The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “If we played ten times, they’d win nine,” Valvano said. “But we got our one at just the right time.”

  Unlike in 1983, though, when the Wolfpack was an excellent team that had hit a bump because of Dereck Whittenburg’s injury, this was still a flawed team. Paired against ole Norman’s very good Florida team in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, State went out quietly, 82–70. There were no missed free throws at the end, no miracles, no surviving and advancing. Just the end of a 20–14 season, salvaged only by three days in Landover, Maryland—which was the site of the ACC Tournament that year.

  Duke’s season ended a few days later, but—in spite of the disappointing overtime loss to State in Landover—the feeling was completely different. The Blue Devils had gone 9–5 in the ACC, finishing third behind Carolina and Clemson. They had lost both regular season meetings to the Tar Heels but had come closer than anyone to beating Carolina.

  The game in Durham had been especially frustrating to Krzyzewski because it had turned on two crucial calls made by veteran referee Paul Houseman—an official Krzyzewski liked and respected.

  “If I missed either one,” Houseman said while Krzyzewski was barking at him about the second call, “I’ll buy you a Coke.”

  “I don’t want a f——ing Coke,” Krzyzewski answered. “I want to win the f——ing game.”

  He didn’t. Before he went in to talk to the media, Krzyzewski went to his office, which back then was only a few yards from the media room, to look at replays of the two calls. “Go to the officials’ locker room,” he told one of his managers, “and tell Houseman I said he owes me two f——ing Cokes.”

  By then, the Duke-Carolina rivalry and the Smith-Krzyzewski rivalry had truly been joined. Smith was still the King, the icon, but the Prince of Durham had made inroads. The Ferry recruitment had been one step, and now the two coaches were both recruiting a talented big man from outside Buffalo named Christian Laettner. There was also a guard from New Jersey named Bobby Hurley, who was only a sophomore, but already drawing attention. Smith was still winning more than his share of recruiting battles: Krzyzewski would have loved to have been able to get Jeff Lebo, and J. R. Reid had been the most sought-after big man in the country. But Smith was no longer a lock to get everyone he wanted, even though, by his own admission, he was making the extra phone calls.

  With the four seniors from the 1986 team gone, Danny Ferry had emerged as a star. Amaker was still the glue, but Ferry, Billy King, Quin Snyder, and Kevin Strickland were now stepping into major roles. Only Amaker was a senior. Duke made the NCAA field easily and opened with wins over Texas A&M and Xavier, putting it into the round of sixteen against Indiana—the number-one seed in the Midwest Region and a heavy favorite to make the Final Four for the first time since 1981.

  Knight and Krzyzewski were still close at the time. In fact, Knight had spent the entire weekend in Dallas the previous spring wearing a “Go Duke” button on his sweater. Neither man wanted to face the other even though the matchup was made in heaven for the media. The entire week became a teacher-pupil lovefest.

  There was far more pressure on Knight and Indiana to win than on Duke and Krzyzewski. By reaching the Sweet 16, Duke was playing with house money. Indiana had been ranked number one for a good portion of the season. Steve Alford and Daryl Thomas were the team’s senior leaders, and Knight, who had started recruiting junior college players a year earlier, had added two good ones—Keith Smart and Dean Garrett—to what was already a talented, experienced team.

  Duke stayed in the game all night, cutting the gap to two at 78–76 with three minutes left. But Alford hit a key shot and the Hoosiers made their free throws down the stretch to win, 88–82. They would go on to win the national championship—Knight’s third.

  Knight said all the right things about Krzyzewski and Duke after the game. He talked about how proud he was of Krzyzewski and the program he’d built at Duke, emphasizing that the game had been between “two teams that do things the right way, with good kids who graduate.”

  Krzyzewski was happy with all the bouquets being thrown in his direction but couldn’t help but wonder how Knight might have handled a loss. “I’m not sure he would have been able to be quite as gracious,” he said.

  It would be several years before he learned just how prescient he had been.

