The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  The Blue Devils overcame major foul problems and another injury to Robert Brickey to get past UCLA, 90–81. Every time the Bruins seemed ready to make a move, Phil Henderson seemed to make a shot. Three years earlier, as a freshman, Henderson had played superbly in a December game in the Meadowlands against Alabama. Then he’d flunked out of school, and his future at Duke had been in serious doubt. He’d come all the way back to be a key part of the team as a junior and as a senior.

  The win over UCLA put Duke back in the Elite Eight. Standing outside the locker room after the game, Mickie Krzyzewski shook her head. “This team in the Elite Eight? This team? No way.”

  The thought that her husband’s team might beat Connecticut and go to the Final Four for the fourth time in five years never crossed her mind. No way.

  Connecticut had been one of college basketball’s best stories that season. After years of wallowing near the bottom of the Big East—so much so that many UConn supporters thought it should leave the league—the Huskies had been revived by the presence of Coach Jim Calhoun. They had won the Big East Tournament and arrived at the Meadowlands with a record of 30–5, the clear favorites to come out of the East and go to Denver for the Final Four.

  Except that they almost lost to Clemson. After leading by as many as 19 points, the Huskies missed a number of key free throws down the stretch and appeared dead when Clemson took a 70–69 lead on a three-point shot by David Young with twelve seconds to go. But UConn got one more chance after a missed Clemson free throw with one second on the clock. Scott Burrell—who was also a baseball pitcher—threw a perfect length-of-the-court pass to Tate George in the right-hand corner. With the Clemson defenders backed off so as not to foul, George managed to catch the ball, get into a shooting motion, and swish the shot. In today’s world, the officials would have gone to replay to see if he had released the ball in time, and it might not have counted. In 1990, the shot counted, and the UConn players piled on top of George in celebration.

  Two days later, George was again involved in one of the game’s critical plays. Duke and Connecticut had swayed back and forth for nearly forty-five minutes—forty minutes of regulation and almost five minutes of overtime. Abdelnaby had played the game of his life, with 27 points and 14 rebounds, but had missed a short jumper that could have won the game in regulation. Hurley hadn’t made a shot from the field—0 of 9—but had done a superb job running the offense against Connecticut’s stifling pressure defense. He had 8 assists and only 2 turnovers.

  Connecticut led 78–77 and had the ball with the shot clock and the game clock running down. With two seconds on the shot clock, Chris Smith missed a jumper and Laettner rebounded. He quickly pitched the ball to Hurley, who began pushing it upcourt with the clock winding toward five seconds. Seeing Phil Henderson on the left wing, Hurley tried to whip a pass in his direction. Henderson already had 21 points, and a last-second shot taken by him, or even a drive to the basket with UConn scrambling to get back, seemed like a good idea.

  But Hurley hadn’t seen George sneaking up on Henderson like a cornerback jumping a passing route. George stepped in front of Hurley and had his hands on the ball in full flight. Had he caught the ball cleanly, he would have been able to dribble out the clock before anyone from Duke got close to him. But he bobbled the ball. There’s a photo of Krzyzewski, standing just a few feet away in front of the Duke bench, giving a traveling signal—knowing, no doubt, that if George gained possession, an unlikely traveling call was Duke’s only chance.

  The ball bounced off of George’s hands and shoulder and went out-of-bounds—rolling into the Duke bench. There were 2.6 seconds left. Krzyzewski called time to set up a final play.

  The play he called made sense. Laettner would inbound. Abdelnaby would set a screen on the baseline, and Henderson would try to go around it and come open in the near corner. If the pass reached him, he would have time to shoot while Abdelnaby tried to get to the basket for a possible rebound or tip-in.

  But as the teams came back onto the court, Krzyzewski noticed that Laettner was unguarded. Calhoun wanted an extra defender inside the key to cut off the kind of screen that Krzyzewski was hoping would spring Henderson. Krzyzewski made a snap decision. “Run special!” he yelled at Laettner and at Brian Davis, standing a few feet away near midcourt.

