The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  State was no more competitive against Iowa—which would go on to the Final Four—than it had been against Duke, losing 77–64. Just like that, the Norman Sloan era at N.C. State was over. And, with Willis Casey on the road the next two weeks as a basketball committee member, there was no telling when a new coach would be named—or who it would be.

  Casey did have an idea who he wanted his new coach to be, even though he couldn’t start formally interviewing people right away. The man Casey wanted had been born in Durham but was a Maryland graduate who had spent his adult life in the Washington, D.C., area: Morgan Wootten.

  Wootten was generally viewed as the best high school basketball coach in the country and was already a legendary figure at DeMatha High School, where he had coached since 1956. He was not yet fifty and had never coached in college but had coached plenty of future college players, including Whittenburg and Lowe.

  “We thought it would be great,” Whittenburg said. “Playing for Morgan again? We would have loved that.”

  “When we heard it might be Coach Wootten, I think Dereck and I were relieved,” Lowe said. “We both thought, ‘If Coach comes, everything will be all right.’ But as time went by and he didn’t take the job, we began to wonder what was going on.”

  Wootten was torn. Part of him wanted to give the college game a shot. He had conquered every world there was to conquer at the high school level. In 1965, he had been part of the biggest upset in high school basketball history when DeMatha had ended Power Memorial Academy’s 71 game winning streak. Power Memorial was led by seven-foot-one-inch center Lew Alcindor (who was actually closer to seven foot four) and had beaten DeMatha in a close game the previous season.

  Prior to the 1965 game, Wootten had his six-foot-eight-inch center, Sid Catlett, play defense in practice holding a tennis racquet over his head so his players would get a sense of what it would be like to shoot over Alcindor—who changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971. DeMatha slowed the game down and won, 46–43. To this day, DeMatha’s win is still considered the most stunning upset in the history of high school basketball. Given that Alcindor’s high school and college basketball teams were a combined 167–4, that’s probably not a stretch.

  Wootten was tempted by Casey’s offer. Even though the coach ran an extremely successful summer basketball camp, Casey was offering him a huge raise: $800,000 over five years. In those days that was very big money. Wootten’s son Joe, who followed in his father’s footsteps and is now the coach at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Virginia, was eight at the time. He remembers seeing a headline in The Washington Post with the number $800,000 and asking his father if taking the job at N.C. State would mean the family could afford a swimming pool.

  “Probably,” his dad answered.

  “Take it,” the eight-year-old boy said.

  After deliberating for more than a week, Wootten finally told Casey no. He didn’t want to uproot his family, he still enjoyed teaching—he taught history in addition to his coaching responsibilities—and there was really only one job that would be impossible for him to say no to: Maryland.

  “It was my school, I wouldn’t have to move my family, and I’d have loved that challenge,” he said. “But I didn’t think Lefty [Driesell] was going anywhere, and we were the same age.”

  Remarkably, Dean Smith (February 28), Wootten (April 21), and Driesell (December 25) were all born in 1931. Driesell’s birthday allowed The Washington Post’s superb columnist Ken Denlinger to refer to him once as “God’s unique Christmas present to the world in 1931.”

  Once Wootten said no, Casey was back to square one in his search. Except for a letter that Tom Butters had sent him. As he had suspected—and hoped—Butters had found that the Duke basketball coaching job was coveted by many coaches, especially up-and-coming younger coaches.

  One day, Steve Vacendak had walked into Butters’s office with a letter that had been sent to Butters but was redirected to him since he was the first stop for any correspondence related to the basketball coaching search.

  “I’d gotten a lot of mail,” Vacendak said. “I read it all even though we had narrowed the search pretty quickly and I was convinced that Mike [Krzyzewski] was the right choice. But this letter jumped out at me. It was so full of passion, so eloquent, and so different from all the others that I couldn’t just toss it on the pile. I thought I had to show it to Tom.”

  The letter was from Jim Valvano.

