The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “At least acknowledge that it was a hell of a game, Dean,” he said.

  Smith didn’t feel like acknowledging anything at that moment.

  “I’m going to remember this,” he answered.

  “Good,” Krzyzewski said pointedly. “I hope you do.”

  The two men glared briefly at each other before parting.

  A few feet away, Roy Williams witnessed the exchange. He was North Carolina’s number-three assistant coach and, normally, would have been in the locker room. But, because of the potential issue with the clock, he had walked down behind Smith to deal with any questions—Should there be one second left if the game wasn’t over? Two seconds? Where would Duke inbound from? Could Carolina substitute?—that might arise as a result of Krzyzewski’s attempt to keep the game alive.

  As a result, he saw and heard everything that was said.

  Many years later, he remembered the exchange quite vividly.

  “My first reaction was being kind of angry,” he said. “I didn’t like the idea that anyone would talk to Coach Smith like that. I have to say, though, looking at Mike at that moment, the thought went through my mind, ‘There’s no backdown in this guy.’ I didn’t like what I was hearing and seeing, but I respected it.”

  Sitting up in the stands, Steve Vacendak, Duke’s associate athletic director, turned to his boss, Athletic Director Tom Butters, at the instant when he saw Krzyzewski refuse Smith’s initial attempt at a handshake.

  “Tom,” he said, “we got the right guy.”

  —

  Vacendak had good reason to want Krzyzewski to be the right guy. He was the one who had first brought his name up to Butters the previous spring.

  Bill Foster had completely turned a moribund Duke program around after arriving in 1974. Duke had been one of the basketball powers in the country in the 1960s under Vic Bubas, winning four ACC titles and reaching the Final Four three times between 1963 and 1966. Bubas had retired in 1969 and turned the program over to a former assistant, Bucky Waters.

  Things had not gone well for Waters. After going 12–14 in his fourth season, he was told his contract—which had one year left on it—would not be extended and that he would be, for all intents and purposes, a lame duck going into the 1973–74 season. That fall, a little more than a month before practice was scheduled to start, Waters accepted a job as a fund-raiser for Duke Hospital.

  The basketball team was left without a coach. On October 15, when practice officially began, the Blue Devils still didn’t have a coach. In a letter to the editor of the student newspaper, Bob Fleischer, the team’s starting center, publicly wondered exactly what was going on with Duke basketball.

  What was going on was complicated. Carl James, the athletic director, was trying to pull off what he thought would be a coup: hiring Adolph Rupp, the legendary Kentucky coach, who had been pushed into retirement eighteen months earlier by the school that he had led to four national championships.

  Rupp wanted to come to Duke. He wanted to prove, even at the age of seventy-two, that he could still coach. He told James he would take the job, and a press conference was scheduled for the morning of October 18. Word leaked in the Durham Morning Herald that Adolph Rupp was going to be the next Duke coach.

  It never happened. The night before he was supposed to be introduced in Durham, Rupp called James. His farm director had died very suddenly. Rupp couldn’t leave his farm with no one in charge. Regretfully, he told James he couldn’t take the job. That left James with a press conference scheduled for 9:30 the next morning to introduce a new coach and no coach to introduce.

  Two hours prior to the press conference, James called Neill McGeachy into his office. McGeachy was Waters’s top assistant and had been in charge during the first three days of practice. He offered him the job as interim coach. McGeachy didn’t want the interim tag. The two men compromised: there would be no interim tag, but McGeachy’s contract would be for one year.

  Then, after introducing McGeachy as the future of Duke basketball, James began conducting a nationwide search for a new coach. After Duke had finished with a 10–16 record, the worst in school history, McGeachy was told he would not be asked back to coach. A few weeks later, Foster was hired to replace him.

  Foster was forty-three and had been successful both at Rutgers and Utah. In 1967, when the National Invitation Tournament was still a big deal, Rutgers had finished third. The point guard on that team was a kid from Seaford, Long Island, New York, named Jim Valvano. He and his classmate Bobby Lloyd, a sweet-shooting guard, were the heart and soul of a team that ended up going 22–7.

