The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  The game was played at Villanova’s pace: slow, slower, slowest. Senior point guard Gary McLain was able to handle Carolina’s pressure, and in college basketball’s final season without a shot clock, the Wildcats milked the game clock throughout. Carolina had played thirty-four games to that point and had scored fewer than 60 points on three occasions. On that Sunday afternoon in Birmingham, they managed to score 44. Villanova broke open a tight game late, made all its free throws in the final minute, and won, 56–44. In the last thirty seconds, with the game no longer in doubt, Smith ordered his players to back off and not foul. That allowed Massimino, his coaches, and his players, to drink in what they had just accomplished as the seconds ticked down to zero.

  “That’s a memory I’ll never, ever forget,” Massimino said years later. “To stand there and look around the arena and realize we were going to the Final Four; to be able to hug my son [R.C., a Villanova walk-on that year] and just drink it all in. I’ll be forever grateful to Dean for backing off that way. A lot of coaches wouldn’t have done that.”

  Even though a loss, especially in a game he believed his team was good enough to win, always left Smith despondent—and, as Keith Drum could attest, often angry—he believed it was important to be gracious in defeat. This was certainly one of those occasions.

  The 1984–85 season was best described by Bill Guthridge as he sat on a chair outside the locker room that day: “Great year, terrible ending,” he said. “One of those days at the worst possible time.”

  Three Big East teams made it to Lexington and the Final Four that spring. Villanova beat Memphis in the first semifinal and then shocked Georgetown in the championship game, shooting an otherworldly 79 percent from the field in one of the most memorable championship game upsets in history. It ranked right up there with N.C. State’s win over Houston two years earlier.

  Seven years after the championship made him an almost godlike figure in Philadelphia, Massimino fled Villanova for, of all places, Nevada–Las Vegas. To those who followed college basketball, the irony was inescapable: two years earlier, also seven years after becoming an iconic figure, Jim Valvano had left N.C. State.

  The circumstances were entirely different except for one thing: the change of life brought on by the championship and the newfound stardom were impossible to resist—and to overcome.

  20

  On the morning after Villanova’s remarkable victory over Georgetown, Danny Ferry announced where he was planning to go to college. The choice was Duke. This was a major breakthrough for Mike Krzyzewski because, for the first time, he’d won a head-to-head recruiting battle with Dean Smith. For Smith, it was a loss, but hardly a crippling one. Not only did he have Brad Daugherty returning, but Carolina was clearly the leader for both J. R. Reid and Scott Williams, who were considered to be among the best big men—or, in the case of Reid, the best big man—in the high school class of 1986.

  Even so, Ferry’s decision got people’s attention.

  “For a long time, Carolina seemed to have the market cornered on the ‘great player, good student’ market,” Valvano said several years later. “The Dawkins class was a huge breakthrough for Mike. But Dean didn’t go after any of those kids. Usually, when Dean wanted a kid like that, he got him.”

  Even Smith, who rarely talked about recruiting or in any serious way about having any sort of rivalry with another coach, admitted several years later that Ferry’s decision got his attention.

  “By then he [Krzyzewski] had it going,” he said. “When Danny went there I remember saying to myself, ‘Time to make some extra phone calls.’ ” As in phone calls to recruits, their families, and their coaches. Smith had always made the calls that Eddie Fogler and Roy Williams asked him to make, but it was not his favorite sport.

  “Sometimes he would say, ‘Is this really important?’ ” Williams remembered. “If I said it was or Eddie said it was, he did it without asking any other questions. But we tried to ask him to make those calls only when we knew it was necessary.”

  The requests from Fogler and Williams became more frequent. Sometimes, Smith didn’t need to be asked.

  Ferry had grown up as a North Carolina fan and, for a long time, dreamed of playing for Smith and the Tar Heels. But Krzyzewski changed his mind. “In the end, he was the reason for my decision,” Ferry said. “I was bowled over by his intensity and by the clarity of his plan for the program and for me as part of the program.

