The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “There were people who said to me, ‘You better be ready to look for another job next year,’ ” Bender remembered. “I knew what the deal was, but I looked at the four freshmen who had started the year before and I knew we were going to be better.”

  The faith had paid off, and three years later, as Bender and Pete Gaudet sat down on the bench as the teams lined up for the opening tip, Bender felt Gaudet elbowing him softly.

  “Look behind you and to your right,” Gaudet said, indicating the area in the stands where college basketball’s most prominent coaches were seated. “Dean Smith is there. So’s Bob Knight. You know what they’re doing right now? They’re watching us in the Final Four.”

  Gaudet, whose only college coaching experience prior to coming to Duke had been at Army, was just a little bit in awe of where the program had come since he and Bender had joined the staff.

  “I always told Mike that Bob and I turned it around for him,” Gaudet said, laughing, many years later after he had retired from coaching. “Of course I conceded that the players he’d recruited might have had a little to do with it too.”

  For the next two hours those players were involved in one of the better Final Four games anyone in Reunion Arena had seen.

  Kansas blew to an 11–2 lead, and Krzyzewski, remembering something Knight had told him—“Don’t be afraid to call an early time-out if you need it”—did so. Duke calmed down, and the game became one of those wars of attrition where every possession feels as if it is the one that will decide the game.

  Alarie might have played the greatest defensive game of his career. He held Manning to four points on 2-of-9 shooting, consistently denying him the chance to set up in the places he was most comfortable shooting from. “I can’t remember ever being quite so exhausted and drained after a game,” Alarie said. Remembering how hard he had worked to “hold” Len Bias to forty-one points earlier in the season, Alarie shook his head. “Manning was very good. Bias was, well, Bias.”

  Dawkins scored 24 points, but it was Ferry, chipping in 8 critical points off the bench, who came up with the offensive rebound and putback that decided the game in the final minute. Duke hung on to win, 71–67, meaning it would meet Louisville, which had won against LSU with relative ease, in the championship game.

  The two teams also met—sort of—on Sunday, an afternoon that began to set a tone for Krzyzewski’s program that would linger for many years.

  —

  College basketball’s national championship game has been played on a Monday night since 1973. NBC took a chance on moving the game from Saturday afternoon to prime time, hoping to take advantage of the UCLA dynasty. The Bruins were on their way to winning a seventh straight national championship that year, and they didn’t let the network down. Bill Walton produced one of the great performances in college basketball history, shooting 21 of 22 from the field (the miss was an attempted tip-in) on his way to 44 points as UCLA routed Memphis State.

  Forty-three years later, college basketball people refer to “Monday Night” as if it were a holiday—which it is—the highest holy day of the year in the sport. Every coach aspires to coach at least once in his life on Monday Night.

  Part of playing on Monday Night is dealing with Sunday afternoon. That’s the time when the two teams that will play in the championship game meet with the media for ninety grueling minutes apiece. First, the coaches and the five starters sit up on a dais and take questions. Then, the coach stays on the dais while the players are taken to separate rooms for what are called “breakdown sessions.” Often a star might have two hundred reporters in his breakdown session, while the fifth starter who averages six points and four rebounds a game might have three—or fewer—in the room with him.

  Louisville went first on Sunday afternoon in 1986 because it had played in the first game. Coach Denny Crum had been through this once before, in 1980, when the Cardinals had beaten UCLA in the national championship game. His players hadn’t seen anything quite like it. Most of their answers were brief, sometimes halting. As with many—if not most—college athletes, there were a lot of “you knows” in their answers. Nothing unusual.

  Then came Duke. This was their first time on this stage too—for all, including their coach. But there were two things that made them different from Louisville: Four were seniors, one a junior (Louisville’s best player, Pervis Ellison, was a freshman). And, having played in the ACC, they were constantly exposed to the media. In fact, the ACC had very specific rules about media access that made it a given that players from all teams would be exposed to the media from day one and game one of their careers.

  “After what we’d gone through as freshmen and even the next couple of years, this was easy,” David Henderson remembered. “We were having fun.”