  In those days, every NIT game was played in Madison Square Garden, and the Scarlet Knights became the tournament darlings—a team from across the Hudson River in New Jersey who showed up to play with a large chunk of the student body there to cheer them on.

  In the semifinals, they played Southern Illinois, then a small-college power. The Salukis, led by a lightning-quick point guard named Walt Frazier, had stunned a Bubas-coached Duke team in the quarterfinals. Against Frazier’s Salukis, Valvano, normally Lloyd’s feeder, became the scorer, making nine straight shots from the field. By halftime he had twenty-one points.

  Valvano’s brother Bob, who was ten at the time, remembers running out to get some popcorn at one point and hearing two huge roars. “I knew it was Jimmy,” he said. “You could tell. He couldn’t miss.”

  “I was unstoppable,” Valvano said years later. “Couldn’t miss a shot.”

  At halftime, Southern Illinois coach Jack Hartman made an adjustment, putting Frazier on Valvano.

  “Didn’t miss a shot in the second half either,” Valvano said. “Didn’t take a shot, because Frazier wouldn’t let me touch the ball.”

  Frazier went on to be considered perhaps the greatest defensive guard in NBA history. Southern Illinois won the game, 79–70, and Valvano and Lloyd closed out their Rutgers careers by beating Marshall in the third-place game.

  Foster had actually returned to the NIT in 1974 with Utah, losing the championship game to Purdue. His up-tempo style attracted James, who needed something to compete with North Carolina, which had been to four Final Fours in seven seasons, and North Carolina State, which had just finished ole Norman’s 57–1 run by winning the national championship, even without ole Dean as the team’s coach.

  Foster turned Duke around. In his fourth season, led by a junior guard named Jim Spanarkel, a sophomore center named Mike Gminski, and a pair of gifted freshmen forwards, Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard, the Blue Devils won the ACC Tournament and reached the NCAA title game. The joyride ended there in a 94–88 loss to Kentucky, but with only one senior on the team—walk-on guard Bruce Bell—Duke was everyone’s preseason number-one pick for the 1978–79 season.

  That season, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end for Foster. Just as there was nothing Norman Sloan could do to top ole Dean, Foster found that he was constantly hearing about Smith and North Carolina—even after Duke’s 27–7 season that had culminated in the trip to the 1978 championship game.

  “He was obsessed with Dean twenty-four hours a day,” said Bob Wenzel, who had played for Foster at Rutgers and then worked for him as an assistant coach at Duke. “He honestly believed that the only way to compete with him was to drink as much coffee as he could stand and just keep working and working. I think he honestly believed that Dean didn’t sleep and that if he slept he’d be losing ground to him.

  “There was definitely an aura about Carolina and about Dean. We all felt it. You couldn’t not feel it.”

  “I think Bill felt as if the Duke people didn’t appreciate what he’d done,” said Lou Goetz, who had also played at Rutgers for Foster and had come with him from Utah to Duke as the number-one assistant. “It wasn’t just about Dean. It was a general feeling that if we slipped even a little, people were ready to jump on him.”

  Foster was a man blessed with a quick wit and a self-deprecating sense of humor. When Duke, having lost in the opening
round of the ACC Tournament in each of Foster’s first three seasons, reached the championship game in his fourth season, Foster noted on the morning before the title game that it was snowing in Greensboro.

  “They said it would be a snowy March day in Greensboro before Foster made the ACC final,” he said. “Turns out they were right.”

  But success didn’t bring any real satisfaction to Foster or any sense that he could cut back on the coffee and his work hours. In his last three seasons at Duke, his record was 73–24 and Duke won six NCAA Tournament games and two ACC Tournament titles. During those same three seasons, North Carolina was 67–22, didn’t win an NCAA Tournament game, and won one ACC Tournament title.

