The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “During that whole period, his army mentality kicked in,” Mickie said. “He has always believed in mind over matter. If you’re sick and you tell yourself you aren’t sick, then you won’t be sick. If your doctors tell you that you can’t stand for two hours a day a few weeks after back surgery, you can stand for two hours a day by not thinking about how much your back hurts.”

  Under the best of circumstances, Krzyzewski knew he was facing a tough season. Grant Hill and Antonio Lang had graduated. Steve Wojciechowski and Trajan Langdon had been added to a solid backcourt of Jeff Capel and Chris Collins, but none of them would have Hill there to take pressure off them on the defensive end and free them for shots on the offensive end. Cherokee Parks was now a senior and he had NBA talent. But he was as easygoing as Laettner had been intense and simply wasn’t the guy who was going to win games just by the force of his personality. There were solid role players like Ricky Price, Erik Meek, and Kenny Blakeney, but that’s exactly what they were—role players.

  There was no one who compared to Laettner, Bobby Hurley, or Grant Hill.

  “We could have been a good team that year, though not a great one,” Krzyzewski said. “But it was a team that needed me to be one hundred percent every single day. I was never one hundred percent, and in the end I was zero percent.”

  The Blue Devils were 7–1 and ranked number seven nationally (as much on reputation as anything else) when they went to Hawaii to play in the post-Christmas Rainbow Classic. They lost their first-round game to an unranked Iowa team before winning their two games in the consolation bracket. The loss to Iowa turned out to be the least of Krzyzewski’s concerns. On the long plane trip home, he stood most of the way because sitting down was too painful. He was still in mind-over-matter mode, but his mind was starting to lose the battle.

  Five days later, the Blue Devils opened ACC play against Clemson and first-year coach Rick Barnes. The students weren’t back from break yet, and Cameron Indoor Stadium felt like the Dean Dome Lite. The team needed to get the crowd going and it never did. Clemson won easily—the final score was a deceiving 75–70—one of the worst home losses Duke had suffered in a long time.

  By then, Krzyzewski wasn’t sleeping at all. He was in too much pain. He had come back too soon and not taken care of himself well enough. Two days after the Clemson loss, Duke was scheduled to practice at one o’clock and then fly to Georgia Tech for a game on Saturday. When Mike came downstairs that morning, he found Mickie waiting for him in the kitchen. The look on his wife’s face told him right away that she meant business.

  “I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for you at two o’clock this afternoon,” she said. “That’s the earliest he can see you.”

  “I’ve got practice at one and then we’re flying to Atlanta.”

  Mickie took a deep breath. She understood that her marriage of almost twenty-six years had never faced a crisis quite like this one.

  “Mike, if you don’t show up at the doctor’s office, I’m leaving you,” she said. “You can’t go on like this. You can’t keep doing this to yourself, to me, to the girls—to everyone in your life. You aren’t well. You can’t coach this team in the condition you’re in. You have to go to the doctor and you have to go today. You can’t go to Atlanta.”

  Mike listened, watching his wife’s face as she spoke. He knew she wasn’t bluffing. “I have to go,” he said, not telling her whether he was going to get on the plane or show up at the doctor’s office.

  At two o’clock, Mickie arrived at the doctor’s office, terrified. “What if he didn’t show up?” she said. “What did I do then? I didn’t want to leave him, but if he went to Atlanta and I didn’t do something about it, then where were we? More important, where was he? I didn’t think there was anyone else who was going to tell him he couldn’t coach. It had to be me.”

  As she pulled up to the office, she saw something that brought tears to her eyes: Mike’s car. He had taken her seriously. Not only did he know she was right, but he loved her enough to not call her bluff. The Blue Devils went to Atlanta without their coach.

  They had no idea that he would not coach again that season.

  31

  The news at the doctor’s office that afternoon wasn’t very good. Mike’s back hadn’t healed properly because he had pushed it too hard too soon and because he hadn’t rehabbed enough. What’s more, he was in a complete state of collapse from lack of sleep, from fighting off pain, and from the tension he had been feeling, knowing that he couldn’t coach his team the way it needed to be coached.

