The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Still, the twenty-two wins and the trip to the NCAA Tournament with all the key players returning the next season gave State reason for hope even if their fans were getting restless about the lack of success against North Carolina. Valvano was 3–2 against Krzyzewski, but that didn’t excite anyone. If anything, people wanted to know how he’d managed to lose twice to Duke—especially that second season when the Blue Devils were 10–17 and lucky to win 10.

  “Honestly, Duke never really crossed our minds,” Gannon said. “They probably should have, just because they played so hard. But they didn’t have the talent to compete with us at that point.”

  Duke didn’t really have the talent to seriously compete with anyone in the ACC at that point. The Blue Devils were 4–10 in conference play and ended their season by losing 88–53 to Wake Forest in Greensboro.

  Duke versus Wake was the dreaded 9:30 game—dreaded because the teams had to sit around until what felt like the middle of the night waiting their turn to play. If the game wasn’t close, the Coliseum was always virtually empty by the time it was over, sometime around midnight.

  With the game a complete blowout, there couldn’t have been more than two thousand people left in the building as the game dragged to a finish. In the final minute, veteran ACC referee Lenny Wirtz twice called meaningless fouls on Wake Forest walk-ons who were about the only ones in the building with any energy left for anything other than going home.

  As Wirtz stood in front of the press table while a Duke player went to the free-throw line, Bill Brill, a Duke graduate who had been covering the league since it had been invented in 1953—Brill had graduated in 1952—yelled Wirtz’s name. Surprised, Wirtz turned to look at him. The two men had known each other forever.

  “Lenny, if you blow that goddamn whistle one more time, I swear to God I’m going to come across this table and shove it down your throat,” Brill said.

  “Just doing my job,” Wirtz said.

  A moment later a hapless Wake walk-on and an equally hapless Duke walk-on collided at midcourt. Wirtz glanced at Brill, turned, and ran down the court without blowing his whistle. Thus, he lived to blow it another day.

  When Mike Krzyzewski had finished talking to the media he walked over to where Mickie was waiting for him. Mickie began to cry.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It was just a very bad night.”

  “That’s not why I’m crying,” Mickie said. “I’m crying because the season’s over.”

  Mike Krzyzewski looked at his wife and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  Years later, Krzyzewski changed the story.

  “I said to her, ‘Do you still love me?’ She looked at me and said, ‘Honey, I still love you. I’m just not sure I respect you.’ ”

  It would get worse before it would get better.

  9

  While N.C. State was showing improvement in the winter of 1982 and Duke was sliding to the worst record in school history, North Carolina had only one question to answer that March: Would the Tar Heels finally deliver a national championship in Dean Smith’s twenty-first season as coach?

  Carolina had lost two games during the regular season: the first was at home to Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons always gave the Tar Heels trouble because Carl Tacy had a knack for recruiting talented guards who knew how to handle UNC’s trapping defenses. The other loss was at Virginia, which still had Ralph Sampson and also had excellent guard play—including Jeff Jones, who came from Owensboro, Kentucky, and had been a player Smith coveted.

  “One of my biggest disappointments was not getting him,” Smith often said. “He was a terrific player and a better young man.”

  Jones, who went on to coach at his alma mater and then at American University and Old Dominion, still has the letter Smith sent him after he had decided to go to Virginia. “He was the only coach who recruited me at a school I didn’t pick who took the time to do that,” Jones said. “I always had great respect for him. I had even more after that.”

  Smith almost always wrote to recruits he had ardently pursued who decided not to go to North Carolina, to wish them luck. It was an act of extreme grace—most coaches will tell you they’d rather not hear the name of a player who turns them down ever again—but it also paid dividends.

  “I can’t tell you the number of players and coaches through the years who told me that one reason they were attracted to Carolina was hearing a story about Coach Smith writing a letter like that,” Eddie Fogler said. “A lot of those kids grow up to be coaches. Or their coaches remembered the letter when they had another talented player.”

