at N.C. State since Jim left,” said Pam Valvano Strasser, who was Valvano’s childhood sweetheart and his wife for twenty-six years. “Because Jim is still alive to so many people. Those are very big shoes to walk in, especially when it feels as if he’s still here.”

  The same can be said—in an entirely different way—for those who have coached basketball at North Carolina since Dean Smith retired in 1997. Roy Williams, who sits now in Smith’s chair—but won’t park his car in the ex-coach’s parking space outside the building named for him—has won two national championships in twelve seasons. Smith won two in thirty-six seasons. But the thought that his name belongs in the same sentence or paragraph, or even on the same page with Smith’s, not only wouldn’t cross Williams’s mind, it would horrify him.

  “Everything I’ve ever done, any success I’ve ever had, is because of Coach Smith,” Williams said one hot summer day. Williams would sooner cut off his arm than call his mentor anything but Coach Smith.

  “He didn’t just teach me how to coach basketball, he taught me right from wrong. North Carolina basketball is Coach Smith. The rest of us have just followed his lead and his lessons.”

  Smith died on February 7, 2015, after being disabled for several painful years by dementia. Toward the end, only on occasion did Linnea Smith see glimpses into her husband’s mind. “Every so often, when there’s some kind of positive reinforcement in some way, he might say something or smile or give us an indication that he understands something,” she said. “It’s a terminal illness. We all understand that. The hardest thing is that he can’t tell me how he feels about what’s going on around him. To be honest, it’s excruciating.”

  Smith’s long decline and death were most excruciating for those who loved him, but also painful for those who knew him—and competed against him. Krzyzewski had more than his share of shouting matches with Smith through the years. Now, though, after all the enmity between the two men, Krzyzewski understands that,
in many ways, he became Smith. He became the target, the measuring stick for the younger coaches trying to compete with him. Gary Williams, the retired Maryland coach who—like Krzyzewski and Smith—is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, spent years trying to figure out how to beat Krzyzewski more often.

  “In the end you realize, it wasn’t the referees, it wasn’t bad luck or anything else,” Williams said. “It’s really very simple: he’s a great, great basketball coach.”

  That was the conclusion that Krzyzewski finally reached about Smith—though it took him years to get there.

  “Whether we admitted it or not, he set the bar for all of us,” Krzyzewski said. “I never looked for a bar, I wanted to just make our program as good as I possibly could. But we all learned from him. He set the standard. When he retired and I became the target, I finally understood what it was like to be him when all of us were trying to beat him—trying, really, to be him.”

  Krzyzewski smiled again, his mind’s eye clearly seeing those nights when he dueled with Smith and with Valvano.

  “Boy were they good,” he said. “No matter how much you prepared, no matter how much you believed in your players, you knew every game was going to be a fight to the finish—whether you won or lost.

  “I miss those nights. I miss the battles. I miss the two of them.”

  Once upon a time, that was not the case.

  2

  The night of December 5, 1980, was unseasonably warm in Greensboro, North Carolina.

  To most sports fans around the country, it was football season. The NFL was entering the final month of the regular season. College football teams were preparing for bowl games.

  In the state of North Carolina, though, it was already college basketball season. In a sense, it was always basketball season. That sentiment was perhaps best described by Bill Foster, who coached at Duke for six seasons, between 1974 and 1980.

  “If you go to the market and buy steak, there’s bound to be a story in the paper the next day saying that recruiting must be going well,” he said once. “If you just buy hamburger, the story will be that recruiting’s not going so well. There’s no letup—ever. It’s twelve months a year.”

  Mickie Krzyzewski thought she understood that. She had been living in North Carolina for more than eight months, and just by reading the newspapers, she understood clearly that the job her husband had taken on the previous March was going to be a lot more pressurized than the one he had held for five years when he was the coach at Army.

  Mike Krzyzewski’s first season at Duke had begun benignly enough, with easy wins over Stetson and South Florida. Those had been warm-up games, scheduled in order to get some kinks out before the Blue Devils and their new coach faced their first real test, a game in the Greensboro Coliseum against archrival North Carolina.

  There was only one place in the country where rivals like Duke and North Carolina might meet so early in the season, and that was in the Atlantic Coast Conference, specifically in North Carolina. Every season, long before conference play began, the four schools known collectively as the Big Four made the trip to Greensboro to play a two-night tournament called, cleverly enough, the Big Four. The event had been created in 1971, largely as a money grab for the four athletic departments. All 15,500 seats in the Coliseum were sold for two nights, and since no one had to travel very far (N.C. State had to travel the longest distance, seventy-eight miles) the costs were minimal and the profits were sizeable.

  None of that thrilled the four coaches. It was one thing to play a quality opponent early in the season. It was quite another to play an opponent you would meet twice more during conference play and perhaps again in March, in the ACC Tournament. It was also very much another thing to play a game that brought your fans out in full voice when you were still trying to figure out what kind of team you might have.

  “I think the players enjoy it,” Dean Smith often said. “I know the fans and the media enjoy it. It’s us old coaches who aren’t so thrilled about it.”

