The Legends Club
Page 33
“That season was probably the first time that Jim and I started to have long talks,” Krzyzewski said. “He’d come in for a game and we’d sit down for a while before practice, after practice—whenever.” He smiled. “He really didn’t need me to tell him much about my team. He knew my team. That left plenty of time to talk about a lot of nonbasketball stuff. It became something I really looked forward to.”
Each man saw a side of the other that he hadn’t realized existed. Like most people, Krzyzewski had been exposed only to the showman Valvano. Now, along with the humor, he saw the more serious side: the father who wondered if he was spending enough time with his girls; the voracious reader who had strong opinions on everything from world politics to parking problems at the North Carolina State Fair.
“I’ve never been a reader,” Krzyzewski said. “I think if I was a kid now, I’d probably be diagnosed with ADD. I just have trouble staying with things unless they’re basketball related or something I really have to try to figure out. Jimmy knew something about everything. I learned a lot just listening to him back then.”
Valvano hadn’t realized how funny Krzyzewski could be. It occurred to him that while Krzyzewski didn’t have Valvano’s natural instincts as a performer, he had a quick, dry sense of humor and had a great memory—important for a good storyteller. “You should do more speaking,” Valvano said. “Maybe it doesn’t come as naturally to you as it does to me, but you’d be good at it if you tried. You’re smart, you’re funny, and you can tell a good story.”
Krzyzewski waved Valvano off at first. He had followed him enough times on media days to know he wasn’t in Valvano’s league as a speaker. “But then it occurred to me that no one was in Jimmy’s league as a speaker,” he said. “I didn’t have to be Jimmy to be good.”
It wasn’t as if the two men became close at that point. They didn’t usually go out to dinner or share the names of favorite wines with each other. But they began to see each other in a different light—each saw the other beyond what he had seen when they were competitors.
Deep down, Krzyzewski was still bothered by the one hole in his coaching résumé prior to Indianapolis. That was apparent when Mickie Krzyzewski became indignant when she was asked after the Kansas game if it felt good to finally have the national championship monkey off her husband’s back.
“There never was a monkey,” she insisted. “Mike didn’t have to prove himself to anyone.”
The irony in that comment is that the one person Mike probably had to prove himself to before that night was Mike. Coaches—especially great ones—are almost insistent that winning a national championship doesn’t make or break them, that they don’t lose sleep about it.
Dean Smith and Gary Williams had almost exactly the same reaction—word for word—after winning the national championship for the first time: “I don’t think I’m a better coach now than I was two hours ago.”
Perhaps not, but you are a different coach—one who never again has to deal with answering the questions about winning a national title. Your legacy is different and you know that—even if you don’t want to concede the point. About an hour after Duke had beaten Kansas to win the national title, ESPN’s John Saunders half-jokingly asked Krzyzewski on camera how it felt to have equaled ESPN’s Jim Valvano in national championships. Krzyzewski didn’t even crack a smile.
“I never felt like my career took a backseat to Jim Valvano’s,” he said.
“I almost felt like ducking,” Saunders said. “I wasn’t trying to hit any kind of nerve, I was actually trying to get a funny answer on the way out. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Krzyzewski’s life changed radically after Duke won the championship. He was already visible—going to five Final Fours in six years, regardless of whether you won, would do that. But winning—and upsetting what had been billed one of the great teams of all time along the way—took him to another level. The speaking requests began to pour in. So did a lot of other demands.
Both Krzyzewskis—Mike and Mickie—had believed the change of life after the title would be moderate. “We’ll handle it,” Mickie said. “As long as we’re the same people, nothing needs to change.”
Except that it did. Unlike Valvano, whose life goals changed after he had cut down the final net, Krzyzewski still wanted to coach and wanted to win and wanted to win a second title. Only Greg Koubek and Clay Buckley were graduating. No one left early for the NBA in those days. Two young big men, Cherokee Parks and Erik Meek, would bring depth—especially Parks, another coveted recruit Krzyzewski had managed to secure even though Parks knew that, as a freshman, he wouldn’t play a lot of minutes behind Laettner.
