The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Perhaps if Timberlake had rolled on the floor in pain, Laettner would have been ejected. But he didn’t and, since it was clear to the officials that Laettner’s act had been more stupid than violent, he was given the technical foul—which meant he had four personals—and the game moved on. They went to overtime, tied at 93. The extra five minutes swayed back and forth, one team scoring, the other team answering. Finally, after Laettner had put Duke ahead 102–101, Sean Woods drove to the basket and somehow banked in a shot high off the backboard over Laettner’s reach to put Kentucky ahead, 103–102, with 2.1 seconds to go.

  Krzyzewski called time. His team had to somehow go the length of the court and score or the dream of back-to-back titles would be gone. Almost everyone in the building was standing.

  “I’ll never forget the first thing Coach said when we came to the huddle,” Hurley said. “He just said, ‘We’re going to win the damn game.’ ”

  Then he drew up the play that he believed would win the damn game. Earlier in the season, trailing Wake Forest by two points, the Blue Devils had run a play in which Grant Hill, who had the strongest and most accurate arm on the team, had thrown a pass to Laettner near the top of the key. If Laettner could catch it, he would have time to turn and—at six-eleven—shoot over anyone guarding him. But the pass had faded just enough to the left that Laettner hadn’t been able to catch it cleanly. Still, Krzyzewski knew it could work, and given that Laettner had not missed a shot in the game—he was 9 of 9 from the field and 10 of 10 from the foul line at that moment—this was clearly Duke’s best chance.

  As the teams walked onto the court, no one from Kentucky was guarding Hill. Krzyzewski was surprised and thought Pitino was going to call time to reset his defense now that he had seen how Duke was lining up. Most coaches, when a team needs to throw a long pass from the baseline, will stand someone in front of the inbounder to make it harder to throw the pass. Dean Smith always sent his tallest player into the game in those situations—even if he hadn’t played a single second—to force the passer to throw the ball over him. The higher the pass, the more time there was for someone to intercept it or at least deflect it.

  There was no time-out. With no one on him, Hill was able to stand still and line up his pass. Laettner came to the top of the key and the ball reached him on a string. Once he had it, the Kentucky players were helpless. They’d been told not to foul, especially Laettner, so they more or less stood and watched as Laettner, knowing that 2.1 seconds was plenty of time, took one dribble to balance himself, turned, and shot an eighteen-footer, a shot he had taken in practice hundreds of times.

  It was actually an easier shot than the one he had hit in the regional final two years earlier against Connecticut because then two UConn players had come at him and forced him to shoot slightly off-balance, his left leg flying outward as he released the ball. The buzzer went off with the ball in the air and it splashed cleanly through the net as players on both teams fell to the floor in shock.

  Thomas Hill didn’t fall down, but he burst into tears, completely drained by the entire experience of playing in the game, and wept on Pete Gaudet’s shoulder. Krzyzewski went to shake hands with Pitino and then walked over to Richie Farmer, one of the four Kentucky seniors, who was still lying on the floor in shock. He helped Farmer up, then hugged him.

  “There was nothing I could say to him,” Krzyzewski said. “I think I just wanted him to know how much I respected everything they had accomplished. I felt the same about Rick.”

  He also felt that way about Cawood Ledford. Laettner’s basket was the last play Ledford would call after thirty-nine seasons as the radio voice of Kentucky basketball. He had announced earlier in the year that he was retiring. Krzyzewski walked over to where Ledford and partner Ralph Hacker sat and asked if he could come on the air for a minute. He then delivered a tribute to Ledford, talking about what he had meant to basketball, and urged Kentucky fans to be proud of their team and the game they had just played. “I would be proud of my team even if it had lost tonight,” he said. “It was a great game, one worthy of Cawood’s career.”

  It is likely that no coach, before or since, has done anything like that for an opponent’s broadcaster.

  “I just thought it was the right thing to do,” Krzyzewski said. “I didn’t think about it, I just did it.”