  Butters was equally impressed. He knew who Valvano was and he knew he had done remarkable work at Iona. But Butters wasn’t certain that Valvano’s style would fit at Duke, and that spring there had been questions raised (well founded, as it turned out) about whether Jeff Ruland, Valvano’s star center, had taken money from an agent. Whether Valvano was culpable or not, Butters wasn’t going to hire him.

  Still, it was clear to Butters that Valvano was going to be a big-time coach somewhere, sometime. So he forwarded the letter to Willis Casey. Apparently Casey was also impressed because he contacted Valvano right away to see if the State job was of interest to him.

  It was.

  —

  James Thomas Valvano was the second of three sons born to Rocco and Angelina Valvano. He was born on March 10, 1946—three years after Nick and eleven years before Bobby. He was, in many ways, a classic second child: always searching for attention.

  “When he was about six, kids in school started giving him a hard time about having a big nose, you know the way kids do,” Nick said. “Jim started doing an imitation of Jimmy Durante, who always joked about having a big nose. He was so good at it that the nuns who ran the school began taking him from classroom to classroom to do the bit.” Nick Valvano smiled. “I guess you could say they were Jimmy’s first comic enablers.”

  Jim was always the funniest kid in school, but he was also an outstanding athlete, even though he was small for his age until his junior year in high school, when he finally hit a growth spurt. “It didn’t matter that he was small,” Nick said. “He could play anything. In fact, his best sport might have been baseball.”

  By the time he hit that growth spurt, Jim was already a three-sport standout at Seaford High School. His dad, who was always his hero, was a high school basketball coach, so sports played a big role in the lives of all the Valvano boys right from the start. Nick went to Rider, where he played basketball and baseball. Jim played basketball at Rutgers, and Bob played basketball at Virginia Wesleyan.

  Jim actually went to Rutgers without a scholarship: Bill Foster told him he would almost certainly play on the varsity as a sophomore—freshmen couldn’t play varsity sports in those days—but that he couldn’t offer him a scholarship. When the guard Foster had recruited ahead of Valvano flunked out of school, Valvano became the point guard on the freshman team. A year later, he and Bob Lloyd were the starters in what would become one of the country’s best backcourts.

  “It wasn’t as if the game came easily to Jim, it really didn’t,” said Lou Goetz, a teammate, who would go on to be Foster’s top assistant at Duke. “He couldn’t dribble with his left hand at all. He’d come downcourt, all right hand, the other team knew he was all right hand, and he’d still figure out a way to get the job done and get the ball where it needed to go—which usually meant getting it to Bob.”

  In 1967, when Valvano and Lloyd were seniors, Lloyd averaged twenty-nine points a game and was a first-team All-American. There were seven consensus first-team All-Americans that season: Lew Alcindor, Elvin Hayes, Wes Unseld, Bob Verga, Clem Haskins, Jimmy Walker, and Lloyd. The first three are in the Basketball Hall of Fame. The first six played for national powers. Lloyd played for Rutgers, which had never appeared in any postseason tournament prior to that season.

  Lloyd was the star, Valvano was his enabler, and they led Rutgers to the best season in school history.

  Valvano majored in English at Rutgers. He wanted to follow his dad into coaching, and he suspected that would mean being a teacher while he coached at the hig
h school level. He also had a love of reading and an extraordinary memory that allowed him to quote lengthy passages from books he had read years earlier.

  “As much as he loved basketball and coaching basketball, he never wanted to think of himself as just a basketball coach,” Pam Valvano Strasser said. “I think as he got older that became a problem. He believed he could—and should—do more than just coach basketball.”

  Valvano met Pam Levine when the two were in eighth grade, but they didn’t date until the junior prom three years later. Pam had a boyfriend, but he had gone off to college. When Jim asked her to go to the prom she said yes. “I figured it would just be one time,” she said. “None of our parents were exactly thrilled but I liked him. He was funny.”

  Rocco Valvano didn’t love the idea of his son dating a Jewish girl. Pam’s parents didn’t think an Italian Catholic was ideal either. The first date didn’t go all that well. Pam picked a restaurant for their preprom dinner that was more expensive than she—or Jim—expected it to be.