  Special was a simple short-clock play. Laettner would inbound to Davis and, unguarded, cut in the direction of the key. Davis would pass it right back to him, and if all went well, Laettner would have about a second to release a shot before anyone from UConn could get close to him.

  Krzyzewski didn’t even have time to let the other three players on the court—Abdelnaby, Hurley, and Brickey—know that he’d changed the play. Which was probably a good thing since all three carried out what had been called convincingly enough that the Huskies believed the ball was going to Henderson.

  Laettner flipped the ball to Davis, left open near midcourt since he was a nonshooter. The ball came right back to Laettner and he took one dribble that got him to the foul-line extended, left of the lane. He was standing about three feet away from the spot where he had missed the free throw thirteen months earlier against Arizona, when he released the shot.

  Two Connecticut players, Nadav Henefeld and Burrell, charged at Laettner when they realized he had the ball, but they were too late. Laettner was just a little off balance, ducking to avoid Burrell when he shot, but he got it off before the buzzer and it hit the bottom of the net as the buzzer sounded. For a split second, time seemed to stand still because everyone was in shock.

  The first person to move was Krzyzewski, who went directly to the UConn bench to shake hands with Calhoun and console him. Everyone else on the Duke bench charged Laettner. One could almost hear Al McGuire’s words: “That kid will never miss another big shot.”

  Remarkably, he wasn’t done.

  25

  The consensus going into the 1990 Final Four in Denver was that this was the weakest team Mike Krzyzewski had coached into college basketball’s last weekend. Duke would play Arkansas in the opening game on Saturday and UNLV and Georgia Tech would play in the second game.

  Like Connecticut, Arkansas liked to press ninety-four feet all game long. Nolan Richardson, the Razorbacks’ coach, had labeled his team’s style “forty minutes of hell.”

  Although Bobby Hurley had done well against UConn’s press, there was ample reason to believe that Arkansas’s relentless defensive style would wear him down. That became an even bigger concern when Hurley woke up sick on the day of the game, running a fever and feeling nauseated.

  Twice he had to leave the court during the game to go back to the locker room to get sick. But he hung in and so did his team in a seesaw game. Duke led 54–43 early in the second half before Arkansas went on a 26–8 run to lead 69–62 with 10:38 to go. It looked as if the Razorbacks’ pregame boasts that they would wear Duke out were going to prove accurate. But it turned out that all of Arkansas’s “hell” had worn the Razorbacks down. They faded badly in the last ten minutes, outscored by Duke and its white-as-a-ghost point guard 37–14.

  “I guess it was more like thirty minutes of hell,” Hurley said afterward, forcing a wan smile.

  If Mickie Krzyzewski couldn’t believe this team had reached the Elite Eight, she was in complete shock that it was now in the final two. The opponent would be Nevada–Las Vegas, which had won a wildly entertaining game against Georgia Tech and Lethal Weapon Three.

  “How ironic would it be if this team finally won the national championship for Coach K,” Jay Bilas said after the semifinal games. Bilas had come back to Duke to go to law school and was working as a graduate assistant coach. “After the ACC Tournament, if you had said we were going to lose the first weekend, no one would have given you much argument. Now look at where we are.”

  There was a sense on Sunday—April Fool’s Day—that maybe the team that made the least sense as a potential national champion was going to be the Duke team that finally won the title.


  “That’s the way it works sometimes,” said Dick “Hoops” Weiss of the Philadelphia Daily News, one of college basketball’s preeminent writers. “They could have lost to St. John’s or UCLA. They probably should have lost to Connecticut and to Arkansas. But they’re still playing. I think this is Mike’s time.”

  It was Mike’s time—to get humiliated.

  UNLV won the game, 103–73. The Rebels led 47–35 at halftime before going on an 18–0 run early in the second half to turn the game into a complete rout. It was the largest margin of victory—or defeat—in championship game history.

  “We never had a chance, I mean never,” Krzyzewski said, looking back. “They swarmed us. They didn’t miss a shot. Bobby [Hurley] was still sick but that wasn’t the reason we lost. They had great players and they were experienced. And they had a great coach.”