  A few yards away, Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe was standing, watching the Duke celebration. “When Laettner’s shot went in, I leaped to my feet,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t because I had a rooting interest one way or the other, it was just that I was amazed by what I’d just witnessed. It was a leap of ‘Oh my god, that was incredible’ more than anything. But when I realized I was standing, I was embarrassed. You aren’t supposed to do that on press row—no matter what. Then I looked around me and saw that everyone else was standing too. Then I felt better. It was a moment when we all became human, when we all recognized that we’d seen something truly special. It was worth jumping to your feet, not just for the shot, but for the entire game.”

  —

  Having beaten Kentucky in a game that would be talked about and written about forever—the game has spawned both books and documentaries—Duke now faced the not-so-small task of playing Indiana in the national semifinals in Minneapolis.

  It was the first time Knight and Krzyzewski had faced each other since the Sweet 16 in 1987. Then the circumstances had been very different: Indiana was a clear favorite as the number-one seed in the Midwest Region. Krzyzewski was just coming off his first Final Four and was many rungs below Knight on the coaching ladder.

  Five years later, Knight was in the Final Four for the first time since Indiana’s championship run in ’87. Duke was in the Final Four for the fifth straight year and was going for a second straight title. Knight still had more titles—three to one—but Krzyzewski had actually surpassed him in Final Fours—six to five. Just before the tournament began, Alex Wolff of Sports Illustrated had written a lengthy piece on Krzyzewski with the headline “Blue Angel,” wondering if the pupil had surpassed the teacher.

  The story essentially said that Krzyzewski had evolved into about the best thing going in college basketball. One of the reasons he had become so good was that he was not—as he had been portrayed for so long—a Knight clone or even necessarily a disciple. Knight wasn’t going to like any story that implied someone, especially an ex-player/ex–assistant coach for whom he had once been the ultimate authority figure, might be a better coach than he was.

  Krzyzewski certainly never implied that in any way, but he did admit he grew weary at times of hearing that everything he was and had become was because of Knight.

  “I value Coach Knight very much,” Wolff quoted him as saying. “He’s been a tremendous influence on me, mostly in good ways. There are also some things I don’t do as a result of being influenced by him. But to keep bringing him up doesn’t give credit to others who have helped me: my mom, my brother, my wife, my AD, my assistants, my buddies. I’ve been a head coach for sixteen years and I don’t go over every game plan with Coach Knight.”

  Saying that others had been important in his life hardly sounded like an insult. Saying that, after six Final Fours and a national title, he was a pretty good coach in his own right hardly sounded out of line either. The implication that maybe he didn’t copy everything Knight did not only made sense but was one of the reasons for his success.

  Knight, naturally, didn’t see it that way. This was an act of disloyalty in his view, and in the week prior to the Final Four, he sent Krzyzewski a note telling him that. Krzyzewski really wasn’t bothered by it that much because, to some degree, it was just Knight being Knight, and because he thought Knight might be trying to get inside his head before they faced off again.

  Whether Knight had gotten inside Krzyzewski’s head hardly seemed to matter during the first half of the game. Someone had gotten inside Laettner’s head. The same guy who literally couldn’t miss in the Spectrum couldn’t throw it into any of Minneso
ta’s thousand lakes while playing in the Metrodome. He was 1 of 5 from the field in the first half and even missed the front end of two one-and-ones after having made twenty consecutive free throws in the tournament.

  Indiana appeared to be on the verge of blowing Duke out of the building. But Hurley wouldn’t let them. Every time Indiana seemed ready to go on a run, he buried a shot—four of them from three-point range. The Hoosiers led 39–27 with 4:20 to play, but Hurley hit his fourth three and Grant Hill and Thomas Hill chipped in with baskets to cut the margin to 42–37 at the break.

  “We should have been down more,” Krzyzewski said later. “We were lucky—especially lucky that we had Bobby on our side.”