  —

  As it turned out, the fall of 1987 was not an especially happy time for Dean Smith. On October 15, the first day of practice, Smith got a phone call from the police in Scott Williams’s hometown in California. Both of Williams’s parents had died that day. His father had shot and killed his mother in the family’s garage and then killed himself.

  It was Smith who had to deliver the news to Williams, who was about to start his sophomore season. Many years later, Smith still wasn’t comfortable talking about that day. “My only concern was for Scott at that point,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that, of all the things I’ve ever done as a coach, giving him that news was the most difficult. There was very little I could say to comfort him other than telling him we would all be there for him.”

  Not long after the Williams tragedy, Smith began to experience nosebleeds. He thought perhaps it was stress and went to see his doctor. The doctor told him stress might be involved, but the real issue was his smoking. All the nicotine he had inhaled had affected his nasal passages. He had to stop smoking—period.

  Smith did, but it wasn’t easy. He began popping Nicorette constantly and never stopped. In 2009, he sat behind his desk one afternoon during a lengthy interview, reaching into his pocket for Nicorette again and again. “There’s not a day that goes by,” he said, “that I don’t want to smoke a cigarette. And it’s been almost twenty-two years.”

  Carolina would go on that winter to win another ACC regular season title. North Carolina State finished second and Duke finished third. Oddly, N.C. State beat Duke twice in the regular season, North Carolina beat N.C. State twice, and Duke beat Carolina twice. It was the first time since 1980, Bill Foster’s last season, that Duke had beaten Carolina twice in a season and the first time since 1966 that Duke had swept both regular season games with the Tar Heels.

  The Blue Devils went on to beat both State and Carolina in the ACC Tournament, finally slowing the freshman guard duo of Corchiani and Monroe just enough to get a 73–71 win over the Wolfpack. By then, Duke’s signature move on defense had become for all five players to slap the floor to show their unity on an important defensive possession. Valvano loved to make fun of the floor slap, pointing out that he had told Monroe that the floor slap was actually a signal for him to make a three-point shot. Krzyzewski was well aware of how often Monroe had burned his team in the two regular season meetings.

  “I was beginning to think that half of State’s highlight film was going to be Rodney Monroe making threes in the clutch against us,” he said after the ACC semifinal victory. “I suspect I’ll still have nightmares about it even after today.”

  The next day Duke beat North Carolina for the third time—again matching the 1966 team, Vic Bubas’s last Final Four team. That year, the two teams had met in the semifinals and Smith had decided to play stall-ball, slowing the game to a walk. With less than a minute to go, the Tar Heels led 20–19 and Duke called time-out to try to set up a last shot.

  Larry Brown was an assistant to Smith at the time. He still remembers the time-out vividly. “Coach Smith wanted to foul Jim Liccardo,” he said. “He wasn’t a very good foul shooter, and it would have been one-and-one. His theory was, even if he made both, which he didn’t think he would, we’d have the ball and get the last shot. Donnie [Walsh] and I talked him out of it. We told him we’d played great defense all night and we should just dig in and not give them a good shot.”

  Brown smiled. “Of course Mike Lewis hit a runner at the buzzer and they won, twenty-one to twenty. Coach Smith never said a word, never said, ‘I was right.’ Nothing. Duke beat State the next night and went to the Final Four and ended up p
laying Utah in the consolation game the same night Texas Western beat Kentucky in Cole Field House. Coach Smith and I were sitting in the stands watching the consolation game. Duke was up two with about ten seconds to go and Utah fouled Liccardo. His free throw was about two feet short and a foot to the left. Coach Smith leaned over and said very softly, ‘Told you.’ ”

  Smith was smiling when he said it, but Brown knew, in his boss’s mind he’d learned a lesson. “The lesson was to always trust his gut,” Brown said. “Because it was almost never wrong.”

  In those days, only one ACC team could go to the NCAA Tournament. In 1988, five of the eight teams went: Duke, UNC, N.C. State, Maryland, and Georgia Tech. Only Duke and North Carolina made it out of the first weekend—a shock to Valvano. State had been the number-three seed in the Midwest, the highest seed one of his teams had ever received.

