“It was a moment I loved and one I cherish, because that was a great Carolina team and beating them, especially in the ACC Tournament, was a huge step for that team and that group of kids,” he said. “But, looking back, it was a learning experience for me as a coach. I made a mistake. I reacted emotionally because it was a big win, but we had another game to play the next day. We ended up running out of gas because it did feel like we had won the tournament or something very important at that moment. If I’d handled it differently, we might have beaten Maryland the next day.”
Seven years later, when Duke pulled off one of the biggest upsets in college basketball history by beating a 34–0 Nevada–Las Vegas team in the national semifinals, Krzyzewski raced onto the court at the final buzzer with his palms pointed to the ground, screaming, “Calm down, calm down!” even as his players were starting to hug one another.
“What I learned from eighty-four is that you never celebrate when there’s another game to play,” he said. “After that Vegas game, we still had to beat Kansas to win the national championship. If we had lost to Kansas, the win over Vegas would have been hollow. We all make mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them.”
That afternoon, very few people from Duke thought it was possible to celebrate too much. Some Duke fans were so ecstatic about the win that they had bumper stickers made up that said simply: Duke—77, North Carolina—75, March 10, 1984.
Krzyzewski wasn’t thrilled when he saw them. “You don’t build a program based on beating one team—any team,” he said. “You get bumper stickers made up for winning a championship, not for winning one game.”
While Krzyzewski was still hugging Dawkins and his teammates, Dean Smith stalked down the steps to the hallway area just outside his locker room and lit a postgame cigarette. He was angry about the outcome, angry about losing to Duke and Krzyzewski. He was still angry about the whole “double-standard” imbroglio. Standing there, he spotted Keith Drum coming down the steps heading to the interview-room area, which was down the hall from the Carolina locker room.
Tossing his cigarette, Smith walked across the hall and cut Drum off. Hand extended, he said, “Congratulations. I’m sure you’re very proud of the way your team played today.”
Smith was still seething from the “better team lost” column that Drum had written a week earlier and from his refusal to take a clear stand against Krzyzewski—as most columnists in the state had done—after the “double-standard” game. Drum had gone to the University of North Carolina. In Smith’s mind, his “siding” with Krzyzewski in any way, shape, or form was a betrayal. Sarcasm was almost always the way he showed his anger—whether in person or in practice or during a game.
“He never raised his voice or used profanity in practice,” Buzz Peterson remembered. “But he could cut you down in a second. I might take a shot and he’d blow the whistle and say, ‘Tell me, Buzz, how good a shot do you think that was? Was it the best shot we could have gotten right there? Let’s ask your teammates what they think: Anyone think that was the best possible shot we could have gotten?’ And you’d stand there wishing a hole would open in the court and swallow you up.”
Often the sarcasm came in response to someone not playing as hard as Smith thought he should be playing. “He’d say, ‘Eddie, is that as hard as you can go after a loose ball?’ ” Eddie Fogler said. “ ‘Are you okay? Do you need a rest?’ There was never any doubt about the message he was sending.”
Now Smith was standing in front of Drum, smiling, hand extended, clearly sending him a message.
“That was Dean,” Drum said. “If you knew him, you knew that was just him being hypercompetitive. I’ve never met a great coach who wasn’t. The difference was Dean tried to sound as if he wasn’t being that way when, in fact, there was never anyone alive more competitive than he was.” Drum smiled. “Only guy I ever knew well who was as competitive was Krzyzewski. Which probably explains a lot about their relationship.”
Indeed.
18
The 1983–84 season didn’t end especially well for any of the teams in the Triangle.
North Carolina State’s season fell apart midway through February. The Wolfpack was cruising along at 19–7 and appeared to be—at worst—an NCAA Tournament bubble team, just as it had been a year earlier. Given the departure of Sidney Lowe, Dereck Whittenburg, and Thurl Bailey, making it back to the tournament would have been a major achievement.