  Having missed their chance to take control of the game, Indiana came out firing blanks at the start of the second half. In the first ten minutes, the Blue Devils outscored IU 21–3, meaning the run over two halves was 31–6. Knight didn’t help his team’s cause at all by drawing a technical foul early in the half from referee Ted Valentine. “TV Teddy,” as Valentine was known, had a quick draw when it came to techs, but Knight got in his face anyway.

  To their credit, the Hoosiers rallied late, but even with both Brian Davis (ankle) and Grant Hill (knee) hurt, the Blue Devils hung on to win, 81–78. That put them in the championship game against the tournament darlings, Michigan’s Fab Five.

  Krzyzewski was hardly jubilant after the game. For one thing, Davis’s injury made it unlikely that he could play very much—if at all—on Monday night. Hill would be able to play but might be hobbled. And there had been an ugly postgame incident with Knight.

  It had started with the postgame handshake. Knight had done what coaches call a “blow-by” with Krzyzewski, not even slowing down as the two men passed. Then he made a point of wrapping Colonel Rogers in a hug to show that he wasn’t so much mad at the loss as at the Duke coach. Everyone saw that.

  What they didn’t see was what took place right after Indiana’s press conference ended. The losers always come in to talk first after the second game on Saturday night at the Final Four because the winners have TV obligations. Knight and his players had come off the podium and were in a curtained-off area that led back to the locker rooms. As Krzyzewski, Hurley, and Laettner passed Indiana’s representatives—Knight, Alan Henderson, and Calbert Cheaney—everyone slowed down to exchange handshakes. Knight wished Hurley and Laettner good luck in the championship game. Krzyzewski, trailing his players, figured Knight was over his seconds-after-the-game funk and walked up to Knight with his hand out.

  Knight walked right past him—never so much as looked at him. Krzyzewski was devastated. It was the beginning of nine years when the two men didn’t speak to each other.

  Two nights later, Krzyzewski became the first coach since John Wooden to win back-to-back national championships. After another sluggish first half, the Blue Devils blew the Fab Five out of the gym, pulling away for a 71–51 win. Laettner finally found his shot midway through the second half, and Hurley was voted Most Outstanding Player.

  Krzyzewski now had one more national title than Smith—and Valvano. It was Pitino, appearing on CBS, who summed up the way Krzyzewski was now viewed by his fellow coaches. “Simply the best,” Pitino said. “Simply the best.”

  That summer, Bob Knight came to North Carolina to play golf with Dean Smith. He made certain the Carolina media knew he’d been there—and that he hadn’t bothered to so much as call Krzyzewski. One member of the local media, an older man who saw only good in Smith and only evil in Krzyzewski, wrote rapturously about the two great coaches playing golf together: “I can’t help but think that as they made their way around the golf course, the two greatest basketball coaches of all time were enjoying one another’s company.”

  Perhaps. But the coach with the back-to-back national titles wasn’t there. He didn’t play golf.

  28

  Jim Valvano was on a trip to Europe, working World League of American Football games for ABC in the spring of 1992, when he began to experience serious back pain. His first thought was that he was just sore from doing gigs on the sideline, during which he had to stand for most of a three-hour football game, and from long plane flights.

  It had been a hectic, busy, and enjoyable year for Valvano. In December, he had almost become coach of the New Jersey Nets. The Nets, struggling as always, were planning to fire Bill Fitch and contacted Valvano to see if he was interested in taking over the team. He was, so much so that he called younger brother Bob to tell him he wanted him to be one of his assistant coaches.

  The Nets told Valvano they wanted him to take over after the Christmas holiday. They thought it would be in poor taste to fire Fitch, a distinguished NBA coach, just before Christmas. But the deal never happened, because the story leaked.

  Valvano was convinced that someone at ESPN overheard him talking to someone about the job on the telephone and made a phone call to a friend who covered the Nets for a New York newspaper. Once the story leaked, the Nets backed away.