  “Why wouldn’t you have fun?” Jay Bilas said. “We were playing for the national championship. We’d won thirty-seven games after winning eleven when we were freshmen. It was a joy ride.”

  And so, for the first half of the media session, the five Duke players entertained the media. They were bright, confident, and articulate. And funny. When someone asked the players if they aspired to play in the NBA—two of them, Dawkins and Alarie, would be first-round draft picks and Henderson would also play in the league—Bilas was the first to respond.

  “I’d give my left arm to play in the NBA,” he said. “But last I looked there isn’t a lot of call for one-armed players in that league.”

  It went on that way for forty-five minutes. Most of the media were charmed by the Duke players and found their candor and humor refreshing. But not everyone.

  Standing in the back of the room, Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News decided he’d had enough. “What are they, the Cosby kids?” he said, referencing what was then the number-one-rated TV show in the country. “Are we all supposed to love them because they’re from a rich kids’ school?”

  Lupica is a columnist who has always worn his biases on his sleeve. He and Larry Brown were close friends—they had run together the previous morning prior to the game. Lupica was convinced that Kansas had been jobbed by the officials at the end of the game, and he was venting.

  Charlie Pierce, then of the Boston Herald-American, had no such biases. But he didn’t like the Duke kids’ act either. “White America’s team,” he said. “So they speak in complete sentences. I’m supposed to like them more because of that?”

  Neither Pierce nor Lupica was shy about sharing his feelings with others in the room. Only a handful bought in that day, but it was the beginning of a trend in the media’s reporting about Duke that’s never really gone away. The “white America’s team” label really rankled Krzyzewski, especially since Louisville had one white starter in the room that day and his team had two.

  “I’m supposed to apologize because our kids sounded smart?” he said. “I’m supposed to feel bad because all five of those kids got degrees in four years and have gone on to be very successful? I’m not going to sit in judgment of anyone else’s players because I don’t know them as people. But I’m not going to apologize for my players coming across as smart and appealing. If people are bothered by that then they have a problem.”

  True or not, fair or not, the label stuck. Duke has had a lot of very good white players in the last twenty-five years, among them Bilas, Alarie, Ferry, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner, Mike Dunleavy, J. J. Redick, and Kyle Singler. But it has also had plenty of African American stars, including Amaker, Dawkins, and Henderson from the ’86 team and players like Billy King, Robert Brickey, Alaa Abdelnaby, Grant Hill, Thomas Hill, Elton Brand, Chris Carrawell, Shane Battier, Jason Williams, Carlos Boozer, Chris Duhon, Shelden Williams, Nolan Smith, and the one-and-dones Kyrie Irving (a number-one NBA draft pick who played all of eleven games as a Duke freshman), Jabari Parker, and Jahlil Okafor.

  That’s a lot of African American players for white America’s team. But people latched on to the easy stereotype because Duke was winning a lot and they were looking for a reaso
n not to like Krzyzewski and not to like Duke. Pierce and Lupica helped launched the myth that Sunday afternoon in Dallas.

  —

  Louisville won the national championship the next night, beating Duke 72–69. Ellison was the star, scoring 25 points and pulling down 11 rebounds. CBS’s Jim Nantz wondered in the postgame if America had just witnessed the beginning of the “era of Never-Nervous Pervis.” Ellison never played as well again in the next three years as he played that night.

  Duke’s biggest problem on that Monday Night was Kansas. The draining game with the Jayhawks had left the team tired, specifically Alarie and Henderson. They had spent most of forty minutes on Saturday chasing Manning and Ron Kellogg, and they both had tired legs. They struggled to shoot throughout the night, and, more than anything, that proved to be the difference.

  “It was my fault,” Krzyzewski said. “I had never been in that situation before, and I didn’t do enough to keep them fresh. The next time we went through something like that, I was better prepared, but that night I didn’t completely understand that I needed to get them more rest both before the game and during the game.”

