The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Driesell had won the tournament in his fifteenth season at Maryland. Smith’s first tournament championship had come in his sixth year. Valvano had done it in his third season. Krzyzewski was in his sixth at Duke. At that point in time, Smith had won nine ACC Tournaments. More important to Krzyzewski, Valvano and Cremins—the other two “young guns”—had already won it once. He still trailed the other two: Valvano had a national title and Cremins had taken Georgia Tech to the Elite Eight in 1985 after winning the conference tournament. This, though, was a major step in the right direction.

  Duke finished the regular season 32–2 and went to the East Regionals as the number-one seed. Georgia Tech was a number-two seed—in the Southeast Region. North Carolina was sent to the West as a number-three seed—along with Maryland as a number five—and North Carolina State went to the Midwest as a number-six seed.

  “If we had ended up with four ACC teams in the Final Four that year I wouldn’t have been shocked,” Krzyzewski said. “I thought all five teams who made the tournament had a chance.”

  Among the ACC five, only Duke made it to Dallas, and it had to survive a first-round scare against sixteenth-seeded Mississippi Valley State just to get to the second round. Maryland lost in the second round to UNLV in what turned out to be the last basketball game Len Bias ever played. North Carolina was beaten in the round of sixteen by Louisville. Georgia Tech also went out in that round, stunned by eleventh-seeded LSU in Atlanta.

  That left Duke and N.C. State still alive in the round of eight. Valvano had become the King of March by now. Going into the regional final against Kansas—in Kansas City—his NCAA Tournament record dating to 1983 was 12–1. This was the Wolfpack’s third trip to the Elite Eight in four years. Valvano would tell anyone who would listen that he had a simple formula for success: “You schedule a bunch of directional schools early [home games against weaker teams]; play a couple of TV nonconference games and hope you steal one; go 7–7 in the ACC; and you’re in the tournament. Then, once you’re there, all bets are off.”

  The winter of 1986 had gone just as Valvano drew it up: the Wolfpack was 7–7 in the ACC, 18–12 overall, plenty good enough to make the tournament. Then, once postseason began, they played their best basketball, beating Iowa, Arkansas–Little Rock (which had shocked Notre Dame), and Iowa State (which had upset Michigan) to again reach the Elite Eight.

  Valvano would admit in later years that he was on semi–cruise control as a coach at that stage of his life. Coaching had become easier for him because his fame and the popularity of the 1983 team—all seven of the core players were eminently likeable young men—had made recruiting a lot less challenging. Valvano still had all his charm and humor, but now he was also Jimmy V.

  “It wasn’t just that kids wanted to play for him,” his brother Bob said. “It was that parents wanted to hang around with him, especially the dads. They wanted to say, ‘Hey, I was having a beer with Jimmy V and he told me…’ ”

  Valvano was in a position not unlike the one Smith had found himself in: his job was to select as much as it was to recruit, because so many good players wanted to come to State every year. There was one major difference: Smith was working harder than ever because he heard Krzyzewski’s footsteps. Valvano was working very hard too—but it wasn’t always at coaching. He was all over the map, doing TV, speaking, selling blue jeans (seriously) and artwork (seriously). When he focused on coaching he was as good as anyone. But his focus was often someplace else.

  Larry Brown, who was coaching at Kansas, found that out firsthand the day before their teams played each other for a trip to the Final Four.

  “I was sitting in the holding area with my players waiting to do our press conference on Saturday,” he said. “Jimmy was going long—of course—and I could tell he was on a roll because all I could hear coming out of the room was nonstop laughter. Finally he finished and the NCAA guy came to get my guys [players] to get them on the podium.

  “Jimmy came walking through on his way out and when we shook hands he said, ‘Come over here a second, I need to talk to you, it’s important.’ I couldn’t imagine what was going on. To tell you the truth, I was kind of worried something might be wrong.