While Krzyzewski was digging in to chase another title, Valvano was enjoying life as a TV star. And he was a star. From the beginning, whether he was working in the studio or doing games, Valvano brought insight and laughter to every telecast he did. He was instantly popular with the people he was working with. About the only person not thrilled with Valvano’s presence was Dick Vitale.
Vitale and Valvano had always gotten along, and Vitale had always called Valvano one of his “paisans” when he did N.C. State games. But, in spite of his extraordinary success, Vitale—by his own admission—has always been convinced that he’s going to get the “ziggy”—his term for firing—from ESPN at any moment. That was never going to happen: Vitale was wildly popular. But the presence of Valvano—and his unique TV skills—made Vitale nervous.
No one was more aware of this than Valvano. He knew all about Vitale’s insecurities. Even so, there was occasionally tension between the two when they were on set together.
“Jim knew how to press Dick’s buttons,” said Saunders, who was usually the ringmaster of the “Killer V’s” circus. “Dick would get wound up, and sometimes, he’d hit Jimmy—you know, a playful type of jab. But he was wound up so he’d hit him harder than he meant. We’d go to break and Jimmy would say, ‘Don’t hit me. Don’t touch me.’ Dick really didn’t know how to take it.”
Once, when the three of them worked a game in the Hoosier Dome, Saunders threw it down to the V’s at courtside during the pregame. Vitale was so fired up about the game that at one point he kissed Valvano. “Jim said, dead serious, ‘I didn’t sign on to this job to be kissed.’ It was fall-down funny, but he also meant it.”
“It made for good television, actually,” Bob Valvano said. “Jim would jab at Dick a little and Dick almost always took the bait. I think people liked it. Jim enjoyed it more often than not. The funny thing is he had no desire to unseat Dick or be Dick. He was very happy doing the games he did and leaving it at that. He had no desire to do forty or fifty games a year. For one thing, going to that many games he wasn’t really involved in would have gotten to him eventually.”
No one was happier with the change of life than Pam Valvano. It wasn’t as if Jim was never on the road, but now it was only for part of the year and the pressures were entirely different.
“I was much happier as an announcer’s wife than as a coach’s wife,” she said. “There were no losses. There weren’t any wins either, but you have to remember, wins didn’t linger—losses did. He wasn’t as frenetic. And there was an actual off-season. There was no recruiting, no losing sleep over whether a meeting with an eighteen-year-old had gone well. It was a completely different life.”
One of the people Valvano became close to very quickly at ESPN was Saunders. They were often paired together both in the studio and on the road doing games. Saunders’s father had died young, and even though he was only nine years younger than Valvano, he found a father figure or, at the very least, a big-brother figure in Valvano.
“He was always fun to be with—everyone who was ever with him would tell you that,” Saunders said. “But when you started talking about things that were serious or important, no one was better. I cherish those couple of years. I learned so much. Jim was one of those people who would share anything with a friend: time, money if you needed it, thoughts, emotions. He hel
d nothing back. I looked forward to every week of the basketball season.”
Valvano’s star continued to rise even as State’s basketball program began to flounder. State had made the NCAA Tournament in Les Robinson’s first season as Valvano’s successor, but once Rodney Monroe and Chris Corchiani left, things went downhill quickly. The Wolfpack was 12–18 in 1992 and finished below .500 five straight seasons.
Because Florida State had joined the conference for the 1991–92 season, the ACC Tournament had added a play-in game between the eighth- and ninth-place finishers. State played in that game under Robinson for four straight years, from 1993 to 1996. The play-in became known as “the Les Robinson game.” In 1996, when the Wolfpack beat Florida State in the play-in game, Robinson joked afterward, “If a game is named in your honor, you should be able to win it.”