  “I blew it,” he said later. “We were too good in the regular season.”

  The Wolfpack lost in the first round to Murray State, which was probably underseeded at number fourteen. The Racers lost to Kansas—the team that would go on to win the national championship—in overtime two days later. Valvano couldn’t even put up an “almost” banner in Reynolds Coliseum.

  Smith could have, since his team reached the Elite Eight. The Tar Heels were seeded number two in the West behind Arizona, a team led by national player-of-the-year candidate Sean Elliott and point guard Steve Kerr. The two teams made it to the regional final in Seattle. During that season, Duke’s Billy King and North Carolina’s Steve Bucknall had both been candidates for the national defensive player-of-the-year award. Elliott had torched King in a Christmas tournament played in Tucson, and King had admitted afterward that Elliott had won the battle.

  “Maybe I’ll get another crack at him in March,” he said. “Tonight, though, he shot me down.”

  Bucknall was slightly hobbled going into the regional final. In fact, an hour before tip-off, Smith was insisting to a reporter that Bucknall wouldn’t start, might not play at all. The reporter had been around Smith long enough to know when his leg was being pulled by the cat-and-mouse coach.

  “He’ll start,” the reporter said.

  “Don’t think so,” Smith answered. “It’s up to the trainer, not me.”

  “Betcha a dollar he starts,” the reporter said.

  “Deal,” Smith said.

  When Bucknall was introduced as one of Carolina’s starters, Smith caught the reporter’s eye from across the court and waved a dollar bill in surrender.

  Unfortunately for Smith, that wasn’t his most important loss of the day. Arizona pulled away for a 70–52 victory, and Elliott was named the Most Outstanding Player of the regional.

  “It helps when they call a foul every time someone touches you,” Bucknall said after the game, implying that the officials protected Elliott.

  When Elliott was informed of Bucknall’s comments, he smiled. “At least,” he said, “Billy King took it like a man.”

  —

  King also took it like a man a week later in Kansas City when Kansas’s Milt Newton shot him down in the Final Four. Duke had played Temple, the number-one seed in the East—and the number-one-ranked team in the country—in the East Region final. Temple was a veteran team with a great freshman guard named Mark Macon, who had been tearing defenses apart for most of the winter.

  At six foot six, King had guarded point guards and centers and everyone in between. He was as superb a defensive player as he was awful on offense. Krzyzewski assigned him to Macon, knowing if Macon could be slowed, the Owls could be stopped.

  The game didn’t start well for Duke. Temple jumped to an 11–2 lead, and Krzyzewski got into it with longtime referee Jim Bain and got teed up. Bain had a history with Duke. In the 1978 NCAA championship game he had teed Bill Foster up from across the court when Foster got up and gave the traveling signal after Bain had missed a clear travel committed by Kentucky’s Truman Claytor.

  Krzyzewski’s technical was one of the last bad moments for Duke that day. King completely shut Macon down. Coach John Chaney wanted Macon to keep shooting and he did. By the time the game was over Macon had shot 6 of 29, and 8 of the misses had been air balls. Duke pulled away to win, 63–53, reaching the Final Four for the second time in three seasons. King scored 4 points but was, without question, the game’s MVP.

  A week later, Milt Newton, a senior, did what Macon couldn’t do. He waited for the right moments to shoot and scored 20 points, which was all the help Danny Manning (25 points) needed to get even for the Final Four loss two years earlier. Kansas won, 66–59, then stunned Oklahoma to win the national title two nights later.

  Krzyzewski was disappointed by the way his team had played against Kansas. Every time the Blue Devils seemed ready to make a run, they missed an open shot or took a bad one. Even so, winning a second ACC Tournament and making it to a second Final Four was proof that the 1986 team hadn’t just been a one-shot wonder.

  “By then it was pretty apparent that Mike wasn’t going anywhere for a while,” Roy Williams remembered. “He had weathered that early storm, and he was regularly getting very good players into his program. I don’t think we were worried—we still had very good players too and we had Coach Smith. But we were aware of his presence. We’d always thought he was the threat over the long haul. Now we knew we’d been right.”

