The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Linnea and Dean Smith often talked about the importance of basketball. “We agreed that it wasn’t life and death,” she said with a smile. “But it was deadly serious.”

  Because she had given birth by C-section, Linnea had to stay in the hospital for forty-eight hours. The plan was for Dean to pick her up en route home from Duke that afternoon after the game.

  “I was a complete wreck watching that game,” she said. “I had all these hormones from birth racing through my body, and every time Duke scored I was screaming, ‘Oh no, we can’t lose this game. My poor daughter, what will happen to her if we lose this game?’ ”

  Banks’s shot made things even worse. Then, when he scored late in overtime to seal a 66–65 Duke win, Linnea Smith threw her arms in the air and said, “That’s it. My daughter’s life is ruined.”

  Kelly Marie’s life would turn out fine—she is a doctor now—but the trip home that afternoon wasn’t so great. “Not a word,” Linnea Smith said. “Neither one of us said a word.”

  The Senior Day win over Carolina was as joyous for Mickie Krzyzewski as it was devastating for Linnea Smith. It was, without question, the biggest win of Mike’s first season at Duke. It raised the Blue Devils’ record to 15–11, meaning they were assured of at least a berth in the NIT. Most important, it was a win over Carolina.

  “We celebrated,” Mickie Krzyzewski said. “Usually when Mike is excited about something he says it was ‘pretty good.’ This was better than pretty good.”

  Nine months later, the Krzyzewski’s third child, Jamie, was born. “It had to be that night,” Mickie said. “No other possibility that time of year.”

  Several years later, Kelly and Jamie were in the same piano class. The parents would sit next to each other at recitals. When Mickie told Linnea about Jamie’s conception, Linnea laughed.

  “It was one basketball game,” she said. “I thought my daughter’s life was ruined by it. Mickie’s daughter was a result of it. If you think about it, that’s pretty amazing.”

  —

  North Carolina recovered from the loss to Duke to win the ACC Tournament and reach the national championship game, where it lost to Indiana in Philadelphia on the night President Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington.

  It can be argued that the atmosphere that night in Philadelphia’s Spectrum was the strangest in the history of the tournament. For most of the day, no one really knew how serious the president’s condition was. The NCAA basketball committee didn’t want the national championship game being played if the president’s life was in danger or if—God forbid—news should break that he had died during the game.

  “What bothered me,” Smith would say years later, “was that they seemed more concerned about looking bad than about doing what was right. They didn’t want to move the game because that would affect television. Bob [Knight] and I had no say in it at all. We were simply told what was going on. No one ever asked either one of us what we thought should be done.”

  The two coaches in the consolation game—LSU’s Dale Brown and Virginia’s Terry Holland—were given even less say, if that was possible. They were told to start their game as scheduled while the committee continued to debate whether to play the championship game.

  “It seemed ridiculous to me,” Holland said. “Neither one of us really cared about playing the game or, for that matter, wanted to play it. A year later, they finally got rid of the consolation game, but that year they told us to go out and play. I think they figured if something happened to the president, they could just take us off the court because no one would really notice or care.”

  There couldn’t have been a thousand people watching when the consolation game—which Virginia won—began. It wasn’t until that game was over that word came from Washington that the president was out of surgery and doing well. What’s more, the rumors that press secretary James Brady had died had proven to be untrue. The committee decided to play the game.

  Indiana, led by sophomore guard Isiah Thomas, pulled away to win, 63–50, leaving Smith one game shy of a national title for the third time. This was different, though, than the Marquette game in 1977, because Indiana was clearly the better team.

  Al Wood was graduating, but James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Matt Doherty, and Jimmy Black—four of the five starters—would be back. And Carolina appeared to have a very strong freshman class coming to join those four. There were two highly touted guards: Buzz Peterson and Lynwood Robinson. And there was a six-six swingman from Wilmington named Michael Jordan. Word was, he was quite the leaper.

  8

  On the same March weekend in 1981 that North Carolina was winning the NCAA West Regional in Salt Lake City, Mike Krzyzewski’s first season at Duke ended on a snowy night in West Lafayette, Indiana.