Valvano’s second year on TV was very much like his first year. He continued to be extremely popular with the viewers, with his bosses, and with his colleagues. And, just like his first year, it was Duke that cut down the final net.
The second championship was entirely different from the first. Duke was picked number one in preseason and had become college basketball’s most polarizing team. The Blue Devils were the heavyweights now, favored to win every game, expected to win every game easily. Laettner and Hurley were at the center of all the emotions directed at the team. They were the two best players and they were white. Even though the other three starters—Grant and Thomas Hill and Brian Davis—were African Americans, Duke was again labeled by many as “white America’s team.”
Much of the invective directed at them came from white people—moneyed fans and students at other schools who could accept the notion that an African American was a great player but didn’t want to deal with the notion that two baby-faced white kids could kick their team’s butt.
Many assumed that Laettner, with his boyish good looks, was a rich kid: in fact, his parents were both printers at the Buffalo Evening News. Hurley was the son of Bob Hurley, one of the best high school coaches in the country. Bob Hurley, Sr., coached at St. Anthony’s, a tiny Catholic school in Jersey City, New Jersey. For most of his coaching career he supplemented his income by working as a probation officer.
Even so, the image stuck. In 1992, after winning an unlikely national title a year earlier, Duke was the most beloved and the most despised team in the country.
“It was like traveling with a rock band,” said Mike Brey, now the coach at Notre Dame but a Duke assistant back then. “Everywhere we went, we heard screams—some of adoration, some of hatred. It was tough for some people to accept the fact that a bunch of smart kids—white or black—played basketball that well.”
By the time the Blue Devils got to Chapel Hill the first week in February, they were 17–0 and the only close call had come at Michigan against the group that would come to be known as “the Fab Five.” That game went into overtime and, as it turned out, was the closest the five Michigan freshmen—Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Ray Jackson, and Jimmy King—would come to beating Duke.
North Carolina was 15–3 and ranked ninth in the country when Duke came to town, but the feel in the building was that it would take a huge upset for the Tar Heels to win.
“They’re already planning bonfires on Franklin Street [the main drag in Chapel Hill],” Jim Heavner, the longtime owner of the North Carolina radio network, said shortly before tip-off. “It’s full role reversal. Duke has become North Carolina.”
That night might have been the first time that the Dean Dome felt like Carmichael Auditorium. After losing to Duke at home for the third time in five years the previous March, Smith had told his “bosses”—Smith didn’t have any real bosses at Carolina—that he wanted some students close to the court, not just the rich boosters who tended to sit on their hands. And so a couple of thousand students had been moved downstairs—mostly in the corners and behind the baskets but close to the court nevertheless. The difference was noticeable.
The game rocked back and forth. Carolina led for most of the second half, but part of the role reversal was that it was now Duke that never seemed to be out of a game. The Blue Devils rallied to cut the margin to 75–73 and, with the clock ticking toward zero, came downcourt with a chance to tie or win the game. The ball swung to Laettner, who appeared to be open for a three at the top of the key. But Laettner opted to pass up the three and drove the lane. His shot from the right side fell off the rim as the buzzer sounded, the students stormed the court, and Smith heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“If Laettner takes that three and it goes in, Dean might never have coached again,” Keith Drum said afterward. “They worked so hard to win that game and deserved to win. If Duke had somehow stolen it the way Dean always stole games, I’m not sure Dean could have handled it.”
Years later, when Drum’s comments were repeated to him, Smith smiled. “Keith might have had that one right,” he said. “If Duke had won that game, they might have gone undefeated.”
Left unsaid was the rest of the sentence: and that might have killed me.
Hurley was injured late in the game and, as it turned out, missed the next seven games. Krzyzewski moved Grant Hill to the point and Hill played well there. Even so, with Antonio Lang starting in Hill’s place at forward, Duke was weaker at two positions.
“The fact that we only lost one game during that stretch [at Wake Forest] tells you how good we were,” Krzyzewski said. “Before Bobby got hurt in the Carolina game, we were playing about as well as you could hope to have a team play. Without him, we were still good, but not as good.”