  Krzyzewski and Valvano had now been in the league for eight seasons. Although Valvano still had wanderlust, most people figured that he and Krzyzewski and Smith would continue to produce teams that had a chance to compete nationally every year for a long time to come.

  They were two-thirds right.

  23

  To put it into police parlance, the incident began on the morning of January 7, 1989.

  It was a Saturday morning in Raleigh, and Jim Valvano woke up to find a story in The News & Observer about a book called Personal Fouls that was supposed to be published the following month. The N&O had acquired a copy of the book’s jacket and it appeared to be explosive. According to the jacket, the N.C. State basketball program had run amok in recent years. The book promised to deliver evidence of numerous NCAA violations, academic issues, and a coach who simply wasn’t paying attention.

  What was most disturbing to Valvano was that he knew there was at least some truth in the book jacket. He knew he and his staff had probably taken too many academic question marks and that he had been distracted since the national championship. Word quickly began to spread that the book’s main source was a former State manager named John Simonds, Jr. At the same time it became apparent that Simonds had been paid to be an informant, since he had approached at least two other writers asking for money in return for information. He had finally settled on Peter Golenbock, a well-known author who had specialized in the past in baseball books.

  Valvano was beside himself when it became apparent that Simonds was the book’s main source. “Son of a bitch,” he said one afternoon in his office, looking at a team photo that included Simonds. “I let my [youngest] daughter sit on his lap. I trusted him. I don’t know what the f—— he’s claiming went on here, but I guarantee you most of it is made up. Even if we were doing the things he’s claiming, how the hell would he know about it? He was a goddamn manager!”

  State beat Temple on the day the story broke, to up its record to 9–1. Each day, though, it seemed the drumbeats grew louder. The following week came word that Sports Illustrated had a copy of the book’s manuscript and was planning to run an excerpt from it. For the first time in his life, Valvano didn’t want to see people or talk to people. After the Wolfpack had routed Coastal Carolina five days after the book-jacket story broke, Valvano stood in the basement of Reynolds Coliseum for his usual postgame session with the media.

  There was no sign of his usual humor, none of his one-liners. Instead he talked bitterly about the lessons he had learned about the media during the previous five days and how disappointed he was in the herd mentality he thought he was witnessing.


  A week later, prior to State traveling to Chapel Hill to play North Carolina in a game that was being televised by NBC, Valvano sat slumped at his desk, his body language that of a beaten man. Just prior to the release of the book jacket, he had taped a new recruiting video that he thought was the best one he had ever done. It ended, as always, with Valvano’s signature line to recruits: “Dream the dream…at N.C. State.”

  As the on-tape Valvano walked off into the darkness, the real Valvano stood up at his desk. There were tears in his eyes. “Is this the way the dream dies?” he asked rhetorically. “John F——ing Simonds kills the dream forever?”

  He stood up and walked out of the room.

  Two days later, State lost a very good game at North Carolina, 84–81. But there was little talk when Valvano met with the media about the game. Most of the questions were about Simonds, who had been interviewed (on tape) at halftime by NBC. Simonds refused to answer questions about whether he had been paid but alleged that he had access to information about the team because he was close friends with many of the players.

  Remarkably, even with the controversy swirling, State had its best regular season in Valvano’s ten years. The Wolfpack won the regular season title, going 10–4, meaning it was an NCAA Tournament lock going into the ACC Tournament. It was a classic case of a team being able to use an “us against the world” mentality to play well.

  In February, Simon & Schuster, which had been scheduled to publish the book, announced that it had decided not to publish it because there were issues with Golenbock’s sourcing—specifically Simonds. There were other issues since the book was based almost entirely on anonymous sources. When a number of State players from the 1987 season—which was the focus of the book—came out and said they had never spoken to Golenbock, the author said that he had told players whom he had interviewed that they should deny that they had spoken to him.