  “He says to me, ‘Listen, I’ve got a deal with this guy who does these lithographs. They’re really well done. He’s going to do one of the eight coaches in the Elite Eight. Each of us will sign a couple hundred of them and then he’s going to sell them for a lot of money. We should each make about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It’ll take you an hour or so to do it—at most.’ ”

  “Finally I jumped in and stopped him. I said, ‘Jimmy, we’re playing tomorrow to go to the Final Four. Can’t this wait?’ He looked at me like I was nuts or something, like, ‘Why should this wait?’ He started explaining to me again how easy it would be, and finally I said, ‘Jimmy, I gotta go, they’re waiting for me inside.’ ”

  Kansas won the game, 75–67, after State led deep into the second half. Valvano was disappointed because, like the year before, he believed his team was good enough to win the whole thing. Had the Wolfpack won, it would have played Duke in the national semifinals.

  “We probably would have lost to Duke anyway,” he said later. “They’d beaten us twice that year and both times I thought we should win. They were one of those teams that you looked at and said, ‘They aren’t that good,’ and then they’d beat you. By then, Mike had become a great coach. That team was the epitome of who he was. They were tough, they guarded like crazy, and they didn’t make mistakes. I was shocked when they didn’t win it all.”

  Not as shocked, in the end, as Krzyzewski.

  Valvano didn’t have time to dwell on the loss to Kansas. He was on his way to Dallas—to do TV work for NBC and a couple of speeches. The money was still pouring in. He was still winning a lot of games. And he was still searching for The Next Thing.

  21

  The Mississippi Valley State game had proven to be the toughest test Duke faced in the East Regionals. Johnny Dawkins had taken over the game in the final eight minutes and Duke had hung on for an 85–78 win. The Blue Devils beat Old Dominion easily and advanced to the Sweet 16 in the Meadowlands. There, they eased past twelfth-seeded DePaul in the regional semis, setting up an Elite Eight matchup with Navy.

  “Navy,” Krzyzewski said, laughing when the subject came up. “I’m a believer in the basketball gods and I think they have a sense of humor, but this one didn’t seem funny to me at the time. I mean, here I am one game from the Final Four for the first time in my coaching career and we’re playing Navy? I remember lying awake in bed the night before the game and thinking, ‘If I lose to Navy to go to the Final Four I will never, ever live it down. I’ll never be invited to an Army alumni function for the rest of my life.”

  Krzyzewski’s fear of losing to the Midshipmen was understandable. They were led by David Robinson, who had been recruited by Navy as a gawky, six-foot-seven-inch engineering wonk. When Navy coach Paul Evans visited his house, Robinson had no interest in talking about basketball or how he might fit in with the basketball team at the academy.

  “All he wanted to do was show me the TV set he’d built,” Evans said. “Then he explained how he had built it. I promise you I’ve never had a home visit quite like that one.”

  Robinson might have been interested in going to George Mason, which in Fairfax, Virginia, was right down the street from his home. The Patriots had a better basketball program than Navy at the time.

  “We never recruited him,” said Jack Kvancz, who was Mason’s athletic director at the time. “We didn’t think he’d be good enough to play for us.”

  Robinson eventually decided to go to Navy because his dad was a retired naval officer and he was interested in engineering. Evans was glad to have him because at six-seven he would be one of his tallest players and he thought he had potential because he could run the floor and was clearly smart enough to learn the game.

  Robinson averaged 7.6 points per game comi
ng off the bench as a freshman. That summer, he grew six inches—but lost none of his athletic skill. He became a star as a sophomore, leading Navy to a first-round upset of LSU in the NCAA Tournament. Evans had recruited some solid players by then, notably point guard Doug Wojcik and Vernon Butler, a rugged six-foot-seven-inch forward who could shoot the ball from outside and mix it up inside.

  At the end of Robinson’s sophomore season, many civilian schools tried to recruit him. At all the military academies, any student can leave before the start of his or her junior year and not pay any financial penalty for the two years of free education. When one returns it is called “Two for Seven,” because he or she is committing not only to two more years at the academy but to five years in the service after graduation.

  Robinson had become a clear-cut NBA prospect. Many schools figured he would want to leave Navy to avoid serving when he graduated. As a first-round NBA draft pick, Robinson would make millions. As an ensign in the navy, he would make $690 a month. Kentucky went so far as to tell Evans it would seriously consider him for its vacant coaching job if Robinson came along. Evans wasn’t playing that game.