They were good enough to go to LSU three days later and beat a Shaquille O’Neal–led team, 77–67, with Laettner outplaying O’Neal for the second year in a row. The previous season, in Cameron, the Blue Devils had humiliated the Tigers, 88–70. This win—on the road, without Hurley—was more impressive.
With Hurley back, Duke beat Carolina, 89–77, in the regular season finale to finish 25–2. The mind-set of the players was apparent when Laettner spoke to the crowd after the game during the Senior Day speeches. “Now listen, you guys, we still have nine games left to play,” Laettner said. “And even though we’re not playing here, we need to know you’re all behind us and you’re back here partying it up after we win.”
Nine games would mean playing three games in the ACC Tournament and six in the NCAA Tournament. Clearly, that was the plan.
—
The ACC Tournament wasn’t that big a problem. Duke eased past Maryland and Georgia Tech and, after a tight first half in their fourth final in five years against UNC, blew the Tar Heels away in the second half, winning 94–74. The 20-point margin was almost identical to Carolina’s 22-point margin in the final a year earlier. That had been the day Krzyzewski had told his players they were going to win the national championship. They had done that. The win over Carolina meant their record since the “bus speech” was 34–2.
The Blue Devils won their first three NCAA Tournament games by double digits, making it look easy except for one second-half stretch against Iowa—whom they played in the second round for the second straight season—when they let the Hawkeyes’ press get to them for a while. They recovered in time to win, 75–62.
As it turned out, their difficulties with Iowa’s style proved to be a harbinger. The opponent in the regional final was Kentucky. Rick Pitino had become the coach three seasons earlier in the wake of NCAA sanctions that came about after the infamous Emery air express envelope containing a thousand dollars, which had been mailed from the Kentucky basketball office to the father of a recruit, fell open.
Eddie Sutton was fired at the end of the 1989 season and Pitino was hired to rebuild. He had recruited superbly, convincing Jamal Mashburn to leave New York (Pitino was also a New Yorker, growing up on Long Island) and adding two excellent guards, Sean Woods and Dale Brown. They had combined with four seniors, most notably John Pelphrey, to make Kentucky into a power again during the 1992 season.
For the first time since 1985, the East Regionals were not being played in the Meadowlands. They were in the Philadelphia Spectrum, the same building that had been the site of Bob Knight’s first two national titles at Indiana. It had also been the site of one of the more comic scenes of Knight’s career. As he was about to walk into the interview room after his team had beaten LSU in the first semifinal in 1981, Knight was stopped by a security guard.
“You can’t go in there without a credential,” the guard said.
For once, Knight was momentarily speechless. Then, actually thinking the guard was kidding, he started to walk past him. The guard—who wasn’t kidding—blocked his path.
“I told you, sir, you can’t go in there without a proper credential.”
Knight actually smiled. “Look, pal, believe me, I’d be very happy to not go in there,” he said. “But if I don’t, you are going to have to explain to everyone in there why I didn’t show up.”
At that point, an NCAA official arrived to explain that Knight did not need a credential. No one will ever know what might have happened next had he not intervened.
There were no security issues on the night of March 28, 1992. Just what has since been called “the greatest college basketball game ever played.”
The game was a track meet from the start. It went back and forth, neither team able to get control or able to stop the other for more than a couple of possessions at a time. Duke led 50–45 at halftime but couldn’t widen the lead. The Wildcats pushed in front, then Duke led again. Midway through the second half, a play happened that Kentucky people and anti-Duke people wail about to this day. During a skirmish under the basket, UK backup center Aminu Timberlake hit the floor. As he lay there, Laettner very clearly stepped on him. He didn’t stomp his foot but he did step on his chest. Timberlake was completely unharmed. He jumped up right away and laughed at Laettner, who was instantly called for both a personal foul and a technical foul.