  “There were other factors: I liked the idea that I’d be playing with a group of really good seniors for a year and then, after that, there would be big opportunities for me after I’d had a year to learn. Plus, I loved the idea of playing on the same team as Johnny Dawkins. I’d played against him when I was a freshman and he wasn’t just a really good player, he was cool. The way he played, the way he was as a person was cool. I loved that about him then.” He paused. “I love that about him now. He’s still cool.”

  Morgan Wootten never asked a player where he was going or even where he was leaning. He wanted to be able to tell college coaches that he had no idea where a player was thinking about going and to be telling the truth when he did so. In fact, as he and Ferry walked across the gym floor at DeMatha to the press conference for Ferry to make his announcement, Ferry asked him if he wanted to know where he was going to college.

  “I’ll find out here soon enough, Danny,” Wootten said. “I’m fine.”

  But he had a feeling that he already knew. “Once Danny said it wasn’t going to be Maryland, I just had a sense that he liked Mike a lot. It wasn’t that he didn’t like or respect Dean, I just felt a connection there. As it turned out, I guess I was right.”

  Lefty Driesell had pulled out every trick he had in his playbook to try to get Ferry. When Ferry made his official visit to Maryland, Driesell sent a helicopter for him. Ferry’s house was a twenty-five-minute drive from Maryland’s campus. Lefty sent the helicopter anyway—to no avail.

  —

  It can be argued that the 1985–86 ACC was the deepest league in the history of college basketball. Three teams—North Carolina, Georgia Tech, and Duke—took turns being ranked number one in the country throughout the regular season. North Carolina State, with Chris Washburn eligible and playing center, was probably a half tick, if that, behind the top three. Virginia had a big-time frontcourt led by Olden Polynice and the onetime would-be Duke recruit Tom Sheehey plus a plethora of guards who could shoot. And Maryland also had a solid backcourt and Len Bias, who had become virtually unguardable, as Mark Alarie would learn during the course of the winter.

  North Carolina opened its new basketball palace on January 18. From the moment the announcement was made that the building would be called the Dean E. Smith Center, it was dubbed the “Dean Dome” by everyone in the ACC. Only those who worked for the school ever referred to it as the Smith Center.

  The man for whom the building was named never referenced it that way, but he did notice the bust of him in the main lobby. Walking past it one afternoon, he stopped and pointed it out to a visitor. Not the bust—the writing on it.

  “Look,” he said. “It says, ‘Dean E. Smith, 1931 to.’ ” He laughed. “I guess they’re just waiting to fill in the second date.”

  Years later, when the building was renovated and the bust was moved to a spot right outside the basketball offices, the writing was removed. Apparently Smith had pointed it out to enough people that it had been decided there was no need for any writing at all.

  The opening game in the Dean Dome was—not coincidentally—against Duke. Construction delays had pushed back the opening. Originally the plan had been to open the season and the building with a game against UCLA on November 24. When it became apparent that the Dome wouldn’t be ready for the UCLA game, the decision was made to not rush the finishing touches and to open it in January against Duke.

  The game would have been hyped under any circumstances. As luck—or the basketball gods, as Krzyzewski often liked to say—would have it, Carolina was
17–0 and ranked number one in the country and Duke was 16–0 and ranked number three. The media was calling it one of the biggest regular season games in college basketball history. Smith, naturally, didn’t want to hear it.

  “Every conference game is a big game,” he said. “Of course the pressure’s on us since we’re playing at home.”

  Krzyzewski didn’t mind the hype at all. “It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t belong in the same sentence with Carolina,” he said. “This is exactly the kind of game we wanted to be good enough to play in. I just hope we are good enough to play in it.”

  They were good enough to play in it—but not good enough to win it. Both teams loved playing up tempo, and there was little need for the forty-five-second clock that had been introduced to college basketball at the start of the season.

  The building was electric from the start and both coaches were clearly wired. Smith certainly didn’t want his team’s unbeaten skein to end against Duke and Krzyzewski in a building newly christened in his name. Krzyzewski wanted nothing more than to ruin Carolina’s opening-day party.

