The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “We had Domino’s on the bus ride home,” Valvano would joke. “If I’d had three game balls that night I’d have given one to Lo, one to Domino’s, and one to the students.”

  The Duke players agreed. “Sometimes you should let sleeping dogs lie,” Alarie said. “The ‘Please miss’ signs would have been a much better call.”

  Duke was now 14–5 overall but 1–4 in the ACC, with a 4-game losing streak. The Iron Dukes and other alumni and fans were now in full cry. Clearly, they believed, Krzyzewski wasn’t ever going to be able to win in the ACC—with or without any double standard.

  17

  Tom Butters was in his office early on the morning after the loss to North Carolina State.

  He hadn’t slept much thinking about what his next step should be. He poured himself coffee and walked from his office across the Cameron Indoor Stadium lobby and down the narrow hallway to Mike Krzyzewski’s office.

  He wasn’t surprised that Krzyzewski wasn’t in yet. He imagined his coach had probably been up until dawn looking at tape to try to figure out what had happened the previous night. The answer, of course, was simple: Lorenzo Charles and pizza boxes had happened.

  “I usually liked to meet with my coaches in their office,” Butters said. “Me walking in and sitting down, I thought, felt less threatening than ‘Come to my office.’ That morning, though, I left word that I wanted Mike to come to my office as soon as he got in.”

  Krzyzewski was in by midmorning. The team had to leave that afternoon to bus to Clemson for a quick turnaround game on Saturday afternoon. In addition to everything else, the schedule wasn’t doing him any favors. Clemson was usually a very solid team, and at home, even in years when it wasn’t good, the Tigers were always difficult to beat.

  Krzyzewski looked tired when he walked into Butters’s office and even a little bit apprehensive. “When Mike’s uncomfortable, he’ll narrow his eyes a little bit,” Butters said. “Maybe he was tired, but maybe he was a little worried too. I’m not sure I’d called him into my office since I’d hired him.”

  Krzyzewski didn’t think Butters was going to fire him. “I honestly didn’t know what it was about,” he said. “If I hadn’t been so tired, maybe I’d have been worried. All I was thinking about that morning was trying to figure out a way to beat Clemson. We needed to win a game.”

  When Krzyzewski sat down, Butters told him he’d been thinking about what was going on with the basketball team a good deal.

  “Me too,” Krzyzewski said, forcing a smile.

  “I’ve got three problems right now,” Butters said. “First, I’ve got an alumni base that doesn’t think I’ve got the right coach in place. Second, I’ve got a lot of media who want to believe I don’t have the right coach and are going to keep saying and writing it until you prove them wrong once and for all.”

  He paused. “I can handle all that. But here’s my biggest problem. I’ve got a coach who doesn’t know how good he is and he’s doubting himself. So, there’s really only one thing I can do about it.”

  With that, he pushed something across the desk in Krzyzewski’s direction. Krzyzewski picked it up and looked at it. It was a new contract—a five-year extension.

  “I don’t want you or anyone else thinking there’s any chance you aren’t going to be coaching here for a long time,” Butters said. “So let’s lay that question to rest once and for all.”

  Butters thought he saw Krzyzewski’s eyes glisten just a little.

  “It was an incredible thing for Tom to do, especially on that morning,” Krzyzewski said. He smiled. “I told him later it was also a smart thing for him to do. But I can see why that wasn’t exactly the focus in the media or among the alumni when he made the announcement.”

  In fact, Butters was skewered both in the media and by Duke people—many of them major donors to the athletic program—after the announcement. He didn’t take much of it too seriously, even the notes that said, ‘If you don’t fire Krzyzewski someone might kill you,’ until one night when he and his wife, Lynn, came home to find their teenage daughter, Jill, in tears.

  “There had been a phone call,” Butters said. “Whoever it was said he was going to come to the house and hurt me if I didn’t get rid of Mike right away. That bothered me. My daughter shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

  Butters kept the letters—almost all of them signed. Today, they sit in a box with letters written several years later, many by the very same people, telling him he had to make sure Krzyzewski didn’t leave Duke to coach in the NBA. “Same people, no sense of irony,” he said. “None of them ever said, ‘I guess I was wrong back in eighty-four.’ ”

  When the team gathered on that Friday afternoon for the bus ride to Clemson, Krzyzewski told them about his new contract.