Two losses, one not at all surprising, the other stunning, turned the season around. On February 18, State was pummeled 95–71 in Chapel Hill. This surprised no one, least of all Valvano, since the Tar Heels were pummeling just about everyone at that point.
“They were as good a college basketball team as I’d seen since the Wooden [UCLA] teams,” Valvano said years later. “I think the only person more shocked that they didn’t win the national championship than me was Dean.”
Five nights later, Duke came to Raleigh and won, 73–70, in overtime.
“That was the loss we never got over that year,” Tom Abatemarco said. “By then, we knew they were good and we didn’t expect to win easily anymore. But we did expect to win.”
As it turned out, State didn’t win again for the rest of the season. It lost in the first round of the ACC Tournament to Maryland and then sleepwalked through a 74–71 first-round NIT loss to Florida State. That was the team’s seventh straight loss, and it was pretty apparent that no one, including the head coach, had any interest in playing in the NIT.
“We’d won the whole thing a year earlier,” Valvano said. “At that point in my life did I have any interest in cutting down the last net in the NIT? Did any of our guys? Of course not. The only thing that would have been worse than losing to Florida State would have been winning and having to play another game.”
Once a team and a coach have tasted the NCAA Tournament—much less won it—playing in the NIT is very difficult. For smaller schools, it can still be a big deal. But if you are from the ACC or one of the other major conferences, it is a place you go only after a lost season. A year after Valvano made his only NIT appearance as a coach, Bob Knight and Indiana played in the NIT after Knight’s worst season ever in the Big Ten. The Hoosiers were 7–11 in league play during a winter lowlighted by Knight’s infamous chair throw.
Somehow, the Hoosiers pulled together to make it to the NIT final—perhaps because in those days coaches were allowed to make their team practice until the Final Four was played, and Knight’s players preferred playing games to facing Knight in practice day after day with no games to break up the anger and the monotony.
After Indiana had beaten Tennessee in the semifinals, Bill Raftery asked Knight during a postgame TV interview what he liked most about his team at that point in the season.
“The fact that I only have to watch it play once more,” Knight said without a hint of a smile.
Watching that interview, Valvano, never a fan of Knight’s, could relate. He was more than happy to pack up the basketballs after the Florida State game. As had been the case two years earlier, he had his three best players—Lorenzo Charles, Terry Gannon, and Cozell McQueen—coming back as seniors, and he was going to add Chris Washburn, the most highly touted big man to come out of high school since Ralph Sampson.
Valvano didn’t enjoy losing seven straight games to end the season, but he looked at it as a blip. He was right. His next five teams all made the NCAA Tournament.
—
It turned out that Krzyzewski’s on-court celebration after the win over North Carolina was his last chance to enjoy a win that season. Duke lost to Maryland in the championship game the next day when the Blue Devils wore down midway through the second half after building an eight-point lead and Len Bias, voted the tournament MVP, ran amok in the final eight minutes.
“The guy was the closest thing to Jordan I ever saw in a college game,” Mark Alarie said. “He jumped so high and shot it so softly he was almost impossible to stop.”
Two years later, when
Duke had a truly great team and Alarie and Bias were both seniors, Maryland came in to play at Duke. Krzyzewski knew how good (great) Bias was, but he was also stubborn about not double-teaming anyone unless he had absolutely no choice.
“We don’t double-team at Duke,” he said, stalking into the locker room prior to the game. He looked directly at Alarie and Jay Bilas. “Which one of you is guarding Bias? Which one of you is up to the challenge?”
Alarie pointed at Bilas. Bilas pointed at Alarie.
“It ended up being me,” Alarie said. “Jay had put on a lot of muscle in the off-season and wasn’t as quick as he’d been, so I got Bias. It might have been the best defensive game I’ve ever played. I was all over him, never lost him on a switch, contested every shot. We won the game because our other four were a lot better than their other four, but I was really proud of the way I kept him under control.
“We got in the locker room and I grabbed a box to see what I’d held him to.” Alarie paused and smiled. “He only got forty-one.”