  A year earlier, Duke’s final game under Bill Foster had been a loss to Purdue in the Mideast Region final—the round of eight—of the NCAA Tournament. Lee Rose had been Purdue’s coach that day, but after losing to UCLA a week later in the Final Four, Rose left Purdue to become the coach at South Florida. It was a move almost as surprising—maybe even more surprising—than Foster’s decision to leave Duke for South Carolina.

  Like Duke, Purdue had lost several key players—including center Joe Barry Carroll—and found itself in the NIT under new coach Gene Keady. Duke had won two NIT home games to reach the quarterfinals—the round of eight—but had lost Gene Banks to a broken wrist in the first-round victory over North Carolina A&T. Without Banks, the Blue Devils had managed to beat Alabama at home, but playing at Purdue proved impossible. For the second straight season, the Boilermakers ended a Duke season, this time 81–69, to reach the NIT semifinals in New York.

  The day he walked in the door, Krzyzewski had known he would be losing three of his four best players—Banks, Kenny Dennard, and Jim Suddath—after his first season. Returning for his second season would be one of those top four, Vince Taylor, along with Chip Engelland and Tom Emma, both good shooters but limited otherwise—especially on defense.

  It would not be a team one wanted to go to war with—especially in an ACC that included North Carolina and Virginia, both Final Four teams in 1981 with key players, including Virginia’s seven-foot-four-inch center Ralph Sampson, returning; Maryland under Lefty Driesell; a very solid Wake Forest team; and an up-and-coming North Carolina State team that returned all five starters and a sweet-shooting sixth man named Terry Gannon.

  Knowing he needed reinforcements, Krzyzewski had ambitiously pursued some of the top high school seniors in the country. Once the season was over, he was all over the map, chasing five players he thought he had a good chance to get. The best of them was Chris Mullin, a New York City kid whom Krzyzewski had fallen in love with the first time he’d seen him. Not only could Mullin shoot, he had a coach’s sense of the game, the kind of court vision you couldn’t teach, and a look in his eye that made Krzyzewski believe Mullin was the kind of player you build a program around.

  The other four were also highly touted: Uwe Blab, a seven-foot-three-inch German who was going to high school in Effingham, Illinois; Rodney Williams, a talented swingman from Florida; and Jim Miller and Tim Mullen—Miller from West Virginia, Mullen from Virginia. Krzyzewski was hoping that only one of the Miller-Mullen duo would choose Virginia and that Duke would land the other.

  In an ideal world, all five would sign with Duke. Realistically, Krzyzewski would have been very happy to get three. If he could only have one—and it was Mullin—he’d be thrilled.

  He also knew it was probably a long shot. Mullin was from Brooklyn and, like most New York kids, had grown up a St. John’s fan. The Redmen (as they were still called back then) were a national power under Coach Lou Carnesecca and had been in the Elite Eight as recently as 1979—beating Duke in that NCAA Tournament when the Blue Devils were coming off their trip to the championship game the previous season.

  One night in the dead of winter, Krzyzewski and assistant coach Chuck Swenson flew to Glens Falls, New York, to watch Mullin p
lay in a two-night tournament. Mullin’s play confirmed everything Krzyzewski had thought about him. Teenage boys fall in love with girls who have blond hair and blue eyes. Basketball coaches fall in love with players who have a cerebral court sense and a great jump shot. Krzyzewski was in love.

  And, like a lot of teenage boys dealing with the notion of unrequited love, he was depressed.

  “Mike had a strict routine when we were on the road recruiting,” Swenson said. “Eat dinner—or supper as midwesterners call it—before the game. Go to the game, try to make sure the kid and his coach know you’re there. Stop on the way back to the hotel for ice cream. Get to the room, call Mickie, and go to bed. That was it. All the time.”

  Swenson knew the routine cold because in those days, the head coach and his assistant shared a room on the road. Often as not in a place like Glens Falls it was at a roadside motel.

  On this night, though, Krzyzewski hung up the phone with Mickie, looked at Swenson, and said, “Let’s go get a brew.”

  “You mean a beer?” Swenson asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” Krzyzewski said. “Let’s get a beer.”