  Was that Smith’s intent in writing?

  Fogler smiled. “No, I really don’t think so,” he said. “But it didn’t hurt.”

  Smith didn’t have Jeff Jones to coach during the winter of 1982, but he had a plethora of talent. Junior James Worthy was arguably the best player in the country and would be the number-one pick in that spring’s NBA draft. Sam Perkins was a sophomore who was blossoming into a star. Jimmy Black was a senior point guard, exactly the kind of player Smith liked to have running his offense—especially with so many talented scorers in the lineup. Matt Doherty was a hard-nosed swingman from Long Island who could score, guard, and rebound.

  There was also a freshman who had been the North Carolina state high school player of the year the previous season: Buzz Peterson.

  “I think Michael’s probably still mad about that,” Peterson said with a grin thirty-three years after he and Michael Jordan had graduated from high school.

  Jordan was a little bit of a late bloomer. He and Peterson first met after their junior seasons in high school at North Carolina’s basketball camp. Peterson was a star already and had been invited to the two important national camps that existed in those days: the Five-Star Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania and the B/C All-Stars Basketball Camp in Georgia. Jordan had just received an invitation to Five-Star when he and Peterson first met.

  “I still remember him saying to me, ‘How do I get invited to B/C?’ ” Peterson said. “He hadn’t been invited and he wanted to go there.”

  As it turned out, Jordan didn’t really need to go to B/C. After his week at Five-Star was over, camp owner Howard Garfinkel convinced him to stay a second week—which wasn’t the norm.

  “There were better players coming that second week,” Garfinkel said. “That meant more coaches and more media. I told him if he stayed he was going to explode as a star nationally. Funny thing is, I only took him because Roy Williams (then a UNC assistant) said they’d had him at their camp and I should invite him.”

  Garfinkel’s advice that Jordan stay seven more days was sound. By the time his second week at Five-Star was over, every coach in the country knew about the kid from Laney High School in Wilmington. Still, because Peterson was considered a better shooter (Jordan hadn’t yet developed his unstoppable jump shot), he was equally coveted in the fall of 1980.

  “We tried to recruit both of them,” Bobby Dwyer remembered. “We were a little late getting started when they were both juniors because we didn’t get to Duke until March. But we went after them both hard after that.” He smiled. “There was just one problem: we had no chance with either one.”

  Both Dwyer and Mike Krzyzewski remember visiting Peterson’s house and being given a tour by Buzz. “We walked into his room and the walls were filled with Carolina posters and calendars,” Dwyer said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is what we’re up against trying to recruit in this state.’ ”

  Peterson remembers feeling a little bit sheepish when he saw the look on the faces of the two coaches.

  “Carolina always put out a calendar every year with the schedule and a team picture on it,” he said. “If you had been to their camp, they would send it to you. I’d been going to the camp since I was ten, so I had every calendar.

  “The funny thing is I really liked Coach K. He was impressive. I remember thinking, ‘They’re going to be good in a few years.’ But I wasn’t intereste
d in a few years, I was interested in now. Plus, I don’t think there’s any way I would have been allowed to go anyplace but Carolina when all was said and done.”

  In fact, Peterson visited Kentucky and was awed by the facilities and the clear fanaticism everyone in the state had for Kentucky basketball. He also very much liked Leonard Hamilton, who was then Coach Joe B. Hall’s top recruiter.

  “Carolina had gotten a commitment from a very good guard named Lynwood Robinson,” he said. “I knew Michael was going too and I really did like Kentucky. I came home and I told my friend Randy Shepard that I thought I might want to go there,” Peterson said. “Next morning, I’m sitting in homeroom and my coach, Rodney Johnson, came into class and said, ‘Come with me.’ He took me down to his office and he said, ‘Are you seriously thinking about going to Kentucky? Really? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

  Peterson laughed at the memory. “That afternoon, Coach Smith was at practice. It’s about four hours to drive from Chapel Hill to Asheville and he drove. It occurred to me that, one way or the other, I was going to Carolina. Then Michael [who had already committed to UNC at that point] started calling and saying, ‘Come on, Buzz, what are you thinking?’ ”

  He ended up thinking he wanted to go to North Carolina. And he was voted the player of the year by the state high school association. “Not exactly sure what they were watching or who they were watching,” Peterson said with a grin. “But it’s the one thing I’ve got Michael doesn’t have.”