Bias “only” got 32 in the ’84 ACC championship game, but that was enough for Maryland to pull away and win, 74–62.
Maryland’s win meant that, in his fifteenth season, Lefty Driesell had finally won an ACC championship after losing the title game five times. It also led to one of the most widely misquoted lines in basketball history. Speaking to the media after the game with the championship trophy right next to him at the lectern, Driesell said, “When I was younger, I’d’a probably taken this trophy, attached it to the hood of my car, and driven all around North Carolina, pulled into every driveway, honked my horn, and said, ‘Come on out and look what I got.’
“Now, though, I’m too old for that. I’m just gonna take it home and get some rest.”
To this day, Driesell is still quoted as saying he was going to take the trophy and attach it to the hood of his car.
Krzyzewski had no trophy to take home or put on the hood of his car. Instead, he and his team were sent to Pullman, Washington, for the second round of the NCAA Tournament after receiving a first-round bye. It was hardly an ideal draw because their opponent was the University of Washington. Even though Duke was the higher-seeded team, it had to play on what amounted to a home court for the Huskies because so many of their fans could drive to the game. Durham is a long drive—2,097 miles—from Pullman. Seattle wasn’t exactly around the corner—284 miles—but Washington had fans across the state.
Duke ended up losing, 80–78, the game ending when Johnny Dawkins caught what looked like a perfect alley-oop pass from Tommy Amaker and appeared to get undercut as he tried to control the ball and put it in the basket.
“Appeared to get undercut?” Dawkins said thirty years later, smiling but still clearly not over it yet. “Go back and look at the tape. These days, it would have been two shots and the ball.”
In those days, in Pullman, it was no shots and a long plane flight home. Even so, a corner had clearly been turned. Duke finished 24–10, winning more games than it had won in the previous two seasons combined. The win over North Carolina and the return to the NCAA Tournament after a four-year absence calmed the waters in Durham considerably.
“The angry letters stopped,” Butters said. “It wasn’t as if people were writing to say, ‘Okay, Tom, you got it right,’ but at least they weren’t saying I was a complete idiot anymore.”
One place where they had never thought Butters was a complete idiot was in the basketball offices located on the concourse level of Carmichael Auditorium. Dean Smith and his staff had always believed Krzyzewski could coach but had wondered if he’d be able to survive those first rocky years.
“We always knew Jimmy [Valvano] was a threat but we also wondered how long he’d stay or want to stay, especially after he won the championship,” Roy Williams said. “With Mike, once he had turned that corner in eighty-four, we were pretty sure he was going to be around for the long haul. He was always the bigger threat if only because we always recruited against Duke and rarely recruited against State.
“Coach Smith knew how good he was. But there’s also no doubt that the whole ‘double-standard’ thing really set a tone for their relationship that never completely went away as long as they were coaching against one another. Some of the hostility was inevitable because of who they were and the setting they were coaching in against one another. But at that point, there’s no doubt it got to be a little bit personal.” Williams smiled. “Probably a little more than a little bit.”
No one from Carolina was worried about Krzyzewski or about double standards when the Tar Heels traveled to Atlanta to play Indiana in the East Region semifinals after a relatively easy second-round win over Temple in Charlotte the previous Saturday.
No one believed that Indiana was any kind of a serious threat in the round of sixteen. Bob Knight had probably done one of his better coaching jobs getting that far into the tournament. His team was built around Uwe Blab, the seven-foot-three German who had been a part of Duke’s lost recruiting class of 1981, and Steve Alford, a freshman guard who could catch-and-shoot about as well as anyone in the country but, at six foot one, with little ability to create his own shot, appeared to be eminently guardable.
No one was more convinced about that than Knight. On the afternoon of the game, after the team’s pregame meal, he pulled Alford aside for a rare game-day one-on-one talk. Knight usually reserved his private meetings with players for practice days. He made an exception because he believed this was an exceptional situation.
