The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I think he’s the best young coach in the country,” Butters said. “He’s going to be a star…someday. I just can’t hire him right now.”

  Vacendak left Butters with one last thought before leaving: “If he’s the best young coach in the country, how can you not hire him?”

  Discouraged, he drove Mike and Mickie to the airport. He and Mike put Mickie on her plane to Washington. She was going there to pick up the two Krzyzewski daughters, who were staying with Mickie’s parents. Mike’s plane, back to New York, was a little later. Vacendak shook Krzyzewski’s hand—apologetically—and began walking in the direction of the airport parking lot. He was almost at the door when he heard himself being paged.

  Surprised, he found a phone. It was Butters.

  “Bring him back,” Butters ordered.

  “What?”

  “Bring him back; I need to talk to him one more time.”

  “Tom, you can’t do this to the guy. I mean…”

  “I’m going to offer him the job! Bring him back. But don’t tell him why.”

  Vacendak hung up and looked at his watch. The flight was boarding. There was no time to get back to the gate. He called the airport operator and asked her to page Krzyzewski and tell him not to get on the Eastern Airlines flight that was about to leave for LaGuardia Airport.

  Vacendak then sprinted back to the gate and found Krzyzewski waiting for him. “He wasn’t pleased,” Vacendak said. “He wanted to know what the hell was going on.”

  “I told him Tom needed to talk to him one more time.”

  Krzyzewski’s response was blunt: “What the f—— can he ask me that I haven’t already answered?”

  Vacendak knew the answer but kept his word to Butters not to say anything. They drove back to Durham—steam coming out of Krzyzewski’s ears. He practically stormed back into Butters’s office.

  “All I could think was, what now?” he said, laughing at the memory.

  Butters was standing behind his desk when Krzyzewski walked in.

  “I need to ask you one more question,” he said.

  “What could you possibly have left to ask me?” Krzyzewski said. “You’ve interviewed me three times.”

  “I know,” Butters answered. “But there’s one question I haven’t asked you. Will you take the job?”

  Krzyzewski was stunned for a moment. Then he said, “Of course I’ll take the job.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m going to pay you?” Butters asked.

  Krzyzewski shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll be fair,” he said.

  Years later, he added, “And he wasn’t.”

  Butters offered Krzyzewski a five-year contract for $40,000 a year. There were no agents for coaches back then. Krzyzewski accepted. Twenty-four years later, when the Los Angeles Lakers offered him $40 million to coach their team for five years, Krzyzewski called Butters to ask him what he thought.

  “I think you should send me a ten percent finder’s fee,” Butters said.

  “Fine,” Krzyzewski said. “If I take the job, I’ll send you four thousand dollars.”

  Within an hour of Krzyzewski accepting the $40,000-a-year offer, Duke had called a press conference to announce his hiring.

  If Butters had walked in and introduced John Wooden or Dean Smith as Duke’s new coach, the assembled media would not have been any more shocked. They would have been a lot more impressed, but not any more shocked.

  “The press conference began at 8:45 P.M.,” wrote columnist Frank Vehorn in the Greensboro Daily News. “It was a shame it was a Tuesday and not a Monday. Had it been Monday, the press conference would have been held at the exact same time as the TV show ‘That’s Incredible.’ Those two words best described Tom Butters’ decision.”

  Vehorn’s sentiments were echoed around the state. Duke’s press release introduced “Duke’s new Special K.” It talked about the fact that Krzyzewski had played for Knight at Army, about how he had “transformed” Army’s program in his first two years, and went through his postgraduate coaching record while in the army and his one season under Knight at Indiana.

  There was no mention of 9–17.

  “Duke was supposed to hire a name coach,” another columnist wrote. “Well, it certainly did that—except it wasn’t exactly the kind of ‘name’ Duke fans were expecting.”

  Butters knew all of that was coming. “I was absolutely convinced that I had made the right choice,” he said. “At that moment, though, there were probably three people in the world who agreed with me: Steve, Mike, and Mickie.”