  They found a bar and Krzyzewski sipped his brew quietly.

  “Usually after we’d seen a player he liked, especially one he liked as much as Mullin, he’d be wound up,” Swenson said. “He’d talk about what the kid could do in our offense or how he might make our older kids better—which Mullin certainly would have.

  “That night, he was quiet and introspective in a way I wasn’t used to seeing. I’d been with him for a while at that stage—four years at Army and then at Duke. It kind of scared me a little. He finally said, ‘Chuck, this is the kid we need to get. And I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to guarantee that we get him.’ ”

  Mullin actually visited Duke on the weekend of what is still referred to in Duke lore as “the Banks game.” He saw Cameron at its absolute wildest and clearly loved the atmosphere.

  But Krzyzewski’s gut was right. Mullin wasn’t leaving New York. His buddies all wanted him to go to St. John’s. Krzyzewski had done an excellent job “recruiting” Mullin’s mom, but in the end it wasn’t enough. Mullin, the player Krzyzewski believed would be his first Jeff Ruland, went to play for Carnesecca—where he had a brilliant career and led St. John’s to the Final Four in 1985.

  One by one, the recruiting blocks fell that spring—all in the wrong direction. Blab liked Krzyzewski but his high school coach was enamored of Bob Knight—so he went to Indiana.

  Rodney Williams was coming to Duke. That’s what he told Krzyzewski when he asked the coach to come down and speak at his high school’s awards banquet in April. The plan was for Krzyzewski to speak and then, when Rodney got up to accept his award as the team’s MVP, he would announce that he was signing with Duke.

  Krzyzewski flew to Titus, Florida, on the afternoon of the banquet, rented a car, and drove to the school. He was greeted there by Williams’s coach, John Smith.

  “Coach I feel really badly about this. Rodney just signed with Florida a couple of hours ago. He won’t be at the banquet tonight. I hope, since you’re here already, you’ll stay and speak.”

  Krzyzewski wasn’t sure what was most upsetting: Williams backing out at the last possible second to mysteriously sign with Florida, his unwillingness even to face him at the banquet, or the coach requesting that he still speak.

  He stayed and spoke. “I just decided that I wasn’t going to start breaking commitments,” he said. “No matter how upset I was at that moment.”

  Soon after the Williams debacle, Tim Mullen decided on Virginia and so did Jim Miller—on the last day of the signing period. Krzyzewski and Bobby Dwyer had gotten a call the day before saying that Miller was leaning toward Duke.

  “Let’s not take any chances,” Krzyzewski said. “Drive up there tonight, and if it’s us, pick up the letter from the mailbox.”

  Although contact between recruits and coaches was allowed during the signing period, Duke had used up all its allowable visits. That’s why Krzyzewski wanted the letter of intent in the mailbox.

  Miller lived in the mountains, in the town of Princeton, West Virginia. It would take Dwyer several hours on a lot of back roads to get there. He arrived at about two in the morning and asked for an eight o’clock wake-up call. Miller had said he would make his final decision when he woke up in the morning.

  Dwyer’s wake-up call came early—a little after seven. Only it wasn’t from the front desk. It was Miller. “Coach, I’m really sorry,” he said. “I woke up this morning and my gut told me I should go to Virginia.”

  Dwyer called Krzyzewski. Desperate, Krzyzewski tracked down Miller’s mother, who was at a teachers’ convention. He knew she wanted her son to go to Duke. “Let me talk to him,” Brenda Miller said. “I’ll call you back.”

  An hour later she called back. “Jim’s really set on Virginia,” she said. “I have to support him. It’s his choice. I’m sorry.”

  Not as sorry as Krzyzewski was at that moment. They were now officially zero for five. There were others willing to sign, notably Danny Meagher, a six-foot-five-inch Canadian who would develop into a productive player—the kind of physical, hard-nosed opponent Dean Smith couldn’t stand. But Krzyzewski’s first full recruiting season had been, at least in terms of players who could be program cornerstones, a washout.

  Soon after Miller had signed with Virginia, Krzyzewski sat down with his staff.