  He needed more tests, he needed complete rest, and he needed to not think about basketball for a while. How long? he asked.

  “The doctor said, ‘You won’t get better until you stop worrying about your team and just worry about yourself,’ ” Mickie remembered. “That certainly wasn’t the answer Mike wanted to hear.”

  Duke put out a statement that Krzyzewski hadn’t made the trip to Georgia Tech and was taking an indefinite leave of absence because of his health. Pete Gaudet would be the coach until Krzyzewski came back. No one knew when that would be. Krzyzewski went back into the hospital two days after Mickie forced him to see the doctor and underwent a battery of tests to try to find out why he was still in so much pain.

  Krzyzewski was convinced he knew the answer.

  “I thought I had the same thing as Jimmy,” he said. “I was forty-seven; I had terrible pain in my back that surgery hadn’t fixed. I was in Duke Hospital and I had three daughters. All just like him. I thought I had cancer and I was going to die, just like Jimmy had.”

  He didn’t have cancer. He simply hadn’t allowed the disc to heal completely and he needed to rest it—not a little, a lot—and not for only a couple of weeks.

  “For two weeks I kept asking the doctors, ‘How soon can I coach again?’ ” he said. “They kept telling me I had to be patient, it was going to take a while. I didn’t have a while. My team needed me.”

  He was right about that. In Krzyzewski’s absence, the Blue Devils lost their next five games, dropping them to 0–6 in the ACC. No Duke team had ever been 0–6 in the ACC. One loss was in double overtime to Virginia. In fact, almost all the games were close, the exception being an embarrassing 77–60 blowout loss at home to N.C. State.

  On January 22, the message Krzyzewski’s doctors had been trying to get him to understand finally clicked into focus: “I had no chance to get back until I stopped trying to get back,” he said. “I had to know in my mind that I wasn’t going to coach again that season so I could think about getting better, not about getting back.”

  That day, on Krzyzewski’s orders, Duke announced that he wouldn’t coach again the rest of the season. For the first time in more than two weeks, Krzyzewski met with his players to explain why he had decided that he couldn’t return that winter. He told them he had complete faith in their coaches—Gaudet, Tommy Amaker, Mike Brey, and Chuck Swenson (who had returned to Duke after a stint as the head coach at William and Mary). The meeting was funereal. There was nothing to be said that would make anyone feel any better.

  The person who felt worst was Krzyzewski. This was his fault. He had let his players down. The military training kicked in again. “If the leader can’t lead his troops into battle, then he has to step down,” he said. “I’d failed my troops. The only honorable thing for me to do was step down—resign.”

  He went to see Tom Butters, intending to resign. The two men had known each other and worked together for fifteen years. Butters knew before Krzyzewski got to his house that his coach was going to try to resign.

  “That’s who Mike is,” Butters said. “He’s the ultimate leader. Failure always falls on the leader. The Roman generals always fell on their own swords when they’d been defeated. He had left his men on the battlefield without him, and they were getting blown up, beaten up. I knew he felt defeated, I knew he was going to try and fall on his own sword.

  “And there was no way I was going to let him do it.”r />
  Butters listened while Krzyzewski explained to him why he thought the best thing to do—the honorable thing for him to do—was resign. He had failed his players, he had failed Butters, and he had failed Duke.

  “Mike, let me ask you a question: Who do you think I could hire to coach this basketball team, this group of kids, next season who is going to do a better job than you?” Butters asked. “What possible reason could I have to want any coach other than you?

  “Your job now is to get better. And when you’re better, you are the only person I want as my basketball coach.”

  Krzyzewski was stunned—and touched. He started to cry.

  “I honestly thought Tom would accept my resignation,” he said. “I thought it just made sense. He was paying me to coach and I couldn’t coach. He needed to find someone else to do the job I wasn’t doing.