  “If any of you were worried about this—don’t,” he said. “Mr. Butters just gave me a five-year contract extension. I’m going to be here after you’ve all graduated.”

  That was a big deal for the players.

  “We had talked about it,” Jay Bilas said. “We read the papers; we knew what was going on. We’d seen the looks on people’s faces after the game in Atlanta. I think we all felt the same way: our loyalty was to Coach K. He was the reason we’d all come to Duke. We had never stopped believing in him. I’m pretty sure if they’d fired him, most of us would have left.

  “To hear him say, ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ was a huge relief for all of us. It meant we could just worry about winning basketball games and not worry about whether we were going to have to be thinking about where to go to school the next year.”

  Coincidence or not, the Blue Devils won two close games on the Saturday–Monday road trip, winning exactly the kind of games they had been losing. First, they beat Clemson, 67–65, and then, two nights later in Atlanta, they beat Georgia Tech, 69–68. They went on an eight-game winning streak that included a win at Maryland and a win at home against Wake Forest—the team that had beaten them by 31 a month earlier. It was Krzyzewski’s first win (0–8 until that night) against Carl Tacy and the Demon Deacons, and it came when Alarie hit a jump shot in overtime after Duke had blown a big lead at the end of regulation.

  When Alarie hit that shot, with five seconds left, Mickie Krzyzewski was sitting in her husband’s office. The game wasn’t on TV so she listened, hoping to hear a roar that would mean good news. She had left her seat at the end of regulation because she couldn’t bear to watch the overtime.

  On March 3, Duke went to Chapel Hill with a 7–6 conference record to conclude the regular season against North Carolina. The Tar Heels were attempting to finish the conference season with a 14–0 record. They had finally lost—by one—at Arkansas with Kenny Smith out injured and were 25–1 overall. Even after their loss, they had still been ranked number one because their résumé was so impressive.

  Other than the fact that Smith still wasn’t 100 percent (he had broken his left wrist, so he could play once the cast was off even though he wasn’t completely healed), the Tar Heels appeared to be virtually unbeatable. Michael Jordan was going to be the national player of the year and Sam Perkins was a first-team All-American.

  “I’ve only had a handful of teams I looked at and said, ‘Yes, this team should win the national [championship] if we stay healthy,” Smith said years later. “If Kenny hadn’t been hurt, who knows? But even with him playing at less than one hundred percent, it was still a team that was good enough to beat anybody.”

  Carolina was great. Duke was unafraid.

  And Carmichael Auditorium was a cauldron, the Tar Heel fans having not forgotten Krzyzewski’s “double-standard” comments six weeks earlier.

  Amaker and Dawkins were well prepared to handle Carolina’s run-and-jump pressure defense. Time after time they beat the trap and set up Duke baskets. On the other hand, Duke didn’t have any answers for Jordan, in large part because no one really had an answer for Jordan. He finished with twenty-five points. So did Perkins.

  At one point,
after Jordan had soared over everyone for another basket, Pete Gaudet turned to Bob Bender on the Duke bench. “It’s really not fair,” he said. “He can’t be guarded.”

  He was guarded just enough that Duke had a two-point lead with the clock dwindling in regulation after an Alarie three-point play; Carolina setting up for a tying basket. Steve Hale missed a shot from the corner and Dawkins corralled the rebound and took off, heading for the Duke basket with no one in his way. He was one on zero. This was before there was a three-point shot and before the rule had been put in place stopping the clock in the final minute of a game after a made basket. Dawkins was going to dunk the ball and Duke was going to win the game.

  Except that there was a whistle. Very smartly, Matt Doherty had grabbed Danny Meagher away from the ball. The foul had nothing to do with the play, and normally a good referee would have looked away and let the play continue.