  —

  Mickie Krzyzewski had landed at National Airport that evening shortly before dinnertime and gone to her parents’ house to pick up her daughters. Debbie was ten and Lindy was four. Not long after dinner, she began to wonder why she hadn’t heard from her husband. His plane had been scheduled to arrive at LaGuardia about an hour after she had gotten to Washington. Normally he would have called before leaving the airport to let her know he’d landed.

  Maybe, she thought, he was preoccupied with everything that had happened at Duke and had gone straight to the car for the one-hour drive back to West Point. That would be unusual for him, but it had been an unusual—and frustrating—day.

  By nine o’clock she was starting to get a little bit concerned. She called their house—no answer. Now worried, she called Eastern Airlines. Had the plane been delayed, canceled—or worse? Nope. The plane had landed right on time.

  “Where the hell,” Mickie Krzyzewski thought, “is my husband?”

  She tried calling his assistant coaches, Bobby Dwyer and Chuck Swenson. They hadn’t heard from him. She called Colonel Rogers—nothing.

  Finally, just as she was about to become hysterical, the phone rang. It was getting close to midnight. As soon as she heard Mike’s voice, Mickie let out a huge sigh of relief and then said, “Where the hell have you been all night?”

  “I’m at Duke,” he said. “Butters asked me to come back because he had one more question.”

  Mickie’s reaction was exactly the same as Mike’s had been several hours earlier: “One more question? What the hell could he possibly still have to ask you?”

  She was still ranting when Mike broke in. “He asked me if I wanted the job.”

  Mickie was stunned. “Did you take it?”

  Mike was laughing. “Yes, I took it,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been so tied up. I’m sorry if you were worried.”

  Mickie laughed.

  “I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I was hysterical.”

  Then another thought crossed her mind.

  “How much are you getting paid?”

  “Forty thousand dollars,” he said and then quickly added, “for five years.”

  Mickie Krzyzewski sighed. She had known this day would come. She had wished for this day to come because she knew how much Mike wanted it to come.

  At that moment, she was a little nervous, a little frenetic thinking about moving her family from West Point to North Carolina, and still a little bit mad at Mike for not calling sooner. She was also thrilled.

  “It all worked out in the end,” she said years later.

  Little did she know that it was just beginning.

  5

  Twenty-five miles to the east, Willis Casey, Butters’s counterpart at North Carolina State, hadn’t started the process of looking for a new coach as quickly as Butters had, in large part because he was involved with the NCAA Tournament as a member of the basketball selection committee.

  In fact, when Butters had called to complain about Duke drawing Kentucky at Kentucky in a potential round-of-sixteen game, Casey had gone right back at him, pointing out that Duke hadn’t even been a lock pick to make the field before it had won the ACC Tournament.

  Casey was not a man who backed down from confrontation. He had come to N.C. State as the swimming coach—the aquatics center at the school now bears his name—and had become the athletic director in 1969.
On the day he retired in 1986, Casey told the student newspaper, the Technician, that he was a lot different from his image.

  “The picture most people have of me is that I’m a mean son-of-a-gun,” he said. “But underneath it, I’m really just a teddy bear.”

  That description would have surprised most who had worked with him or known him during his years at N.C. State. In fact, many people believed that the departure of basketball coach Norman Sloan was brought about by two men: Casey and Dean Smith.

  Casey and Sloan both had in-your-face personalities and often clashed, even though Sloan was wildly successful during his fourteen years as the school’s basketball coach. He had been hired in the spring of 1966 after coaching at Florida for six seasons. Sloan had grown up in Indiana and was one of six players from the state recruited by the legendary Everett Case to go to school at N.C. State. Case, who had been a high school coach in Indiana, had gone back to his roots to recruit after getting the job at State in 1946. One of Sloan’s teammates in college was Vic Bubas, who would go on to be Duke’s first great coach in the 1960s.

  Sloan had won a national championship in 1974, going 30–1 with a team led by David Thompson. In 1971, State won a massive recruiting war for Thompson, who was from a small town outside Charlotte and was thought to be one of the best high school players anyone had ever seen.