  Robinson stayed and Navy was 30–4 going into the regional final. It had beaten Tulsa, Syracuse—on Syracuse’s home floor in a blowout—and Cleveland State to reach the regional final. Prior to the game, Krzyzewski gave what his players later called the greatest pregame talk of his life.

  “I want you guys to know something,” he told them in their small locker room, which was just a few yards down the hall from the Navy locker room. “There is no team in the country I respect more than that team down the hall. What they’ve done to be in this game is unbelievable. It’s almost impossible. I’d like to give every one of them a hug when the game’s over and tell them how proud I am of what they’ve accomplished because I understand it in a way none of you guys can.”

  He paused for a moment. “But let me tell you one more thing: They are Navy. I am Army. I cannot tolerate the thought of not beating Navy. I live to beat Navy.”

  One more pause. The room was deadly quiet.

  “So here’s the deal. If you do not go out there and completely and utterly kick their blue-and-gold butts, don’t even come back in here. Don’t ever think of speaking to me again. You will be dead to me—dead. I’m Army. They’re Navy. I don’t lose to Navy. And that means that you don’t lose to Navy.”

  Most of the players can repeat that speech word for word to this day. “I have never been so ready to play in my life,” Tommy Amaker said. “I can still hear those words in my head: ‘I’m Army. They’re Navy. I don’t lose to Navy.’ I’m honestly not sure if he meant it when he said he’d never speak to any of us again, but none of us wanted to take that chance.”

  Whether they were inspired—or frightened—by Krzyzewski’s talk, the Blue Devils really never let the Mids into the game. They led 34–22 at halftime and pulled away steadily in the second half to win, 71–50. The game’s signature moment came midway in the second half when Dawkins went down the lane and Wojcik decided to try to stop him. Dawkins simply jumped over Wojcik and dunked the ball.

  “Stupidest thing I ever did on a basketball court,” Wojcik said. “I had no chance.”

  It was at that point that the Duke students, sitting in the upper deck thanks to the generosity of the NCAA, began chanting, “Abandon ship!”

  The Mids went down with the ship—Robinson scored twenty-three of his team’s fifty points and declared after the game, “We played like girls.”

  Krzyzewski, who did hug all the Navy players when the game was over, would have disagreed. “They gave it everything they had,” he said. “We were just better.”

  And now, they were going to the Final Four.

  —

  Duke had been in the Final Four four times in the past—three times under Vic Bubas, once under Bill Foster. The Blue Devils would play Kansas in the second semifinal after Louisville played LSU, the surprise team in the group, in the first game.

  Duke and Kansas had played in the preseason NIT championship game in early December, and Duke had won, 92–86. But a lot had happened since then, including sophomore Danny Manning emerging as the star everyone had expected him to become when he first arrived at Kansas. Manning had grown up in Greensboro and had been the subject of an intense recruiting battle between North Carolina and N.C. State.

  But prior to his senior year, his recruiting path took a turn—west. Larry Brown had taken the Kansas job in the spring of 1983. While putting his staff together he decided to hire an old teammate from his playing days in the ABA, Ed Manning, who also just happened to be the father of the number-one rising high school senior in the country. Brown never pretended that Danny wasn’t a factor in Ed’s hiring, but he also resented people saying it was the only reason he hired him.

  “Ed was a friend for a long time, someone I could trust,” Brown said. “Did it help that he was Danny’s dad? Sure. But a lot of college coaches hired kids’ high school coaches or AAU coaches strictly as a quid pro quo. That wasn’t the case with Ed and Danny.”

  Needless to say, people in North Carolina didn’t see it that way when Danny Manning transferred to Lawrence High School for his senior year and announced soon after that he would enroll at Kansas. Brown became something of a pariah in the state where he had played college basketball, something that pained him but didn’t change the fact that he would have done the exact same thing regardless of how people in North Carolina felt about him for doing it.