  Jerry Tarkanian is probably remembered most for the battles he fought with the NCAA for twenty-five years. Tarkanian was to the NCAA what Bonnie and Clyde were to the FBI. He was famous for saying things you weren’t supposed to say, which infuriated his adversaries. Once, when he was asked why he had so many transfers on his team, Tarkanian shrugged and said, “Their cars are already paid for.” On another occasion, after a thousand dollars in cash had fallen from an Emery air express envelope while en route from the Kentucky basketball office to the home of a recruit’s father, Tark said, “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky it’s going to put Cleveland State on probation for another three years.”

  What got lost in the never-ending specter of Tark vs. NCAA was that Tarkanian could really coach. His teams were always disciplined and played airtight defense. “Best defensive coach I ever faced,” Georgetown’s John Thompson said once. “You can talk your ‘forty minutes of hell’ or any other kind of hell—no one coached the defensive end better than Tark.”

  Late that night, after he had said all the right things to the media and given all the credit he possibly could to UNLV and to Tarkanian, Krzyzewski sat in his hotel suite surrounded by family and a few close friends. There was no tape to look at since the season was over, so Krzyzewski sat in front of a fireplace, head in his hands, reliving the nightmare he’d seen up close a couple of hours earlier in McNichols Arena.

  His mother walked into the room and saw her son, head in hands.

  “Mike,” she said sharply.

  Krzyzewski didn’t look up. He was hoping he was asleep and it was still Sunday night.

  “Mike!” Emily Krzyzewski said again.

  “Ma!” Krzyzewski answered. “What is it?”

  “Mike, you’ll do better next year. I promise.”

  Krzyzewski picked his head up and looked at his mother, who he would learn later kept a journal on every game he had ever coached.

  “Ma, we played in the national championship game,” he said. “There’s no guarantee you’ll get that far again. There’s no guarantee you’ll ever get that far again. The only way to do better is to win the national championship. That’s really, really hard.”

  “I know it is,” Emily Krzyzewski said. “You’ll do better next year, I promise.”

  —

  Once again, Jim Valvano bailed Krzyzewski out after a bad loss—without meaning to. Five days after the championship game, with basketball people still buzzing about the rout, Valvano resigned at N.C. State. One of the first people who called him that day—not to thank him—was Krzyzewski. That didn’t surprise Valvano—Krzyzewski had been supportive of him publicly and privately since the book-jacket story had first surfaced fifteen months earlier.

  Valvano was surprised when Dean Smith called that same day. He had always gotten along with Smith, but he was still surprised by the call. “It just wasn’t Dean’s way,” Valvano said later. “I always felt he believed that if you weren’t in the Carolina family, even if he liked you, it was done at arm’s length. There was nothing arm’s length that day. I think he was genuinely upset.”

  Smith would never have admitted it, but Duke’s loss to Vegas was a huge relief. Krzyzewski had now been to four Final Fours in five years. Smith and North Carolina hadn’t been there since the national title run in 1982. The one thing that still separated the two programs and kept Carolina a stride ahead of the relentless Krzyzewski was that national title.

  There was a sense in Chapel Hill that a bullet had been dodged when Duke lost in the final. The Carolina student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, acknowledged as much when it wrote a postchampionship editorial saying that all was well again in Tar Heel world because Krzyzewski, “the rat-faced one,” as he was not so affectionately referred to, had been stopped short of a championship…again.

  Next year figured to be a better one for Carolina. The key players who had kept the program afloat and gotten the team to the Sweet 16 in 1990 would be coming back, and there was a monster recruiting class on the way. Duke would lose three seniors who had finally blossomed in their final season—Alaa Abdelnaby, Phil Henderson, and Robert Brickey—and had just one incoming freshman, Grant Hill.

  Of course Hill was another of those players who had chosen Duke over North Carolina. That recruiting loss was especially difficult for Smith to swallow because Hill had grown up admiring two teams: Georgetown and North Carolina. Duke hadn’t really been in the picture until late. Hill was the son of Yale graduate Calvin Hill and Wellesley grad Janet Hill. Calvin had played football in both Dallas and Washington. Janet was a high-powered D.C. lawyer who worked for the famous law firm Williams & Connolly.

