The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Smith never changed character when the clock hit zero. He engaged in an awkward hug with Thompson—awkward because, at six-ten, Thompson was a foot taller and it was difficult for the two men to reach each other—and then did the ritual on-court postgame interviews.

  There was no formal awards ceremony—the NCAA didn’t do that until 1991—so the Tar Heels began cutting the nets down. Unlike today, there was no corporate ladder sponsor, so they actually helped one another up to snip the mesh. When Smith was helped up to take his snip, the Superdome was filled with cheers—not just from the Carolina section, but from everywhere. Smith took one quick snip and insisted on coming down.

  A few feet away from him, Roy Williams was weeping, and even Eddie Fogler, the tough New Yorker, had tears in his eyes. A few minutes later, as the second net was coming down, someone told Smith that “everyone” wanted him to come back and take the last cut of the net.

  Smith shook his head. “Find Jimmy Black,” he said. “Let him do it.”

  Why Black? Because he was the only senior starter. Why, Smith was asked, wouldn’t he take the final cut that everyone in the building wanted him to take?

  “Because I hope I’ll have a chance to do this again,” he said. “Jimmy won’t have that chance.”

  When Smith came to meet the media a few moments later he was still totally in character. Three years earlier, The Charlotte Observer’s Frank Barrows, who was generally regarded as the best feature writer in the state, had written a lengthy piece on Smith and the “Carolina system.” Barrows’s thesis had been simple: everything that Smith did that made Carolina so consistently good kept it from being great—as in great enough to win the national championship.

  Barrows researched the piece, which was about five thousand words in length, exhaustively. He spent two full days with Smith and went to Kansas to interview Smith’s parents—among many others. In the story, Barrows pointed out that the two most gifted college guards of the 1970s had been Phil Ford and Earvin “Magic” Johnson. “Dean Smith would never be comfortable coaching someone with the nickname ‘Magic,’ ” Barrows asserted.

  Ford had played on the North Carolina team that lost the national championship game to Marquette in 1977, in part because he had to play hurt, but also in part because Smith had stuck to his system by going to the four-corners very early and, more important perhaps, by stubbornly sticking to his system and not calling time-out to get Mike O’Koren back into the game in place of backup senior Bruce Buckley.

  Two years later, as a sophomore, Johnson led Michigan State to the national title. Early in that season, Michigan State had lost to North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

  “Magic did have eight turnovers in that game,” Smith liked to point out.

  Ford, no doubt, would never have had eight turnovers in a game.

  And so, when Smith met with the media, having finally won the national championship after seven Final Four trips—in a classic game—his opening comment was this: “I guess we proved a very bright writer from Charlotte wrong tonight.”

  Most in the room had no idea what he was talking about. Those who knew Smith knew exactly what he was talking about because he had been openly disdainful of the piece in the past. In 1981, when the subject had come up, he had waved a hand angrily.

  “We’ve done a study,” he said. “Did you know that, statistically, it’s much harder to get to three Final Fours than it is to win one?” Soon after that he made the comment about Johnson’s eight turnovers in Chapel Hill in December 1978.

  Clearly, the story had stuck with him, because it was the very first thing he thought about when he finally won his first title.

  Twenty-five years later, in an interview with Scott Fowler, an Observer columnist, Smith said, “I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have gone after Barrows that way. But I just thought the premise of the whole thing was dumb.”

  Even in saying he was wrong, Smith couldn’t completely let go of his anger.

  Later that night, Rick Brewer, Carolina’s longtime sports information director, was walking down the wide Superdome hallway to the locker room when he saw James Jordan, Michael Jordan’s father, stomping the floor repeatedly. Brewer looked to see what might be under James Jordan’s foot but saw nothing.

  “Mr. Jordan, what are you doing?” he finally asked.

  James Jordan looked up with a wide grin on his face. “I’m stomping that monkey once and for all,” he said.

  “What monkey?” Brewer asked, still baffled.

  “That monkey that’s been sitting on Coach Smith’s shoulder all those years.” He looked down at the floor and said, “Yup, it’s dead. Michael finally killed it.”