  Smith, who would turn fifty the following February, was the oldest and by far the most successful of the four coaches in the building that night. Carl Tacy, whose Wake Forest team would play North Carolina State in the second game of the doubleheader, was forty-seven. The two new kids on the block—Jim Valvano and Mike Krzyzewski—were thirty-four and thirty-three.

  Mickie Krzyzewski was accustomed to crowds of perhaps a thousand people coming to watch her husband’s team play in the old Army field house. There had been more people than that in the building during the first two games he had coached at Duke, but Cameron Indoor Stadium wasn’t close to sold out, and the atmosphere had been somewhat louder than the school library, but hardly intimidating.

  Now though, as she walked into the Coliseum with Charles Huestis, one of Duke’s vice presidents, it occurred to Mickie Krzyzewski that this was different from anything she had seen in the eleven years she and Mike had been married.

  “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she murmured to herself as she and Huestis watched fans in red and white, black and gold, dark blue and white, and—the most prevalent—light blue and white walk into the building from the massive parking lots that surrounded it. She noticed all manner of people holding signs that said “Need Two” or “Need Four, Will Take Two.”

  “They scalp tickets for this thing?” she asked Huestis, almost rhetorically.

  Huestis, a quiet, pipe-smoking man who had turned sixty earlier that year, just smiled and guided Mickie through the gate and inside.

  They walked through the crowded, loud, smoke-filled hallways in search of the quarter of the building where the seats assigned to Duke fans were located. Mickie found herself taking deeper and deeper breaths with every step they took.

  “I just wasn’t prepared,” she said. “I don’t know how you could be. Army had played in some bigger arenas, including Madison Square Garden. But this was different. It was all so…intense. I didn’t think any basketball game could be that intense—before it started—much less a game in December.”

  She and Huestis walked down the steps to their seats and settled in.

  “How do you feel?” Huestis asked.

  Mickie Krzyzewski smiled. “I feel,” she said, “like a virgin.”

  —

  That feeling didn’t last very long.

  Duke had a good team, led by senior forwards Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard and junior guard Vince Taylor. North Carolina, as always, had a great team, keyed by future Hall of Famer James Worthy, senior All-American Al Wood, and freshman center Sam Perkins, who would go on to score more than 15,000 points in seventeen NBA seasons.

  The game swayed back and forth to the very end. With time running down, Duke trailed 78–76 and had the ball. Banks missed a shot and the ball was deflected out-of-bounds—off a Tar Heel hand. Duke would inbound under the Carolina basket.

  Except for one thing: the clock had run to zero during the skirmish for the ball underneath the basket. Krzyzewski instantly charged to the scorer’s table, convinced there should be at least one second left on the clock to give his team a final chance to tie the game. There were no tenths of a second on the overhead scoreboard clock in those days, and there was no video replay available, so it was a very tough case to make.

  As he continued to argue with the clock operator and the two referees, Krzyzewski saw Smith walking up to him, hand extended.

  “Good game,” he said.

  Krzyzewski ignored the proffered hand. “The goddamn game’s not over yet, Dean,” he said.

  But it was. The officials, having consulted with the clock operator, waved their arms to indicate the game was over and headed for the locker room. There was nothing left for Krzyzewski to do.

  He turned to Smith and put out his hand.

  Smith was never one for long postgame handshakes. In fact, before the days when teams started lining up to shake hands, he always ordered his assistant coaches and his players to head directly to the locker room wh
en the buzzer went off—win or lose.

  “It wasn’t about sportsmanship,” he said. “It was about avoiding trouble, especially at the end of a close game. A lot of times when we lost, teams would celebrate at midcourt. Tempers could be hot, and you didn’t want anything to happen if someone on one side said something to someone on the other side.”

  The charge to the locker room was always led by Smith’s top assistant, Bill Guthridge. Like Smith, Guthridge was from Kansas and had a quick, dry sense of humor. One night, Guthridge was talking to a reporter prior to a game in Chapel Hill between North Carolina and N.C. State, when someone came up to say that the score of the Duke-Maryland game being played down the road in Durham was 74–68.

  “Who’s winning?” the reporter asked.

  “Who do you think?” Guthridge said. “Seventy-four.”

  Guthridge led the way to the locker room for one reason: he had the key to the door. Even so, Valvano couldn’t help but notice Guthridge whizzing by him whenever North Carolina and N.C. State played each other.

  “Just once,” Valvano would say with his broad grin, “I’d like to tackle him. Problem is, I think he’d just knock me down and keep going.”

  While Guthridge was leading everyone in light blue to the safety of the locker room, Smith would stay behind to shake hands with the opposing coach. The handshakes rarely lasted very long.

  “Dean was usually a ‘Good game’ and gone guy,” Krzyzewski said. “On that night, I didn’t let him do it.”

  In fact, when he finally turned to shake Smith’s hand, Krzyzewski wouldn’t let it go. Smith, already more than a little annoyed by Krzyzewski’s initial response, said nothing when they finally shook hands and started to pull away. Krzyzewski, a little younger and a little bigger, gripped his hand tightly and pulled Smith a few inches in his direction.