  “Part of it was that they had this fractured ownership,” Bob Valvano said. “Several of them really wanted Jim for the job. Others wanted to wait until the end of the season. The ones who wanted Jim had the upper hand until the story leaked.”

  One person who wasn’t disappointed that the deal fell through was Pam Valvano. “It was New York, so I would have been okay with the move,” she said. “But if he never coached again, that was more than fine with me.”

  In January, Valvano had been awarded a Cable ACE Award for his work on ESPN, a sign of how quickly he had become a star in television. No one who knew him had expected different, but the award was a tangible sign that he was probably on his way to big things in TV.

  “If he had decided to put his heart and soul into TV for a number of years, he would have ended up hosting The Tonight Show or something along those lines,” Mike Krzyzewski said. “No way sports would have been enough for him.”

  At that point, though, Valvano wasn’t certain if TV was really The Next Thing. It was almost too easy. He missed the W’s, and to a lesser extent he even missed the L’s. That was why he had been ready to take the Nets job. He was a natural on TV as long as no one tried to script him. But there was no real challenge there for him. Hosting The Tonight Show might have been fun someday, but it wouldn’t have been comparable to cutting down the final net.

  Which may explain why he was intrigued—more than intrigued—when he got a call in March from Wichita State University. The school was looking for a new basketball coach. Eddie Fogler, Dean Smith’s former assistant, had left for Vanderbilt in 1990 and had been replaced by Mike Cohen.

  Cohen had very little success, going 32–56 in three seasons. Wichita State is very much a basketball school with a lot of tradition. That sort of record wasn’t going to come close to cutting it. Cohen was fired.

  Doug Elgin, the commissioner of Wichita State’s league, the Missouri Valley Conference, brought up Valvano’s name to Wichita State athletic director Tom Shupe. Elgin had been the sports information director at Virginia during Valvano’s early years in the ACC and still had friends in the league who had told him that Jim was interested in coaching again.

  “He was interested—very interested,” Pam Valvano Strasser said. “It was because he hadn’t left N.C. State on his own terms. It was more about closing the loop than anything else. He didn’t like the way it felt when he left, that people thought he had failed in some way or had won because he didn’t do things the right way. He knew how good a coach he was, and he didn’t like the feeling that some of that had gotten lost when he left State.”

  Valvano flew to Wichita and met with school officials. They were very eager to hire him and offered him a five-year contract for $500,000 a year. There were schools that might have paid more, but that was still very good money. Jim flew home and sat down with Pam.

  “He wanted to do it,” she said. “He didn’t necessarily want to do it forever or even for ten years. It might have been five years. But h
e wanted to leave coaching with a good taste in his mouth, not a bad one.”

  As with the Nets, Jim had talked to his younger brother about joining him. As with the Nets, it never happened. This time, the reason was Pam.

  “I told him I just couldn’t do it,” she said. “It wasn’t so much about moving to Wichita, although that would have been tough because I wouldn’t have known a soul. New York would have been different—it was home, we both had family there. This would have been a whole new world.

  “But that wasn’t really it. I had moved before. I knew how to do that. But I really liked the life we were leading. There were no downs. People will say, ‘Didn’t you miss the highs when he wasn’t coaching?’ Honestly, there weren’t that many highs. Most of the time, after a win, he’d just start getting ready for the next game. The only exception to that was in 1983, and that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Every coach’s wife I’ve ever known says the same thing: the losses hang around; the wins go away quickly.

  “I didn’t want that life again. I didn’t want the never-ending recruiting cycle. Not only had I been there, done that, but I liked the way we were living at that point. So I finally said to him, ‘I understand if you feel the need to do this, but I’m not going with you.’ I told him I’d visit, that we’d spend time in the off-season, but I wasn’t moving. He looked at me and said, ‘If you feel that strongly, then I’ll turn it down.’

  “And he did. It was actually one of the great moments of our marriage. If I’d ever had any doubt that Jim loved me, it went away then. There had been times in the past where basketball had come before family for Jim. But when push really came to shove, he put his family first. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.”