  10

  Both Jim Valvano and Mike Krzyzewski knew they had their work cut out for them after Jimmy Black took down that final cut of the net in the Superdome.

  Valvano’s hope lay in the improvement he had seen in his team that season and the fact that all five starters would be returning. He had cast his recruiting net far and wide and was in contention for some very talented high school players, the kind he knew he needed to recruit in order to compete with Dean Smith. The Tar Heels would lose Black and James Worthy, who turned pro after his junior season to become the number-one pick in the NBA draft, but they kept reloading. Among the freshmen arriving on campus in the fall of 1982 were Steve Hale, a talented shooting guard from Oklahoma; Curtis Hunter, a McDonald’s High School All-American from Durham; and Brad Daugherty, a gifted big man from the mountains in western North Carolina.

  Daugherty was seven feet one and good enough to move quickly into the starting lineup, taking the spot vacated by Worthy. He did create one headache for Smith—the kind that could exist only in the Carolina system. Smith didn’t like to list players as being seven feet tall. He didn’t like the notion that other coaches would be able to refer to “all those seven-footers” that the Tar Heels had on their team. Daugherty was clearly over seven feet tall. Not if you read the Carolina media guide. There, he was listed as six feet eleven and three-quarters. Not a seven-footer.

  Smith had a rule that allowed a player to round up and add an inch to his height or round down and take off an inch. That was how he justified Daugherty going from seven feet one to six eleven and three-quarters. It was also how Larry Brown had gone from being five ten and a half to six feet as a senior and how Michael Jordan at six-four and a half was listed as six feet six.

  “Everyone knows Jordan’s only six-four,” Pat Riley, then the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, declared while defending the Portland Trail Blazers’ decision to draft Sam Bowie ahead of Jordan in the 1984 NBA draft. “The media doesn’t understand the NBA. Dean’s players are never as tall as he says they are.”

  Perhaps not. What those in the media who had seen Jordan play did understand that the self-declared genius Riley did not was that Jordan could have been five-four and he was going to be a superstar.

  With Jordan and Sam Perkins returning, Carolina would have a legitimate chance to win a second straight national title. The Tar Heels main competition in the ACC would again be Virginia, led by Ralph Sampson, who had won a second consecutive national player of the year title in 1982. N.C. State, with Sidney Lowe, Dereck Whittenburg, and Thurl Bailey now seniors, would also be a threat, as would Wake Forest. Maryland, coming off a down year, would be better, thanks in large part to a freshman forward named Len Bias. Duke’s hopes for improvement lay in its freshman class. Krzyzewski’s changed recruiting tactics after the failures of 1981, and his “will,” as Chuck Swenson described it, had produced results.

  The best and most important of the Duke signees was Johnny Dawkins, a six-foot-one-inch string bean whose leaping ability was comparable to Jordan’s. He was lightning fast, the kind of guard who was almost impossible to stay in front of and, because of his vertical leap, able to get his shot off over almost anyone.

  Krzyzewski had targeted Dawkins during his junior season in high school. There was another talented guard named JoJo Buchan
an, from Seattle, who was also interested in Duke, but it was Dawkins, who was playing at Mackin, a Catholic school in the Washington suburbs rich in basketball tradition, that Krzyzewski wanted. Maryland wanted him too and so did Notre Dame—among others.

  “Historically the best kids from Mackin [notably Austin Carr and Donald ‘Duck’ Williams] had gone to Notre Dame,” Krzyzewski said. “So I knew we’d have our work cut out for us. But [Mackin coach] Paul DeStefano told me we’d be given a fair chance and thought we had a legitimate shot. I believed him. He was a straight shooter. So we went after Johnny very hard.”

  The first time Krzyzewski saw Dawkins play turned into one of the more important nights of his coaching career. Mackin was playing in the Jelleff League, which was then one of the more revered summer basketball leagues in the country. The Jelleff Boys Club was in northwest D.C., and the games were played on an outside court that was smaller than a regulation court with rickety backboards and rims. But every July the best D.C.-area teams and players came to play in the Jelleff League.