  “But when he responded the way he did, I thought to myself, ‘He’s right. I need to get better and I need to come back and coach my team.’ That was the only way to make things right.”

  From that moment on, Krzyzewski began to get better. He spent many hours with H. Keith Brodie, Duke’s president, who also happened to be a psychiatrist. He watched the games on television at home. When Duke finally broke the six-game losing streak with a win at Notre Dame, Krzyzewski got in his car, drove to Cameron, and left a message for the team on the whiteboard in the locker room, telling them how proud he was of them and that good things were ahead.

  “I wanted them to know that even though I wasn’t physically with them, I was still with them and they were in my thoughts all the time,” Krzyzewski said. “That was important to me and, I think, to them too.”

  While Krzyzewski was away from his team, all sorts of wild rumors circulated: he had cancer; he and Mickie had split; he would never coach again; he’d had a nervous breakdown. Throughout, Krzyzewski took phone calls from a few friends, assured them he was okay and that the rumors weren’t true.

  “I am crazy,” he said at one point in early February. “But no crazier than I’ve been for a long time now.”

  What had been a fragile team at the start of the season became a broken team. The Blue Devils simply couldn’t win close games. They lost twice to Maryland—a team that hadn’t beaten Duke since 1988, a fifteen-game streak—each time by two points. They lost by one to Wake Forest, and they lost a classic game to North Carolina in double overtime in Cameron, blowing a thirteen-point lead in the last four minutes of regulation. The players were confused. They had signed on to play for Krzyzewski. He wasn’t there. Maybe he was coming back next season or maybe he wasn’t.

  “The truth is nobody knew,” Mike Brey said. “The plan was for Mike to come back, but the plan had also been for him to be healthy after the surgery. I remember one day Dr. Brodie asked Pete, Tommy, Chuck, and I to come to his office to talk. I said to him directly, ‘Are you sure Mike K. is coming back?’ And he said, ‘I can’t tell you that for sure.’ That was pretty chilling for all of us to hear.”

  The person who suffered the most through all the losses was Gaudet. He felt as if he was letting Krzyzewski down by not winning more often. “It was a lot to take on,” he said years later. “It’s not a fluke that Mike has the record he has. We could have used him, especially during those close games. He always brought a unique sense of confidence that the players felt. It mattered.

  “Plus, we were all in different roles. The guys weren’t used to my voice in the locker room, in the huddles. Mike, Tommy, and Chuck had to do a lot of what I normally did. We were all out of place.”

  The best example of Krzyzewski’s importance in the huddle had been the Kentucky game three seasons earlier. To this day, every player in that huddle with 2.1 seconds left remembers Krzyzewski’s first words: “We’re going to win the damn game.”

  Grant Hill still shakes his head at that memory. “We all walked to the bench thinking it was over, we were going on spring break,” he said. “He asked two questions: ‘Grant, can you make the pass?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Then he said, ‘Christian, can you make the shot?’ Christian just looked at him as if he couldn’t believe he’d even asked. We walked back on the court convinced we were going to win. And we did.”

  Gaudet was a very good basketball coach. He probably knew as much about coaching big men as anyone in the sport. He’s written widely read books on the topic. But, as he himself pointed out, he wasn’t Krzyzewski. What’s more, with Gaudet in the role of head coach, the staff wasn’t as deep as it had been. Everyone’s role had changed.

  What had become the college basketball program everyone aspired to be for the past nine years was now a soap opera—a bad one.

  After the double-overtime loss to Virginia, Doug Collins, the NBA Hall of Famer whose son Chris was a junior, burst into the coaches’ locker room screaming at Gaudet for the way he was utilizing his players and for the team’s inability to win a close game. Collins’s frustration was understandable. But there was no way he would have pulled something like that on Krzyzewski.

  “We were hurting in a lot of different ways,” Brey remembered. “Not only did we not know if Mike was coming back, we had no way of knowing if he was going to want all of us back. You knew watching us lose all those games wasn’t making him happy. It couldn’t possibly make him happy.”