  Peterson and Jordan were roommates in college and were in each other’s weddings. In the spring of 2014, Peterson was fired as the coach at UNC Wilmington. He wasn’t out of work for long. The owner of the Charlotte Hornets hired him to be a liaison between the coaching staff and the owner—in effect his eyes and ears on the court and in the locker room.

  The owner was Michael Jordan, who had forgiven him—finally—for being the state player of the year thirty-three years earlier.

  —

  Dean Smith didn’t like to start freshmen. He had opposed the NCAA rules change that had made freshmen eligible to play varsity basketball in 1972, and he had strict rules for them. In the Carolina hierarchy, they were the low men on the totem pole. A senior walk-on had rights that a highly touted freshman did not. Smith so believed in the seniority system that water breaks during practice were done according to class. It was routine for a star freshman to carry the equipment bags for walk-on seniors. When the team gathered for pregame meals at the local restaurant that had once been the Pines but was now called Slugs, they gathered in the lobby until everyone had arrived. Then the seniors walked in and sat down, followed by the juniors, sophomores, and—finally—the freshmen.

  Freshmen couldn’t do media interviews before they played their first game.

  And, in the fall of 1981, when Sports Illustrated wanted to photograph Carolina’s five starters for the cover of their college basketball preview issue, only four of the starters—James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Jimmy Black, and Matt Doherty—appeared. The missing fifth starter was Michael Jordan—because he was a freshman.

  Twenty-eight years later, when Jordan was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, he brought up his absence from that cover shot as part of a laundry list of slights he felt had motivated him during his career.

  Jordan was the fourth freshman to start from day one for a Smith-coached team. The first had been Phil Ford, the second Mike O’Koren, and the third James Worthy. They had been picked second, sixth, and first upon leaving in the NBA draft. Jordan’s unofficial coming-out party came in a nationally televised game in the Meadowlands against Kentucky. (Back then, network TV games were a big deal.) The teams were ranked first and second in the country (Carolina number one), which made the pregame hype huge for a December game.

  Worthy and Perkins were both terrific, scoring 26 and 21 points respectively in an 82–69 Carolina win. But Jordan, with 19 points on 8-of-13 shooting and a couple of spectacular plays, had everyone talking. During his postgame press conference, Smith got frustrated with all the Jordan questions.

  “You know, Michael spends a lot of his time thanking James and Sam and Jimmy Black for getting him such wide-open shots,” he said finally. “They’re the reason we won this game.”

  Black had picked up seven assists, Worthy six. Perkins had none, but the larger point was that Jordan had done plenty on his own. Smith knew that. He just didn’t want a freshman emerging as his team’s star—especially before conference play had begun.

  That season turned out to be a historic one in Chapel Hill—for a number of reasons. North Carolina and Virginia, having split their regular season meetings, met in the ACC championship game. With just under eight minutes left, leading 44–43, Smith decided he wanted to pull Virginia out of its zone. He ordered his team into a delay offense, waiting for UVA coach Terry Holland to order his team to go man-to-man in order to pick up the pace of the game.

  Holland wouldn’t bite. Virginia stayed in its zone, meaning that James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Michael Jordan, Ralph Sampson, Jeff Jones, and Othell Wilson stood and stared at one another for the next seven minutes.

  “It was a great game until the last eight minutes,” Smith said later. “But then they wouldn’t come out of their zone and chase us.”

  The Carolina people blamed Holland for not chasing. The Virginia people—and most of the basketball world—blamed Smith for bringing a game filled with all-world players to a halt. When the NCAA finally put in a forty-five-second clock three seasons later, most pointed at that game as the turning point in the argument for a clock.