  Hank Nichols was a good referee—one of the best ever. For some reason, at that moment, he called the foul. Instead of Dawkins going in for an uncontested dunk, Meagher went to the foul line to shoot one-and-one.

  Meagher, a 64 percent free-throw shooter, missed. After a Carolina time-out, Doherty hit a spinning off-balance jumper at the buzzer and the game went into overtime.

  Piss factor.

  It took two overtimes before the Tar Heels finally pulled away and won, 96–83. Krzyzewski wasn’t even that angry after the loss. Disappointed, sure. Upset with Nichols, absolutely. But he had seen something during the first forty-five minutes—regulation and the first overtime—that made him feel good.

  “I remember in the locker room he was clearly proud of the way we’d played,” Mark Alarie said. “Not in the sense of any sort of moral victory, coming so close to beating them in Chapel Hill, but in the sense that ‘Hey guys, we are this good.’ He remembered how one-sided the games had been the year before, and he knew that us coming close in Cameron wasn’t the same as us just about winning in Chapel Hill. We’d come a long way. He knew we were good enough to beat them.”

  Jay Bilas goes a step further. “That was the game that was really the turning point for us, not just in terms of Carolina but in where we had progressed to as opposed to where we’d been as a team and as a program. There was no doubt in our minds that we could walk on the court and look Carolina in the eye when we played them. The year before, we didn’t think we belonged on the same court with them and, being honest, we probably didn’t. After that game in Chapel Hill, we knew we could play with them.”

  In his column the next day, Keith Drum wrote that “the best team wasn’t the winning team in Carmichael Auditorium yesterday.”

  Just as in January, both coaches read Drum’s column. This time, though, only one of them was upset about it.

  —

  With the win over Duke, North Carolina finished the regular season 14–0 in ACC play. In what was a deep and balanced league, that left the Tar Heels a remarkable five games ahead of second place Maryland, which had finished 9–5. Wake Forest and Duke had tied for third at 7–7 with Georgia Tech and Virginia a game back at 6–8 and N.C. State seventh at 4–10. The Wolfpack’s record was four games worse than it had been a year earlier, but no one was expecting another miracle run as the eight teams—Clemson had finished last at 3–11—assembled in Greensboro.

  The feeling going into the tournament was that Carolina, Maryland, and Wake Forest were all locks to make the NCAA Tournament—Carolina, at 26–1, clearly, as a number-one seed. Duke, Georgia Tech, and Virginia were on the bubble, each needing at least one win to secure a bid. Duke and Georgia Tech would meet in the first round in what appeared to be an unofficial knockout game: winner shows up in the NCAA bracket on Sunday night, loser heads for the NIT.

  Most people were conceding the tournament to Carolina. It wasn’t just that the Tar Heels hadn’t lost in conference play and their only loss all season had been by one point, on the road against a ranked team with Kenny Smith not playing; it was Jordan.

  Although he had averaged “only” 19.8 points per game—which created the never-ending joke about Dean Smith being the greatest defensive coach in history because he was the only coach to ever hold Jordan to under twenty points a game—Jordan was clearly the best player in the country. NBA scouts, who loved big guys, were talking up Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon, Kentucky’s Sam Bowie, and Sam Perkins as the players to watch in the draft, but those who had watched Jordan closely knew they were looking at something truly special.

  Smith knew Jordan wasn’t coming back for his senior season. He had always counseled his players to leave if they were guaranteed to be among the top five players chosen in the draft. The only player who had ever refused this advice was Phil Ford, who had told Smith he didn’t care, he wanted to come back for his senior year. It worked out fine—Ford was the number-two pick after his senior season in the spring of 1978.

  Jordan wasn’t coming back, which was why Smith badly wanted this team to win the national championship. The Tar Heels would still be competitive the following year, but with Perkins and Doherty graduating and Jordan leaving, they wouldn’t be nearly this good. Smith had long since given up the notion of convincing anyone that Jordan was just another very good Carolina player. Even so, he still had what everyone in the Carolina family called his “Dean” moments.