  Thompson was so good that both N.C. State and Duke landed on probation during his recruitment. It didn’t really matter at Duke, because the Blue Devils had no chance to make the NCAA Tournament during the season they were ineligible. It did matter at N.C. State. During Thompson’s sophomore season, the Wolfpack was 27–0 but not eligible to take part in postseason play.

  A year later, when Thompson was a junior, the Wolfpack’s only loss came in December, against seven-time defending national champion UCLA. The two teams met again in the Final Four—which was in Greensboro—and State won in double overtime. One of college basketball’s most famous photos came out of that game, the six-foot-four-inch Thompson leaping to block six-foot-eleven-inch Bill Walton’s attempt at a layup during the first overtime. Two nights later, N.C. State beat Marquette to win the national title.

  Even after winning the national championship Sloan felt haunted by the specter of Dean Smith—in spite of the fact that he had accomplished the one feat that had eluded Smith. It was Smith, not Sloan, who was selected to coach the 1976 Olympic team, and there were the inevitable whispers among in-state fans and the very much pro-UNC media that the only reason Sloan had won the title was because he had cheated to get Thompson. Sloan didn’t hear much of that from Duke supporters for two reasons: there weren’t very many of them living in the state, and they were aware of the fact that their basketball program had also been punished by the NCAA during Thompson’s recruitment.

  Sloan’s nickname was Stormin’ Norman, in part because of his animated bench behavior but at least as much because of his personality. If Sloan didn’t like a question asked by a media member he would instantly let the reporter know what he thought of it—and him.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” he would often demand. And, if he didn’t know the offending reporter, he would frequently ask “Who do you work for?” or “Where exactly are you from?” He saw pro-Carolina/anti-State people lurking behind every camera, notebook, and tape recorder. A lot of the time he was right.

  By the late 1970s, the animosity between Sloan and Smith was palpable. Sloan wasn’t, by any means, the only ACC coach who had issues with Smith. Sloan and Lefty Driesell were openly hostile at times; others were quieter. Legend has it that Terry Holland, the coach at Virginia, named a dog Dean Smith because, he told friends, “the dog whined all night.”

  Holland and his wife, Ann, are vehement that the dog was named by their daughter in honor of a friend named Dean who lived down the street. “That’s true,” Holland said with a smile. “And when the stories started that I’d named it after Dean Smith I told people that wasn’t the case.” He paused. “I guess I did point out that the dog had whined all night when we first got her.”

  Carl Tacy, the coach at Wake Forest, was the quietest person among the league’s seven coaches, but he very much sided with the other coaches when it came to Smith.

  All of them talked about how manipulative Smith could be, how he was the master of the subtle shot—at an opponent, at an official, at someone in the media. That wasn’t what really frustrated them though. What frustrated them was far simpler than that: “He was just so good,” said Bob Wenzel, one of Bill Foster’s assistants in those days. “He was the gold standard. Bill Foster was a great coach. So were Norm and Terry and Lefty and Carl Tacy too—look at some of the teams each of them had. But all of them felt like they were chasing Dean, and no matter how successful they were, it was never going to be enough to catch Dean. He had an aura and we all felt it.”

  That aura, as much as anything, was the reason both Foster and Sloan were willing to listen when non-ACC schools began to recruit them in the winter of 1980. There were two great basketball leagues in those days: the ACC and the Big Ten. The Pacific-8 had UCLA but little else and the SEC was Kentucky and everyone else, although Tennessee had made some inroads when Coach Ray Mears recruited Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld out of New York City. There was no Big East, and the Big Eight only occasionally popped up on anyone’s radar, most often when Kansas had a good team. Many of the top programs were independents—Marquette under Al McGuire, Notre Dame under Digger Phelps, DePaul under Ray Meyer.

  Thus it was virtually unheard-of for a coach to voluntarily bolt from the ACC.

  “The only way anyone left the league in those days was if they got fired,” Krzyzewski said.