  Dawkins, who finished with 24 points, and Amaker, who had 11 points, 7 assists, and 7 steals, almost saved the Blue Devils. In fact, Duke had a 68–65 lead with a little more than two minutes left when Louisville point guard Milt Wagner drove the baseline. Bilas came over to take a charge and appeared to arrive before Wagner—who had four fouls. Referee Pete Pavia didn’t see it that way. He called Bilas for a block.

  “I thought I was there, but I’m a bit of a biased observer,” Bilas said with a wry smile many years later, the play still clear in his mind’s eye. “If it goes the other way, Wagner’s out of the game and we’ve got the ball with a three-point lead.”

  Instead, Wagner stayed in the game and made two free throws to cut the margin to one. The game came down to a possession in the final minute with Louisville leading 70–69. The Cardinals ran the shot clock down but couldn’t get a good shot as it wound to zero. Finally, Jeff Hall launched an air ball that was so short that it went right to Ellison, who was boxed out by Bilas but in perfect position to grab the woefully short shot.

  This was the first year of the forty-five-second clock, and the rule then was that the shot simply had to be launched before the shot-clock buzzer went off. Under today’s rules, where the ball must hit the rim, Louisville would have been guilty of a violation. But in 1986, Ellison grabbed the ball and laid it in for the clinching basket—it was also the last season without a three-point shot—before Bilas or any of the other Blue Devils could move.

  It was a crushing loss, not only because the national championship was at stake but because the Duke players believed they were better than Louisville. Still, as Valvano might have said, the L was an L, and nothing could change that. To this day, when the final buzzer sounds in the national title game, Bilas doesn’t watch the winners celebrate—he watches the losers.

  “I know exactly how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking at that moment,” he said. “You move on in life, we all do, but that’s not something you ever completely get over.”

  Bilas was an assistant coach when Duke won the national championship five years later. So was Amaker. In 2001, Dawkins was on the staff when Krzyzewski won his third national title. All enjoyed cutting down the nets and being a part of a national championship team. All say the same thing about those victories: “It was nice, but it couldn’t compare to how it would have felt to win one as a player.”

  Krzyzewski understands that and, for all his subsequent successes, still broods about that night in Dallas. “I’ll always feel as if I let those guys down,” he said. “I learned some lessons that night that I was able to use later. But it couldn’t bring that night back.”

  Because an L is always an L.

  22

  During one of the Final Four press conferences in Dallas, Mike Krzyzewski had talked about how much it meant to him to have made it to the final weekend of the college basketball season. “You never know if you’ll get here again,” he said. “We’ve got four great seniors on this team. But you never know. Maybe Tommy [Amaker] will average thirty-five a game next season and we’ll get back.”

  Amaker didn’t average 35 a game the following season, but Duke got a lot closer to the Final Four than anyone—including perhaps Krzyzewski—might have expected.

  “In a lot of ways that season might have been the most important one in his career,” Keith Drum said about the 1986–87 season. “Most people thought that Duke would be a one-shot wonder, that once those seniors were gone, they’d back up and that Carolina and State would continue as top programs. Winning twenty-four games and going to the Sweet Sixteen that next season was a big deal. It showed people that Duke wasn’t going away.”

  In fact, when the great Al McGuire had come to town prior to the ’86 Final Four to tape a piece for his Final Four special on NBC, he had urged Krzyzewski to enjoy the coming week because it might never happen again.

  “He came to the house one night and said, ‘What you’ve done this year is special,’ ” Krzyzewski remembered. “He told me to enjoy it because it was really hard to do it twice, especially at a place like Duke.”

  North Carolina was back on top of the ACC that next season, going 14–0 for the second time in four years, led by a backcourt of Kenny Smith and Jeff Lebo and a frontcourt of senior big men Dave Popson and Joe Wolf and freshmen big men J. R. Reid and Scott Williams. N.C. State had lost Chris Washburn to the NBA but still had Charles Shackleford and Vinny Del Negro. Even so, the Wolfpack had a tough regular season, going just 17–13 and finishing 6–8 and in sixth place in the ACC—one game shy of Valvano’s stated goal of 7–7 in conference play.