  And yet, in spite of all the wins and the fact that Duke could legitimately look Carolina in the eye on the court—the Blue Devils were 5–6 against the Tar Heels in those three seasons—Foster came to believe that almost no one appreciated what he had accomplished or how good a coach he was.

  His standard line when people would go on and on about Smith became, “I guess I don’t know my basketball history that well. I always thought it was Naismith who invented the sport, not Dean Smith.”

  It wasn’t as if Foster was the only person in the ACC who often found Smith’s aura difficult to deal with. Lefty Driesell, who coached at Maryland from 1969 to 1986, was convinced that North Carolina always got the benefit of important officiating calls and that Smith would do just about anything to gain an edge.

  One year, when Maryland was playing at North Carolina, Driesell’s top assistant, Dave Pritchett, walked into the bathroom at halftime and found Driesell balancing himself on top of a toilet, examining the ceiling above it. When the coaches met to talk strategy in the small visitor’s locker room, they would walk into the bathroom in order to give the players some space to relax.

  “Coach,” Pritchett asked. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Looking for a microphone,” Driesell answered. “I’m sure Dean’s got this place bugged.”

  In those days, only two officials worked college basketball games. Once, when Driesell was asked if he favored adding a third official, he vehemently shook his head.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “If we go to three officials, when I play Dean it’ll be eight against five instead of seven against five.”

  Although Driesell found competing with Smith frustrating, he did manage to retain a sense of humor about it all. That wasn’t true of Norman Sloan, who had won a national championship at North Carolina State in 1974 but, like Foster, believed he didn’t get the respect he deserved as a coach because of Smith. Sloan was a blunt, feisty, combative man who had a quick, occasionally explosive temper. When the Duke students created a rather profane chant one night in Cameron that made fun of his wife, Sloan was so angry that he threatened to pull his team from the court if the chant didn’t stop.

  After the game, when someone asked Sloan about the chant, he said, “Everyone knows all the Duke students are drunk all the time; what do you expect?”

  Sloan was, of course, wrong. Not all the Duke students were drunk all the time. Only some of them were drunk all the time.

  But most of Sloan’s anger seemed to be directed at North Carolina and at Smith. He and Driesell were united in their belief that Smith controlled the officials, controlled the conference, and, in fact, controlled the FBI and the CIA. They talked often, and, likely as not, the subject of their conversation was Smith.

  “After a while, I thought the name of the coach at North Carolina was That Goddamn Dean,” Driesell said once. “Because every morning Norman would call me and say, ‘Do you know what that goddamn Dean just did?’ ”

  Years later, when Smith’s health began to slip, one of the most frequent callers to check and see how he was doing was Driesell.

  “He calls all the time,” Linnea Smith said then. “He asks how Dean is doing and how I’m doing. It’s really very sweet and kind of him.”

  It wasn’t that way in the 1970s. Keith Drum, then of the Durham Morning Herald, often said, “There’s a lot of hate in this league.” He was talking about the coaches—not the players. Not long after Valvano succeeded Sloan as the coach at N.C. State, Driesell called an informal meeting of all the ACC coaches not named Smith during the league’s spring meetings in Myrtle Beach.

  “Look, fellas, we gotta do something about Dean,” Driesell said.

  “What do you suggest?” Valvano asked. “Should we have him kidnapped?”

  This was in the early 1980s. Smith had just won the national championship on his seventh trip to the Final Four. In truth, kidnapping him might have been the best solution. At that moment in time, nothing else seemed to be working. In fact, Dean Smith was the major reason that Valvano had succeeded Sloan and that Krzyzewski had succeeded Foster in the spring of 1980.

  And it had all started with Steve Vacendak.

  3

  Tom Butters had replaced Carl James as Duke’s athletic director in the spring of 1977, a little less than a year before Bill Foster turned the basketball program around.

  Butters had been a major-league baseball player, pitching for parts of four seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates between 1962 and 1965. But a serious neck injury suffered in a spring training car accident cut short his pitching career at the age of twenty-seven. He went to work at Ohio Wesleyan, his alma mater, before being offered a job in Duke’s development office in the fall of 1967.