  “I had to call my dad to bring some money to the restaurant,” she said. “Jim didn’t have enough to pay the check.”

  Things got better after that. Pam’s boyfriend came home from college to find that she had a new boyfriend. “He didn’t take it very well,” Pam said. “For a long time he kept insisting that he could make me happy if I gave him a chance. He hadn’t done anything wrong, I just liked Jim more. Actually, I liked him. I loved Jim.”

  They dated the entire time Jim was at Rutgers. Pam worked in the city, Jim went to college across the river in New Jersey, and they spent their free time together. Jim worked summers to make enough money to buy Pam a respectable engagement ring. Shortly after he graduated in 1967, they were married. By then, Jim was the freshman basketball coach at Rutgers and quite determined to, if not make history, at least cut down the final net someday.

  Years later, he would often tell the story about his first game as Rutgers’s freshman coach. He had studied old Vince Lombardi speeches and had thrown in some Shakespeare and Carl Sandburg. “I killed it,” he would say. “I mean, I knocked it out of the park. It might have been the greatest pregame speech ever given. The players jumped up, ran for the door ready to charge onto the court, and…the door was locked. By the time we got it open, everyone was ready for a nap.”

  The story might have been hyperbolic—the door was unlocked in a matter of seconds—but Valvano’s enthusiasm and his players’ reaction to his talk were quite real. Unlike Rick Pitino, who would write a book about himself titled Born to Coach, Valvano didn’t believe that he was born to coach. “I lived to coach,” he said once. “My entire focus was to become a great basketball coach. The only real definition of that to me was cutting those nets down. That was what I woke up wanting to do every single morning.”

  He and Pam set out on what was a typical coaching odyssey. After two years at Rutgers, Jim was hired as the head coach at Johns Hopkins, a school known for producing scholars more than basketball players. After one season resulted in a 10–9 record, Jim decided he wanted to get back to the Division I level and took a job as an assistant coach under Dee Rowe at Connecticut. Rowe was three important things to Valvano: a great teacher of the game, a mentor/father figure, and someone with the kind of basketball connections that would help him advance in the profession. After three years at UConn, Rowe helped Valvano land the head coaching job at Bucknell. Three years after that, Valvano became the owner of his own college when he went to Iona, a tiny Christian Brothers school located in New Rochelle, New York.

  Valvano was already a master recruiter, someone who was almost irresistible to parents and their sons once he got inside their home. “He just wasn’t like any other coach you had ever met,” Terry Gannon said more than thirty years after Valvano had visited his house. “Within ten minutes of walking in the door he was my father’s best friend.”

  Recruiting Jeff Ruland was the kind of coup that just didn’t happen at places like Iona. Ruland was six foot eleven and a bull inside. He wasn’t your typical recruit in a lot of ways. His mom owned and ran a bar, and there was nothing even a little bit spoiled about him even though he was a star basketball player. He could have played anywhere—both Dean Smith and Bob Knight were dying to have him—but he chose to stay near home and play for Iona—and Valvano.

  The Gaels had improved from 11–15 in Valvano’s first year to 15–10 in his second. With Ruland on the team, they improved rapidly, going 17–10 and then 23–6 and 29–5 the next two years, making the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back seasons. Valvano had been part of the first Rutgers team to play in postseason as a senior in 1967. In his final two seasons at Iona, he took the school to postseason play for the first time in its history, the 1980 team finishing the season ranked nineteenth in the country—unheard-of for such a small college.

  Even though he didn’t literally own Iona, Valvano came to own Iona. He may not have owned the New York City media, but he came close. Every Tuesday, when all the coaches in the area met for lunch with the media at Mamma Leone’s, tradition held that St. John’s coach Lou Carnesecca, the dean of the city’s coaches, would always go last and tell a few funny stories to finish the lunch on a high note.

  By Valvano’s third season at Iona, Carnesecca was going second to last. “No way was I following Valvano,” he said when asked why.

  Valvano would do twenty minutes of straight stand-up. Occasionally he’d talk about his team, but most of the time it was to set up a story.