  Valvano had become State’s athletic director in 1986 after Willis Casey retired. He took the job in part because he didn’t want to take a chance on State hiring someone he didn’t like. He also took it because the school’s other coaches pleaded with him to do it—for similar reasons. “I might be the devil,” Valvano joked, “but at least I’m a devil they know.” The last reason he took the job was probably the most important—and the worst reason to do so: he was bored, still in search of the Next Thing.

  His sense of humor hadn’t changed even a little bit. In the summer of 1986, he got his first look at the Dean Dome. State hadn’t played there the previous winter because it had played the last game in Carmichael. On a hot July morning, Valvano walked inside to scout the National Sports Festival, an annual event that featured top high school athletes. It was taking place in Chapel Hill that summer, with the basketball games being played in the Dean Dome.

  Valvano walked in, looked around at all the seats and then at the rafters. There is no building in college basketball with more banners hanging in it than the Dean Dome. There are national championship banners, Final Four banners, ACC Tournament championship banners, ACC regular season championship banners, NCAA Tournament banners, NIT banners, and “honored”—not retired—numbers. It appears that about half the players who ever put on a Carolina uniform are “honored.”

  Valvano looked at all the banners and pointed at one that said “ACC Champions” in huge letters.

  “What’s that writing at the bottom?” he asked. “I can’t read it.”

  The writing at the bottom said “Regular Season Tie.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Valvano said. “They tie for a regular season title and they put up a banner?”

  When this was confirmed, Valvano smiled. “Okay, now I’ve figured out what I’m going to do. I’m going to put up a banner for 1985 that says ‘National Champions!’ Then at the bottom, in tiny little letters, I’ll put ‘almost.’ After that, I’ll do the same thing for 1986. Damn, I just won my third national championship…almost.”

  For all the humor and the “almost” national championships, those around Valvano knew he wasn’t especially happy with his life. In fact, when stories coming out of New York reported that the
New York Knicks were interested in hiring him to coach, Keith Drum suggested Valvano take the job and keep coaching at N.C. State.

  Pam Valvano was concerned when her husband took the AD’s job. “It just felt like too much,” she said. “The [basketball] team was still winning, but he was pushing himself too hard, trying to be in three places at once all the time. I knew him well enough to know that he was going to try to be the best AD he could be. That was going to take time—more time than he really had.”

  Valvano was still a master recruiter but, because he was involved in so many other things, he often left the hard part of recruiting—scouting—to his assistant coaches. He didn’t get to know the players as well as he had in the past. “I’m the closer now,” he said after State had gotten commitments from Chris Corchiani and Rodney Monroe, two superb guards, in the fall of 1986. “They [the assistants] set things up for me and I come in and close the deal.”

  The system worked fine except for the fact that some of the players Valvano was closing on were, to put it kindly, questionable students. Chris Washburn’s presence at State had raised eyebrows, but it had been overlooked by many because he was too good a player to say no to if he wanted to come. But when other players with questionable academic records who weren’t as good as Washburn began showing up, the ice began to get thinner.

  “The worst thing I did,” Valvano said in 1989 after the NCAA had come to town to investigate allegations against the program, “was not pay enough attention. We didn’t break rules; we didn’t cheat. But I didn’t pay enough attention.”

  Even in 1987, after a mediocre regular season, Valvano and State were able to get their act together in the ACC Tournament. They were the number-six seed, and, much like in 1983, they went into the tournament knowing they had to win three games or face the purgatory of the NIT.

  On opening night, State beat Duke in overtime. The next afternoon, they beat Wake Forest (which had pulled an upset the first night, beating number-two-seeded Clemson) again in overtime—double overtime. And, on Sunday, facing a North Carolina team that was 29–2 and had beaten the Wolfpack by 18 and by 17 in the regular season, Valvano slowed the pace, his team played a perfect game, and they pulled off the shocker of the season, 68–67. Carolina had scored 96 points in each of the regular season meetings when State tried to play up tempo. Valvano turned the tables by playing walk-it-up basketball all afternoon.