  Carolina won 47–45. In the NCAA Tournament, Virginia ended up losing—after point guard Wilson was hurt—to Alabama-Birmingham in the round of sixteen. Carolina survived a scare from James Madison (52–50) in the second round but rolled from there to Smith’s seventh Final Four. The Tar Heels beat Houston, led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, in the semifinals to set up a confrontation with Georgetown in the championship game.

  The Hoyas star was a freshman, center Patrick Ewing. But they also had experienced guards, notably Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, a great shooter who had been part of the 1980 team that had just missed the Final Four. There was great drama in the coaching matchup. Smith was now on the doorstep of a championship for the fourth time, and standing in his way was John Thompson, one of his closest friends in coaching. Thompson had been one of Smith’s assistants on the 1976 Olympic team and the two were good friends.

  Both men were concerned about somehow not being as intense as they needed to be while coaching against each other—even with the stakes so high. As always, Smith insisted that winning wasn’t that big a deal. Walking up the ramp to the locker room after warm-ups he encountered two reporters he knew well.

  “How you feeling?” one of them asked.

  Smith reached into his shirt pocket for his ever-present cigarettes. Producing the pack, he held it out and said, “Look, I’ve smoked less tonight than before the Duke game.”

  Thompson would say later that in the early minutes of the game he wouldn’t look at Smith for fear that he would find himself wanting his friend and mentor to finally win the elusive title.

  About five minutes into the game, Ewing was fouled. As Ewing walked to the foul line, Thompson could hear Smith talking to Hank Nichols, the lead referee on the game. Ewing’s foul-shooting routine was one of the most deliberate in the history of basketball. He would often go over the allotted ten seconds that a shooter had to release a free throw once he was handed the ball. No one ever called the violation because no one could ever remember any official calling it.

  Now, Thompson could hear Smith’s distinctive voice over the din in the New Orleans Superdome. “Now, Hank, I know he takes more than ten seconds a lot, but I don’t want you to call it,” Smith said. “Don’t worry about it. Let him take all the time he needs.”

  Thompson started laughing. He knew exactly what Smith was doing because he kn
ew Smith. He was trying to gain any tiny little edge he could. He didn’t expect Nichols to call a violation on Ewing, but maybe—just maybe—Nichols might at some point say, “Patrick, you’re awfully close to ten seconds, be careful.” Or maybe—just maybe—he’d become the first ref in history to make the call and Smith could honestly say later, “I specifically told Hank we didn’t want that call made.”

  “It was just Dean being Dean,” Thompson said years later. “He never missed a chance to gain any little edge he could. It was part of his genius. But when I heard him say that I thought, ‘Hell, he’s doing everything he possibly can to win the game. I damn well better do the same.’ ”

  The game turned into a basketball classic. After Georgetown took a 62–61 lead on a Floyd jumper with just over a minute to play, Smith called time-out. He knew that Georgetown was going to sag inside on Worthy and Perkins, and he didn’t love the idea of challenging Ewing. Knowing that there would come a moment when Jordan would be open on the wing, Smith patted him on the back coming out of the huddle and said, “Knock it down, Michael.”

  The notion that a freshman might be the hero wasn’t on Smith’s mind just then. Sure enough, Jimmy Black caught the ball right of the key, looked inside to Worthy, and spotted Jordan open on the left wing. He reversed the ball to him, and in one motion Jordan was in the air, the ball was out of his hand, and, with seventeen seconds left, it splashed through the net for a 63–62 lead.

  Even though he had one time-out left, Thompson didn’t use it—not wanting to give Smith a chance to set his defense. Sophomore guard Fred Brown raced downcourt with the ball, and with forward Eric Smith wide open under the basket, Brown turned to pass the ball to the other wing. But the “teammate” he thought he saw there was Worthy, who gratefully grabbed the perfect pass from Brown and raced to the other end of the court, all but running out the clock.