  The ACC—like Dean Smith—was the gold standard.

  —

  In the winter of 1980, Sloan had a very good team. Hawkeye Whitney was a senior, a first-team All-ACC player, and Sloan and his staff had recruited three outstanding freshmen: Sidney Lowe and Dereck Whittenburg, who had played together at DeMatha High School outside Washington, D.C., and Thurl Bailey, a graceful six-eleven big man who had played a few miles down the road from Lowe and Whittenburg at Bladensburg High School.

  “Honestly, we thought we had it in us to make a deep run in the [NCAA] tournament,” Whittenburg said. “We finished tied for second in the ACC in a year when the league was very deep. We thought we could play with anybody.”

  The ACC was deep that year. Maryland, led by Albert King and Buck Williams, won the regular season title. North Carolina and N.C. State tied for second, and Clemson, which would go on to reach the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, had finished fourth. Duke and Virginia—led by freshman Ralph Sampson—had finished tied for fifth. All of those teams, with the exception of Virginia, were invited to play in the NCAA Tournament. Virginia was relegated to the NIT—which it won.

  State had finished 20–6 during the regular season. But before the ACC Tournament began, the players heard that their coach was leaving. Sloan had accepted the job at Florida.

  “It caught us completely off guard,” Whittenburg said. “Sidney, Thurl, and I were freshmen. All of a sudden we had no idea who we were going to be playing for the rest of our college careers.”

  Lowe knew exactly whom he wanted to play for the rest of his college career: Sloan.

  “The main reason I went to N.C. State was Coach Sloan,” he said. “Growing up I remember watching his great teams with [David] Thompson, [Monte] Towe, and [Tom] Burleson. Coach Sloan always wore those loud plaid jackets and I liked that—never forgot it. When I met him, I liked him right away. I just liked his directness.

  “When I heard he was leaving, I decided I was going with him. I went to his office and told him I was going with him. I remember I was crying. He looked at me and said, ‘Sidney, you’re going to be a great college player. I’d love to have you at Florida. But I recruited you to play at N.C. State. You stay here—you’ll be fine.’ ”

  Lowe wasn’t so sure, but he decided to trus
t Sloan. “If you think about it, what he did was pretty selfless,” he said. “I would have gone in a heartbeat. But, even though he was leaving, he still loved N.C. State and honestly thought it was the best place for me to be.”

  As Lowe retold the story, he smiled, knowing there weren’t a lot of people in basketball who viewed Norman Sloan as kind, gentle, or selfless. “I get that,” he said. “He was certainly an in-your-face kind of guy. I always liked that about him.”

  Duke and N.C. State, the two teams with lame-duck coaches, met in the first round. In those days, the ACC Tournament began on Thursday and culminated on Saturday night. The difference between State and Duke going into that first evening was that the Duke players didn’t know for certain yet—though they had heard the rumblings—that Foster was leaving. The other difference was that the Blue Devils had gone from a 12–0 start to a 19–8 regular season finish and felt they had a lot to prove.

  “We really didn’t know what exactly was going on with Coach Foster,” said Mike Gminski, who went on to play fourteen years in the NBA. “He was clearly uptight and we weren’t playing very well. We all knew something was up, especially because it seemed like the parking lot thing kept coming up.”

  The “parking lot thing” had become symbolic of the rift between Butters and Foster. Years after Foster had left Duke, when his name came up, people who weren’t even around in 1980 would say, “Oh yeah, he left because of the parking lot thing.”

  N.C. State’s players knew their coach was leaving; Duke’s players had no idea what their coach was going to do. On the court uncertainty prevailed, Duke winning easily 75–62. In spite of the loss, the Wolfpack received a number-four seed into the East Regionals when the NCAA announced its forty-eight-team tournament field that Sunday. Since the first four seeds in each region received first-round byes, State traveled back to Greensboro—the scene of the school’s greatest basketball moment six years earlier—to play a second-round game against Iowa, which had won a first-round game against Virginia Commonwealth.