  Several months later, Duke’s baseball coach, J. M. Bly, died suddenly of a heart attack. Eddie Cameron was the athletic director back then. He called Dick Groat, Duke’s most famous baseball alumnus, looking for a recommendation on a new coach. Groat had played with Butters in Pittsburgh and knew he was working at Duke.

  “The guy you’re looking for is working at Duke right now,” Groat told Cameron.

  Butters became the baseball coach in the spring of 1968. Two years later, quite by accident, he became the athletic department’s chief fund-raiser.

  “I was getting morning coffee and Eddie [Cameron] was in the coffee room with a guy named Herschel Caldwell, who ran the athletic department’s fund-raising arm, which, at the time, was called Blue Trident,” Butters said. “They were discussing the fact that Blue Trident was going to raise twenty-five thousand dollars that year.

  “I guess Eddie expected me to congratulate them or tell them how remarkable that was because he said to me, ‘Tom, you didn’t say anything. What do you think about us raising twenty-five thousand dollars?’

  “I said, ‘I think it’s a goddamn shame that you’re happy with twenty-five thousand dollars.’ Eddie just gave me a look but didn’t say anything. A couple of days later he called me and said, ‘The president wants to see you.’ ”

  The president was Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, who had taken over the school in 1969. During his tenure as governor, Sanford’s two biggest priorities had been desegregation and improving the quality of schools in the state. He had created a number of new taxes, labeled by his political opponents as “Terry taxes,” in order to have the money to more than double funding for the state’s public schools.

  Sanford had been a close ally of President John F. Kennedy, so close in fact that Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, wrote in her memoir that Kennedy had told her three days prior to his death that he was planning to drop Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson from the ticket in 1964 and replace him with Sanford.

  Sanford had come to Duke after being Hubert H. Humphrey’s campaign manager in the 1968 presidential election. His goal was simple: change Duke’s reputation from being the southern safety school for kids from the North who were turned down by Ivy League schools into that of an important nationally known and respected academic institution.

  Sanford knew that would take money, and when he heard that someone in the athletic department had claimed it was “a damn shame” that only $25,000 had been raised in the previous year, he asked to meet with him.

  If Butte
rs was nothing else during his years at Duke, he was supremely self-confident. Even so, he was more than a little bit nervous when summoned to see Sanford.

  “Do you think you can raise a million dollars in the next two to three years?” Sanford asked him.

  “I think I can raise that much in a year,” Butters answered. Forty-four years after that conversation Butters still wasn’t certain exactly why he believed he could raise that kind of money.

  “I think it was a combination of two things,” Butters said. “Belief in myself and absolute belief in Duke.”

  Butters left Sanford’s office with a new job. One of the first things he decided to do was rename the fund-raising arm so that Duke people would understand this was a brand-new entity, not just a continuation of Blue Trident. Ted Mann, the longtime sports information director, suggested reaching way back into Duke’s once-glorious football past. In 1938, the Duke football team had been undefeated, untied, and unscored-upon in the regular season. It had finally lost—7–3 to Southern California—on a touchdown in the final minute of the Rose Bowl.

  Mann had been the sports information director back then and had dubbed the team “the Iron Dukes.” He suggested to Butters that he use that name for his new department. Butters liked the idea and began raising money at a rate that even he found surprising. By the time Carl James left Duke in the spring of 1977, Butters was his number-two man and was named to replace him.

  Three years later, even with the basketball team again ranked number-one early in the season, things weren’t looking so rosy for Butters. He had fired football coach Mike McGee, an alumnus who had been a star on Duke’s last great team, at the end of the 1978 season and replaced him with Shirley “Red” Wilson, a malapropping good ole boy who’d had success down the road at what was then Elon College.

  Wilson said things like, “We’re all simonizing our watches for kickoff on Saturday,” and once said that the excitement prior to a Duke–North Carolina game was “reaching a Dascenzo.” Frank Dascenzo was the sports editor of The Durham Sun and was no doubt flattered to be mentioned.