  Late in the first half, Krzyzewski got into it with referee David Dodge, believing that the entire officiating crew was falling prey to the “double-standard” syndrome. Unlike two years earlier in Durham, it had nothing to do with Smith’s bench decorum. It had strictly to do with the way the calls were going.

  Dodge didn’t want to hear it. Krzyzewski continued to let him hear it. Dodge teed him up. Krzyzewski got angrier. Dodge teed him up again. Back then, it took three technicals to get a coach ejected—it is two now—so Krzyzewski wasn’t thrown out of the game. His assistants came to the rescue and got him away from Dodge before he could get technical number three.

  Carolina led the entire afternoon, but Duke never went away. The final was 95–92. Carolina ended up extending its record to 21–0 before losing at Virginia. Duke had to play at Georgia Tech three nights later and lost to the Yellow Jackets, 87–80. That would be the Blue Devils’ last loss for more than two months. Even so, years later, Krzyzewski still hadn’t completely gotten over the loss in the Dean Dome opener.

  “We could have won if we’d played a little better and if we’d gotten a couple more calls,” he said, smiling. “Just a couple. I believed then that, one way or the other, we weren’t going to be allowed to win that game. I don’t think there was any conspiracy at all. I just think it was a very tough game to officiate. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the refs that day.” He shook his head. “Of course being the visiting coach that day wasn’t easy either.”

  There were very few easy games for anyone in the ACC that winter. A little more than a month after Duke failed to get a win in the Dean Dome, Maryland did—in overtime. Len Bias stole the ball from Steve Hale at midcourt and went in for a dunk to tie the game in the final seconds, and Maryland went on to win 77–72 in overtime. It was one of the rare nights in which Maryland coach Lefty Driesell won a tight game against Smith.

  Just as Krzyzewski carried some angst from the Dean Dome opener with him for years, Smith did the same with his team’s first loss in the building. Years later, when the subject of that game came up, Smith shook his head and said, “You know, I was looking at the tape of that game this summer [this was in 1997, eleven years after the game] and Bias double-dribbled on the play where he stole the ball from Hale.”

  When it was pointed out to Smith that it had been eleven years since the game had been played and that Len Bias had been dead for almost as long, Smith nodded. “I know that,” he said. “But lots of dead men have double-dribbled.”

  He wasn’t smiling when he said it.

  Several years later, when Smith had retired from coaching, he traveled with North Carolina to Maui for the annual pre-Thanksgiving tournament played there. Hank Nichols, who had been one of the referees in the 1986 game, was having dinner at Roy’s, one of the better-known spots on the island. When he saw Smith walking in, he went over to say hello and introduced him to the woman he was going out with at the time, his wife having passed away a couple of years earlier.

  “I introduced her to Dean,” Nichols said. “He looked at her, smiled, said it was very nice to meet her, and then said, ‘You know you’re with someone who missed a key double-dribble call twenty years ago.’ ”

  Elephants—and coaches—never forget.

  —

  The Duke team that Danny Ferry joined had come a long way since the humiliation in Atlanta in 1983. Not only had the Blue Devils reached back-to-back NCAA Tournaments, they had started the season by winning the first preseason NIT, becoming the first Duke team to ever win a national tournament of any kind.

  They were, to paraphrase the Blues Brothers, on a mission from Krzyzewski. The four freshman starters of 1983—Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas, and David Henderson—were now senior starters. Tommy Amaker, the only nonsenior starter, had become everything Krzyzewski believed he could be when he had first seen him that night in the Jelleff League. There was also depth: Ferry and fellow freshman Quin Snyder and two talented sophomores, Kevin Strickland and Billy King, a lockdown defender.