  In fact, it can be argued that the most anticipated high school basketball game never played took place there in 1970. Morgan Wootten and DeMatha were the kings of high school basketball in Washington and perhaps the most famous high school team nationally in the years after the famous 1965 upset of Power Memorial. A young coach named John Thompson had built St. Anthony’s High School into a local power. DeMatha wouldn’t play St. Anthony’s. Wootten didn’t like Thompson implying he was racist and was “afraid” to play St. Anthony’s in downtown Washington.

  And so, when the luck of the draw in the 1970 Jelleff League matched DeMatha and St. Anthony’s, an estimated five thousand people packed the stands on a warm July night—about twice as many people as the stands would hold. DeMatha won the game 108–26 because neither Thompson nor his team showed up. Instead, St. Anthony’s was represented by cheerleaders and football players.

  “If he wasn’t going to play me in the winter, I wasn’t going to play him in the summer,” Thompson said years later after winning a national title as the coach at Georgetown. Although Wootten had a plethora of good players during Thompson’s twenty-seven years at Georgetown, he almost never recruited any of them.

  “Sometimes in life, you can live away from someone,” Thompson said once.

  Years later, when Thompson had retired and had become a radio talk-show host in Washington, Wootten would appear on the show regularly. “The media made all that stuff up about us not liking each other, didn’t they, Morgan?” Thompson liked to say, laughing. “We always respected one another.”

  Krzyzewski wasn’t concerned about Wootten’s relationship with Thompson as he sat in the stands watching Dawkins play a Jelleff League game on a hot July night in 1981. At halftime, he was approached by a man he didn’t recognize. The man didn’t really recognize him either, except by the logo on his shirt that said “Duke Basketball.”

  At that moment, Krzyzewski was still little more than an unpronounceable name in the college basketball pantheon.

  “Are you the Duke coach?” the man asked.

  His name was Reginald Kitchen. He was an AAU coach. He wasn’t coaching that night because, in the Jelleff League, high school teams played one another.

  “I know you’re here to see Dawkins,” Kitchen said. High school and AAU coaches always knew which players colleges were pursuing. “But one of my players is playing in the next game and you might want to stick around to watch him too. He’s only going to be a junior this fall and he’s little, but he really knows how to play.”

  Krzyzewski was staying with his in-laws in Virginia that night and flying home the next day. “It wasn’t like I had anything else to do,” he said. “I thought I’d be polite and tell him that I’d stay and watch for a while.”

  “What’s his name?” Krzyzewski asked.

  “Tommy Amaker. You’ll know who he is when you see him.”

  Krzyzewski already knew he wanted Dawkins. He also knew that Dawkins’s best position would be at the number-two guard spot, even though he was a good enough ball handler to play the point if need be. Krzyzewski got something to drink between games, said hello to Paul DeStefano to make sure that Dawkins knew he was there, and returned to his seat.

  Kitchen was right. Krzyzewski knew who Amaker was right away. He was no more than five-nine and might have weighed 135 pounds. But his sense of the game was undeniable. He was waterbug-quick, made it very difficult for the opposing point guard to start his offense, and consistently set up his teammates for open shots. At halftime, Kitchen returned.

  “What’d you think?” he said.

  “I love him,” Krzyzewski said.

  “Would you like to meet his mom?” Kitchen said. “She’s here.”

  Alma Amaker was an English teacher in Fairfax County and almost never missed one of her son’s games. When Krzyzewski was introduced he shook hands with her and said, “Mrs. Amaker, your son is going to look great in Duke blue.” At that moment, Tommy Amaker had no intention of wearing Duke blue. He wanted to go to Maryland. His older sister was already there, and John Lucas, his basketball hero, had played there. He had attended Lefty Driesell’s summer camp in College Park for years.

  Krzyzewski began planning trips to Washington to see both Dawkins and Amaker. When he couldn’t make it up there, Bobby Dwyer was dispatched to make the trip. There were no restrictions then on how many times coaches could see a player in action. Dawkins didn’t play a single game his senior year without at least one Duke coach in attendance.