  One had come in January, when Carolina had pulled away late to win a heated game with Maryland in College Park. In the final seconds, with Carolina up 72–62, Jordan made a steal and went in unmolested for a dunk. But he didn’t just dunk the ball. Wanting to send a clear message to the now-defeated Maryland fans, Jordan rose into the air, cupped the ball below his waist, and then reached his arm back as far as he could and tomahawk-slammed the ball through the hoop just before the final buzzer.

  For a split second there was silence. Then the entire building erupted; no one had ever seen a dunk quite like that one. Maryland fans were high-fiving one another because they knew they had just seen something extraordinary—and it had the bonus of not affecting the outcome of the game.

  As the jubilant Tar Heels raced to the tunnel, Eddie Fogler spotted a reporter he knew and waved him over.

  “Ever see anything like that?” Fogler asked.

  “Have you?” the reporter answered.

  Fogler shook his head. “Nope. I gave it a nine point nine.”

  He was wrong. It was an absolute ten.

  Of course Smith didn’t want to hear about it. “Spectacular” wasn’t his thing. When someone asked him about the dunk during his postgame press conference he shrugged and said, “We’ll take the two points. A layup would have been just as good.”

  The next day, when Smith saw Fogler quoted as saying he’d given the dunk a 9.9, he berated him for making it a bigger deal than it should have been. And, when Carolina fans tuned in to The Dean Smith Show that weekend, no doubt hoping to see the dunk either again or for the first time, they were disappointed. It didn’t make the highlights.

  “Why should it?” Smith said years later. “It had no effect on the outcome of the game.”

  —

  Duke barely beat Georgia Tech in the unofficial knockout game on Friday. It took an Amaker fifteen-foot jump shot late in overtime and a missed Mark Price jumper—which was a shock since Price never seemed to miss when it mattered most—to allow the Blue Devils to escape, 67–63, against another young team that was clearly on the rise.

  North Carolina had easily beaten Clemson that afternoon, setting up a third Duke-Carolina game in Saturday’s first semifinal. Beating Georgia Tech had relieved some pressure for the Blue Devils because they now knew they were in the NCAAs and because the Yellow Jackets and Bobby Cremins had now clearly established themselves as an up-and-coming threat in the ACC. Duke–Georgia Tech was rapidly becoming a very good rivalry—on the court and in recruiting.

  Even so, the Blue Devils were thrilled to get another shot at Carolina—no one more so than their coach. Before they left the locker room on Saturday afternoon, h
e delivered a stern message: “When we win the game, I don’t want to see anyone hugging or jumping up and down,” he said. “Just do what we do after any other game—walk off the court. Don’t act as if you didn’t expect to win, because I expect you to win and you should feel that way too. You’re the better team. Now go out and prove it.”

  Needless to say, proving it wasn’t easy. By now, Amaker and Dawkins were so comfortable against the run-and-jump that they were able to use it against the Tar Heels, finding Bilas and Alarie open for layups so frequently that Smith finally backed it off.

  Duke led for most of the afternoon before the inevitable Carolina rally led to a tie game with a little more than three minutes left. A noncall on what appeared to be a Meagher foul with the game tied sent Smith into a tizzy and led to a David Henderson basket that put Duke ahead for good. When Perkins’s desperation seventy-foot shot went wide left as the buzzer sounded, Duke had won, 77–75.

  “I was nervous until I saw Sam’s shot fading left,” Bilas said. “They were Dracula. You felt at times like you needed an actual wooden stake to put them away. As soon as I heard the buzzer, I started to walk off the court, just like Coach K had told us to. No celebrating because we expected to win. Then I looked at center court and there was Coach K hugging Dawkins.”

  It was true. As soon as the buzzer sounded, Krzyzewski had walked down for a brief—and uneventful—handshake with Smith and then charged Dawkins.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him,” Dawkins said, laughing at the memory thirty years later. “I think we all remembered what he said about not celebrating. He wrapped me up in this hug and I said, ‘Coach, I thought we weren’t celebrating.’ He said, ‘Aah, f—— it.’ So then we all celebrated.”

  Krzyzewski smiles when the subject comes up but doesn’t find it quite as funny as his players still do.