  The entire league was filled with the kind of experience that no one in today’s basketball world would even dream about having. North Carolina’s seniors were Brad Daugherty (who would be the number-one pick in the NBA draft) and Steve Hale; Georgia Tech’s seniors were John Salley, who would be taken with the eleventh pick in the draft; and Mark Price, who would be picked twenty-fifth and go on to be an All-Star. Maryland had Len Bias, who would be the number-two pick in the NBA draft in June and would die tragically that night from a cocaine overdose. N.C. State didn’t have the senior experience of some of the other teams, but it did have Chris Washburn, who, after one year of college play, would be the number-three pick in the NBA draft. Dawkins and Alarie (number ten and number eighteen) would also be first-round picks.

  In short, this was a loaded league.

  “I’m not sure there’s ever been a league that was as experienced, as talented, or as deep as the ACC was in eighty-six,” Krzyzewski said. “It wasn’t just that there were a lot of guys who would go on and be very good NBA players or high draft picks, it was the league was old. There were very few teams starting freshmen or sophomores. Danny Ferry was a very good basketball player, even as a freshman, but he didn’t start for us. The top teams were all that way.”

  When the dust cleared, the team sitting on top of the league was Duke. In 1985, the Blue Devils had hosted Carolina in the last game of the regular season with a chance to tie for the conference title. They hadn’t handled the pressure that day and had gone from a tie for first to a tie for fourth. A year later, with the five seniors—Weldon Williams was the fifth—facing their last home game, the circumstances were similar. If Duke won, it would finish 12–2 and win the regular season conference title outright, something Duke hadn’t done since 1966. If Carolina won, there would be a three-way tie at 11–3 among Georgia Tech, Duke, and the Tar Heels.

  “We didn’t want to lose our last home game, and we especially didn’t want to lose it to Carolina,” Mark Alarie said. “In a lot of ways, that game felt like a culmination of our four years, especially given where we had been as freshmen. We felt like we could have won the game in Chapel Hill in January and didn’t. We had to win this game.”

  Jay Bilas, Alarie’s close friend then, as now, agreed. “We did a lot of very good things that year,” he said. “Winning the conference tournament, getting to the Final Four. I’m not sure there was a more memorable day than that last home game against Carolina. It was as if this was the way it was supposed to happen: all of us celebrating on the court after winning the conference title.”

  It’s also a fond memory for Krzyzewski. “It was the first accomplishment we’d had that was a season-long thing. Beating Carolina in the ACC Tournament in eighty-four was important; winning the preseason NIT was a big deal; and getting back into the NCAAs was a big deal too. But we went twelve and two in a loaded league and we
beat the team that had been on top forever to win that title.” He smiled. “And Dean always said the regular season title was more important than the tournament. I know he wanted to share first place and to keep us from winning it by ourselves. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t matter too.”

  Not that Krzyzewski wanted to bask in the victory for very long. In fact, the next afternoon as the team began preparation for the ACC Tournament, he threw the team out of practice en masse. They hadn’t practiced badly or been flat, but Krzyzewski had decided beforehand, as he occasionally did, to throw them out regardless.

  “Sometimes you do it just to make a point that this isn’t a time to relax,” he said.

  The players knew that. They knew the “tantrum” was premeditated. They had seen it before.

  “Remember, we were a very experienced team,” Bilas said. “We knew the drill. But we also knew exactly why he did it. He was making a point. I think we got the point.”

  —

  The following Sunday, they won the ACC Tournament, surviving a riveting game against Georgia Tech. After Tech’s Craig Neal had missed a jump shot with nine seconds left and Duke leading 66–65, Johnny Dawkins coolly (of course) made two free throws to clinch the win. Tech’s last basket—there was no three-point shot—made the final 68–67.

  The tournament victory was, for Krzyzewski, cathartic. He understood what winning the regular season meant, but the tournament was hugely symbolic and important for any ACC coach. Lefty Driesell, who had lost the championship game five times before winning it in 1984, admitted that afternoon that he’d lost many hours of sleep over not having taken the trophy home—without putting it on the hood of his car—even though he had won the regular season title on two occasions.

  That same day, when Mickie Krzyzewski had congratulated Joyce Driesell on her husband’s victory, Joyce had said to her, “I just hope you don’t have to wait as long as we did.”