  “We blew it this year,” he said, remembering what he’d learned as a West Point plebe: when something goes wrong the only acceptable answer when asked about it is, “No excuse, sir!”

  So, instead of making excuses or talking about how unlucky they’d gotten, Krzyzewski told his two recruiters that the three of them had collectively blown it. “Next year we’re going about it differently,” he announced. “We aren’t recruiting twenty or twenty-five players. We’re recruiting eight—ten at most. And we’re going to sign five or six of them.”

  “What if we don’t?” Swenson asked, still smarting from all the near misses.

  “We will,” Krzyzewski said.

  That was the end of the meeting.

  —

  Jim Valvano’s first recruiting season at N.C. State had been far more productive. He knew he already had players who could score in Sidney Lowe, Dereck Whittenburg, and Thurl Bailey—the three players recruited by Norm Sloan prior to his final season at State. Valvano wanted to add one outside shooter and a couple of players who could play physically inside. Bailey was six-eleven but was more of a finesse player.

  He signed three players: Cozell McQueen, a quick-leaping six-foot-eleven-inch center from South Carolina; Lorenzo Charles, a Brooklyn kid who was six-seven and Charles Barkley wide and strong (though without Barkley’s offensive gifts); and Terry Gannon, a six-one shooting guard from Joliet, Illinois. The three signees were an example of Valvano’s ability to connect with different personalities. McQueen was a southern kid who told Valvano one of the reasons he liked N.C. State was because he didn’t want to go to school in the South. Everything is relative in life. Charles was quiet, a tough-minded New York kid. And Gannon was a coach’s son who never thought for one second he would end up going to college in North Carolina.

  “I grew up dreaming of playing at Notre Dame,” he said. “My dad is an Irish Catholic high school basketball coach [Joliet Catholic High School] and we’re a hundred miles away from Notre Dame. He was friends with Digger [Phelps] and we went to South Bend for games all the time. That was where I wanted to go.

  “Fortunately for me, there was another guard Digger liked more than he liked me, and he offered him a scholarship early in my senior year. That opened things up. Still, the only program I knew anything about in the ACC was North Carolina. Everyone knew who Dean Smith was. But that was about it.

  “Then State starts recruiting me. Jim comes to the house for a home visit. The first thing he said to my father when he opened the door was, ‘Who the hell ta
ught you how to give directions?’ He’d gotten lost. He was by himself, and he and my dad start talking.

  “My dad loved to drink and he loved to gamble. The next thing I know he and my dad are in the next room and Jim’s helping him pick games. I’d never met anyone like him. No one’s ever met anyone like him. I thought he was crazy but I liked him. One minute he’d be talking pop culture, the next world affairs. Anything but basketball—or at least that’s the way it seemed. He was a coach’s son. I was a coach’s son, so I liked him right away. But it was my dad he recruited. When he left that night my dad said, ‘You’re going to go play for him.’ I’d never seen the campus but the decision was made.

  “It was definitely culture shock for me when I got down there. First time I went into a convenience store I said something to the guy behind the counter and he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, so you’re a Yankee.’ It took me a while to get used to that.”

  Gannon, McQueen, and Charles were all learning on the job during that second season. The three juniors, Whittenburg, Lowe, and Bailey, were coming into their own as ACC players, and the three freshmen all made an impact right away. State improved from 14–13 overall and 4–10 in the ACC to 21–9 in the regular season and 7–7 against ACC teams. That jumped them from seventh place in 1981 to fourth place, which meant they had wrapped up a spot in the NCAA Tournament by the time they arrived in Greensboro for the ACC Tournament.

  After winning an ugly first-round game against Maryland, State lost to North Carolina in the semifinals, making Valvano 0–6 against Smith. State went into the NCAA Tournament as a number-seven seed and played a first-round game against tenth-seeded Tennessee-Chattanooga.

  “We overlooked them, simple as that,” Whittenburg said. “We just figured we’d show up and win and then have a tough second-round game against Minnesota. They had a really good guard [Willie White, who later played in the NBA], and we got in a hole we could never get out from. When we’d lost to Iowa when we were freshmen, we’d known going in they were good and they just outplayed us. This time, it was our fault. It was sudden and it was disappointing.”