  Manning was a shy, often reticent youngster who probably would have been a perfect player in Dean Smith’s system because it didn’t put the focus on one player and because he would have played for a coach who completely understood Manning’s dislike of the spotlight. Brown ran the same system, but where Smith used sarcasm to motivate, Brown used anger.

  “There were times,” Manning would admit later, “when I hated him.”

  But, like most players, Manning also learned from him. The Kansas team that showed up in Dallas was now Manning’s team, although it had other very good and experienced players in Ron Kellogg, Cedric Hunter, Calvin Thompson, and Greg Dreiling. All five Kansas starters started in all thirty-eight games—except for Kellogg, who had missed one game with a minor injury. Duke was similar: Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson, and Tommy Amaker started all thirty-nine games for Krzyzewski. Only the center position, where the starts had been split between Jay Bilas and Danny Ferry, had any volatility. The only player in either starting lineup who wasn’t a junior or a senior was Manning. Duke was 36–2; Kansas 34–3.

  It had been only eight years since Duke had played in a Final Four, but there were just two people on the Duke bench who had been part of Bill Foster’s Final Four team in 1978 who were in Dallas in 1986: trainer Max Crowder and assistant coach Bob Bender.

  Bender had been Duke’s sixth man in 1978, playing substantial minutes at the point-guard spot.

  He had graduated in 1980 shortly after Krzyzewski arrived at Duke and, after spending a couple of years working for Tom Butters as a fund-raiser, had joined Krzyzewski’s staff when Bobby Dwyer left shortly after the Virginia debacle in Atlanta.

  Bender had known Krzyzewski since his senior year of high school. In those days, anyone on a coaching staff could go out and recruit and there were no limits on the number of times a coach could see a player. Bender was a senior at Bloomington (Illinois) High School. Krzyzewski was a graduate assistant on Bob Knight’s staff and Bender was one of the players he was assigned to recruit.

  “I loved him, thought he was a great guy,” Bender said. “But my parents really loved him. They thought he was exactly the kind of person they would want me to have as one of my college coaches. He was smart, direct, and honest. Of course I never got to play for him.”

  Bender chose Indiana, but by the time he got there, Krzyzewski had been hired as the head coach at Army. Bender was part of the undefeated national championship team as a freshman, but a year later, when it became appa
rent he wasn’t going to play much as a sophomore, he transferred to Duke. There, under Bill Foster, he flourished.

  Like everyone else at Duke, Bender wasn’t shocked when Foster left in March of 1980 for South Carolina. And, like everyone else, he figured the Durham paper had it right when it said the new coach’s last name would start with a W—Wenzel, Webb, or Weltlich. And so, when Tom Butters called the apartment Bender shared with Mike Gminski and said he’d like them to come and meet the new coach—even though they wouldn’t be playing for him—Bender thought the new coach might be Bob Weltlich.

  “I knew Bob because my year at Indiana was his last year on the staff before he took the Mississippi job,” Bender said. “In fact, when I decided to transfer, that was where Coach Knight told me I should go. He was a big pecking-order guy. I knew Tom [Butters] respected Knight, and I figured if Knight was pushing him, he’d have a good chance to be the coach.”

  Knight had pushed Weltlich. But he wasn’t the new coach.

  “We were all waiting outside Tom’s office,” Bender said. “There was a mail slot in the door. I leaned down and looked through it and saw Mike standing there. I turned to everyone and said, ‘Holy shit, that’s Mike Krzyzewski. He’s hired Mike Krzyzewski.’

  “They all looked at me and said, ‘Who?’ ”

  Three years later, when Dwyer decided to leave to coach at the University of the South, Bender, who had been working as Butters’s number-one fund-raiser, went to Butters and said, “I want to coach. My dad was a coach and I think this is what I want to do.”

  Krzyzewski interviewed Bender three separate times before hiring him. “I think he wanted to be sure this was what I really wanted to do,” Bender said. “Not just something I wanted to try.”

  Bender knew he was going to work with a coach who many thought was on shaky ground. It didn’t bother him, because he believed Krzyzewski was doing the right things.