  Their son had grown up admiring Tommy Amaker, who was seven years older than he was but had been a high school star who grew up not that far from Reston, where the Hills lived, and then a star at Duke. So he began following Duke too. While Smith and Carolina were recruiting six players from the high school class of 1990, Krzyzewski and Duke recruited only one: Hill.

  The ACC looked different in the fall of 1990. Jim Valvano, now working for ESPN/ABC, had been replaced by Les Robinson, who had been the coach at East Tennessee State. One of his assistant coaches was Buzz Peterson, Michael Jordan’s college roommate. Seeing Peterson on the N.C. State bench wearing a bright red jacket—which his boss had insisted he wear when State hosted Carolina—was a startling sight.

  Maryland was on probation that season, the result of an NCAA investigation that had led to the firing of Bob Wade—the man hired to replace Lefty Driesell in the wake of Len Bias’s death. Unlike N.C. State, Maryland was banned from TV, which meant the Terrapins couldn’t even play in the ACC Tournament, since all those games were televised. That left the ACC with a seven-team tournament, meaning the regular season champion would get a first-round bye. Virginia also had a new coach. Terry Holland had retired from coaching at the age of forty-eight because of persistent health issues. Jeff Jones, who had played on the Final Four team in 1981 and had been one of Holland’s assistants, was hired to replace him at the age of twenty-nine. He was the youngest man ever hired to coach an ACC team. Dean Smith had been thirty when he replaced Frank McGuire.

  Holland had won his final game against Duke and Krzyzewski the previous February—ending the sixteen-game losing streak that dated to the Denny’s game. On the day of that game, Matt Blundin, a backup forward for the Cavaliers, showed up at pregame shootaround sporting a crew cut. Holland told his players that if they won that night he would get a crew cut the next day.

  Virginia won, 72–69, and, amid much fanfare, Holland went to the campus barbershop. The idea took off to the point where all the campus barbers showed up at UVA’s next home game offering pre-tip-off crew cuts. About half the students in attendance lined up to get their new Terry Holland buzz cut. What made the whole crew-cut craze fascinating was it showed how big a deal it had become to beat Duke.

  The general consensus going into the season was that this would be the year that North Carolina took back control of the league. Rick Fox, Pete Chilcutt, Hubert Davis, and George Lynch all returned, along with the stellar freshman class. Duke was still good but appeared to be a year aw
ay from another Final Four run. Laettner was now clearly a star, and Hurley had been blooded by playing thirty-eight games as a freshman. Billy McCaffrey, another sophomore, would step into Henderson’s shooting guard spot, and Brian Davis, an excellent defender, would take over for Brickey. Replacing Abdelnaby would be difficult. Grant Hill would start from day one because he was too talented not to start.

  Early losses to Arkansas and Georgetown, teams Duke had beaten the previous two Marches, weren’t surprising. But when the Blue Devils opened ACC play with an 81–64 loss at Virginia, Krzyzewski threw a tantrum—a real one.

  The game had been played in the afternoon. When the bus pulled up to Cameron Indoor Stadium after the two-hours-plus ride home, Krzyzewski ordered everyone into practice gear. These days, there are rules against practicing on the same day as a game. There are coaches who get around the rule by calling a practice for 12:01 A.M. if they are angry enough about a loss.

  Krzyzewski didn’t have to wait. He put his team through a brutal two-hour practice, which culminated in Grant Hill breaking his nose.

  “He was angry, he was embarrassed, and he wanted to be one-hundred-percent certain that everyone understood that the way we’d played wasn’t acceptable,” said Amaker, who was an assistant coach at the time. “What he really wanted to get across was that we’d keep having postgame practices if we didn’t play better. He always had a thing about living up to a certain standard when it came to effort. Letting that standard slip infuriated him.”

  “Virginia was a good team,” Krzyzewski said. “But they weren’t that good.”

  If there has been one thing about Krzyzewski that amazes other coaches it is the consistent effort he gets from his players. Rarely does Duke get blown out or simply fail to show up for a game. If it happens once a year, it’s a lot.