“If Dean is smart tonight, he’s going to put [Michael] Jordan on you man-to-man the whole game and you’ll never touch the ball,” Knight told Alford. “But I think he’s going to stick to his system because he thinks they’re so much better than us, it doesn’t matter.” What Knight didn’t say to Alford at that moment was that he agreed with Smith—Carolina was almost certainly much better than Indiana.
Then he continued. “What that means, Steve, is they’re going to trap the ball and double-team all over the place. Which means you should get open shots all night.” He looked Alford in the eye. “If I’m right about that, you better make those shots.”
Knight was right. Carolina came out in the run-and-jump, and Indiana, which had practiced against the run-and-jump for four straight days, was ready for it. Alford did get open shots. And, even though he wasn’t guarding Alford, Jordan picked up two fouls in the game’s first eight minutes and was consigned to the bench for the rest of the first half.
If there was ever a game in which Knight should have considered a zone defense, it was on that March evening in Atlanta’s Omni—a building that no longer exists. He stuck to his man-to-man, assigning six-foot-five-inch junior Dan Dakich to guard Jordan. Dakich, who is now one of ESPN’s lead college basketball analysts, was a hard-nosed, blue-collar kid from Merrillville, Indiana, which isn’t far from Chicago and is a suburb—for lack of a better term—of Gary, Indiana. He was slow, he couldn’t jump, and he wasn’t much of a shooter. He was also fearless—and funny.
When he was asked after the game what his first thought was when Knight had told him he would be guarding Jordan, Dakich said, “I went to my room and threw up.” That was true—he’d been sick and had made the mistake of thinking he could eat his way out of his nausea with spaghetti. Dakich’s understanding of dietary matters was always questionable. A couple of years later, when he was a graduate assistant coach at Indiana, Dakich and a friend decided to go on a diet by having lunch every day at a Chinese restaurant in Bloomington that served an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Dakich told the media he’d thrown up at the thought of guarding Jordan for one reason: “I thought this was the only chance I’d ever have to make [Sports Illustrated’s] ‘They Said It,’ ” he admitted years later. “I was right.”
Jordan actually scored the first four points of the game, and Dakich, doing some quick math in his head after Jordan’s second basket, realized that if that pace continued the final score would be Jordan: 160, Indiana: 0.
“I figured I needed to start doing better.”
Helped by Jordan’s absence the last twelve minutes of the first half, both Dakich and the Hoosiers got much better. Indiana led at halftime, 32–28. That was hardly reason for Carolina to panic: they were only down 4 even though Jordan had been on the bench.
Indiana’s view of the first half was simple: we can play with these guys. Stew Robinson, a sophomore guard, was having the game of his career, consistently breaking Carolina’s pressure to score 14 points and set up Alford and the other Indiana shooters. Dakich picked up his fourth foul early in the second half, but Knight left him in the game, figuring he was smart enough to know how to play effectively with four fouls.
Indiana began pulling away, stretching the lead at one point to 61–48. Alford would finish the game 9 of 13 from the field, consistently getting open shots against the Carolina pressure. He was also 9 of 10 from the foul line, finishing with 27 points. After making his first two shots, Jordan was 4 of 14 the rest of the night and ended up scoring 13 points in what turned out to be his last college game. Carolina made a late run—aided by Indiana missing a slew of free throws—but never got even. Indiana won, 72–68, in one of the more shocking upsets in college basketball history.
The loss stunned the Tar Heels—from Smith down. In the locker room, Matt Doherty, who had also played his last college game, shook his head in disbelief. “That number eleven [Dakich] is someone I’m not sure would get picked by anyone in a schoolyard game,” he said. “I’m still not sure how he was able to guard Michael.”
Through the years, there have been numerous jokes made about the fact that it was Smith, by choosing to bench Jordan for those twelve first-half minutes, who stopped Jordan. But Jordan played eighteen minutes in the second half and never got going. Dakich had plenty of help from his teammates because Indiana’s man-to-man defense has a lot of zone principles in it, but he was the one who faced up to Jordan each time he caught the ball.
The Legends Club Page 22