  “Guys in the media came to do two things—eat a good meal and listen to Jimmy,” said Krzyzewski, who was the coach at Army for the same five years that Valvano was at Iona. “The rest of us knew when we got up to talk that they were just waiting for Jimmy. It was a little bit intimidating.”

  Valvano’s last team was good enough—as evidenced by the one-sided win over Louisville—to go deep into the NCAA Tournament. But the NCAA Tournament committee didn’t do Iona any favors, seeding it sixth in the East in spite of its impressive résumé. The Gaels won their first-round game—still Iona’s only NCAA Tournament victory—against Holy Cross, but then lost 74–71 to third-seeded Georgetown in a game Valvano never completely got over.

  “We just didn’t play that well that day,” he said. “It was national TV and we knew what it would mean to reach the Sweet Sixteen. I’ll always believe if we’d beaten Georgetown we could have gone to the Final Four. We were that good.”

  Valvano knew there was a good chance Ruland wasn’t coming back for his senior year. He also knew it was unlikely he would ever have a team at Iona as good as the one he had just coached. Which is why he wrote the letter to Tom Butters about the opening at Duke.

  “I felt like I had maxed out at Iona,” Valvano said, several years later. “Even if Jeff had come back for his senior year, it was going to be tough for us to be better than we had been. We’d won twenty-nine games; we’d beaten Louisville in the Garden [and cut down the nets]. We were very good. Jeff had become a truly great college player.

  “I think Mike and I were a lot alike in that we were both at places where we knew, realistically, there was a ceiling. Iona’s ceiling was higher than Army’s, but it was still there.”

  Valvano came to love N.C. State. When he left the school in 1990 he wondered if he could still live in Raleigh—his home was actually in the suburb of Cary—given all the controversy surrounding his departure.

  “At first we thought we’d have to leave,” said Pam Valvano Strasser, who to this day lives in Cary, not far from where she and Jim lived. “But two things happened: People were incredibly nice; they stood by us. And Jim and I, the two kids from New York, realized we loved it here.”

  Why then, had Valvano written to Butters and not to Casey?

  “I honestly thought I’d be a good fit at Duke,” he said, late one night in 1988. “I thought my sense of humor would have fit right in with their students; I almost could have been one of them. I loved going over there to play. It was fun—whether
you were the visitor or the home team.”

  Valvano’s record in Cameron Indoor Stadium was 5–5. Beyond that, though, he clearly enjoyed dueling with the students. In 1984, after Lorenzo Charles, the hero of the 1983 NCAA championship game, had been arrested for participating in the holdup of a Domino’s Pizza driver (he and his buddies stole several pizzas, not money), the Duke students had twenty Domino’s pizzas delivered to the State bench shortly before tip-off. Valvano paid for the pizzas and handed them out to the students. On another occasion, when the students chanted their familiar “Sit down” chant at Valvano, he did—on the floor. Without missing a beat they changed the chant to “Roll over.” He stood up and tipped an invisible hat to them—they’d won that round.

  Duke wasn’t an option though in 1980, and when Casey offered Valvano a deal almost identical to the one that Butters had offered Krzyzewski—$42,000 a year for five years—he took it.

  It was March 27, 1980. Krzyzewski had been the coach at Duke for nine days. When Mickie Krzyzewski heard the name of State’s new coach, she thought about all the publicity he had been able to generate at Iona with his take-over-the-room sense of humor and his ability to generate attention for himself and his team. That led to her thinking, “Oh shit, here we go again.”

  Her husband’s thoughts were a little different. He wasn’t concerned about Valvano’s personality. He was thinking about competing with him as a coach.

  “My thought was that I couldn’t possibly recruit anyone as good as Jeff Ruland when I was at Army,” he said. “At Duke, I believed that I could. So, my attitude was, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ ”

  And so they did.

  6

  While Bill Foster and Norman Sloan were fleeing from the aura that was Dean Smith in the winter of 1980, things were not totally sanguine in Chapel Hill.