  With Dwyer more or less living in the D.C. area, the rest of the country fell—more or less—to Chuck Swenson. At one point, the Durham Morning Herald did a story on one of Swenson’s trips when, in a four-day period, he flew from Durham to Chicago; Chicago to Phoenix; Phoenix to Los Angeles; L.A. to Seattle; and Seattle to Lincoln, Nebraska, before flying home. Swenson saw five players on that trip: Weldon Williams, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas, JoJo Buchanan, and Bill Jackman. All but Buchanan ended up at Duke.

  But while Swenson was traveling thousands of air miles, Dawkins remained the number-one target.

  “I grew up a Maryland fan,” Dawkins said. “My parents were ACC fans, and, of course, if you went to Mackin you had to consider Notre Dame. I remember meeting Coach K for the first time and he was very serious. But he was also very confident. I kind of liked that he was so convinced he was going to succeed even though he hadn’t done anything yet.”

  Dawkins was the key guard in the recruiting mix that winter. Bilas—at least early on—was the key big man. He was six-eight, an excellent student, and willing to consider leaving California. “Honestly, when Duke first contacted me, I didn’t know where it was,” he said. “I had to find it on a map. I just knew it was in the South, but to me ‘the South’ meant San Diego. But once I got to know Coach K, I got serious about the possibility of going there. I honestly believed in what he was telling me about the school and about his vision for the program.

  “If UCLA hadn’t just changed coaches [Larry Brown had left and had been replaced by Larry Farmer when Bilas was a junior in high school] I might have ended up there because if you lived in L.A., UCLA was the holy grail for a basketball player. My parents knew about Duke as a school. I remembered the ’78 team with [Jim] Spanarkel and [Gene] Banks. The key for me though wasn’t academics, it was the coach. I didn’t like my high school coach. For me, it wasn’t so much about what the school was but who the coach was.”

  Bilas liked Lute Olson, who was then the coach at Iowa, and he liked Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim. He also really liked Krzyzewski.

  By mid-January, Duke was en route to an awful season. Things seemed to hit bottom in a 40–36 loss at home to Maryland. The Terrapins weren’t very good. The Blue Devils were worse. Vince Taylor, Tom Emma, and Chip Engelland—the team’s three guards—scored 12 points apiece in the game. No one else scored for Duke.

  Krzyzewski was sick that night—literally and figuratively. Watching his team play made him f
eel ill. He was also running a fever. He had planned a trip to Los Angeles on Monday to watch Bilas practice. Because it was a no-contact period and because he wanted Bilas to understand that he was flying coast-to-coast—coach class with a stopover in Chicago—just to see him practice, Krzyzewski called him to ask for a restaurant recommendation. He and Chuck Swenson were going to watch Bilas practice, have dinner, and then fly home on a red-eye.

  “Let me check with my parents,” Bilas said. “I’ll get a name and directions from the school for you and give them to my coach in a note. He can hand them to you after practice.”

  Krzyzewski followed the plan, taking the restaurant recommendation handoff after he and Swenson had spent some time talking to Bilas’s coach. When they got into the rental car, Krzyzewski opened the envelope with the name of the restaurant and the directions. He read the directions to Swenson and then noticed a PS at the bottom of the note.

  “Oh, one more thing. I know this isn’t as important as the restaurant is but I’m coming to Duke.”

  Krzyzewski sat and stared at the words for a moment almost not believing what he was seeing.

  “It was a huge moment,” he remembered years later. “Jay was a big-time recruit. We hadn’t gotten a commitment from someone as highly thought of as he was since I had gotten to Duke. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel sick or tired anymore.”

  Bilas had been thinking about visiting Kansas the following weekend. But his father had asked him where he stood in terms of his decision. Jay’s answer was, “I’m eighty-five percent Duke, fifteen percent Syracuse.”

  “Then you shouldn’t visit Kansas,” his father said. “It’s not fair to them.”

  Jay knew his father was right. And, unlike a lot of athletes, he hadn’t enjoyed the recruiting process. “There was very much a used-car feeling about it,” he said. “I was tired of it. I liked Coach K. I decided to go with my gut.”