  Even Brey, usually calm and mild mannered, lost it on one occasion. “Pete tended to be clinical with the guys,” he said. “He would calmly tell them what we needed to do better. There weren’t any theatrics the way you got with Mike sometimes.

  “One night, we’re getting our asses kicked, I can’t even remember who we were playing. But he’s kind of calmly walking through what adjustments we’re going to make and I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped up and said, ‘F—— that, Pete, f—— that! Enough with all the whining and feeling sorry for ourselves and making excuses. Go out and play like f——ing men!”

  They went out and lost.

  And, in fact, the losing did make Krzyzewski angry. He knew if he came back some things had to change. He did think about reshaping his staff. He also thought about reshaping his own life. He couldn’t continue to say yes to every request he got, whether it was from the media, from a coach looking for a job, or from a charity looking for a big-name speaker. Things that took up time, like the standard weekly radio show most coaches did, needed to go. His time had to be protected.

  “I never wanted to be that guy—the one who always said no,” he said. “But I couldn’t go on being the guy who always said yes. I had to learn how to say no. It wasn’t easy, because it went against my nature.”

  Other coaches called to check up on him. Bobby Cremins called so often that Mickie finally told him she would call him when there was anything new to report.

  “When he wasn’t there, the sport wasn’t as good as when he was there,” Dean Smith said two years later. “We played a great game against them in Durham, but I wanted to beat them when they were at their best. Duke wasn’t at its best without him coaching.”

  That was clear by season’s end. The Blue Devils had been 9–3—albeit against a fairly soft schedule—on the morning when Mickie gave Mike her ultimatum. They went 4–15 the rest of the season, finishing dead last in the ACC with a 3–13 record. The same school that had played in the national championship game a year earlier played in the Les Robinson game in March 1995.

  Naturally, the game was against Les Robinson’s team. Duke won, and Brey joked, “Well, fellas, I guess we can say we made the tournament.”

  They had made the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament. A day later, they were blown out by top-seeded Wake Forest and the season came to a merciful end. The overall record was 13–18. It would be the only season in a thirty-two-season stretch, beginning in 1984, that Duke would fail to make the NCAA Tournament.

  “It couldn’t end soon enough,” Tommy Amaker said. “We kept hearing Dick Vitale saying the NIT should take Duke even with a record under five hundred because it was Duke. We’d all scr
eam at the TV set, ‘No, no, no. Please let this end.’ ”

  During the ACC Tournament, Krzyzewski, sitting in his house, was piped into team meetings at the Greensboro Marriott on a speakerphone.

  “The intent was good,” Brey said. “The effect was borderline eerie.”

  Once the season ended, Krzyzewski returned to work—meeting with the coaches, making preparations for summer recruiting. His back was healed and so were his mind and his heart. He was healthy. And he was angry.

  —

  Mike Brey’s notion that Krzyzewski wouldn’t just shake off the losses with a “Nice try, fellas” proved to be correct. The victim of his frustration turned out to be Gaudet. Krzyzewski knew the losses weren’t his fault—he’d been thrown into a completely impossible situation. But he also knew that one of the reasons the team Gaudet had coached hadn’t been able to handle Krzyzewski’s absence was because it wasn’t as talented as the teams that had gone to seven Final Fours in nine seasons.

  Krzyzewski decided his staff needed to get younger—especially when it came to getting on the recruiting trail.

  “Some of it was on me,” he said. “I probably hadn’t paid close enough attention to who we were taking the way we had in the years past. We had gotten to the point where we were a little bit like Carolina: we had a lot of kids who wanted to come to Duke. In some cases, we didn’t do enough research when the kids said they wanted to come. They were all highly rated. Most were McDonald’s All-Americans, so we just said, ‘Come on ahead.’

  “We needed to get back to knowing the players we were recruiting intimately again. And we needed to beat the bushes a little more, find the kid who wasn’t that highly rated—like a Thomas Hill or a David Henderson—who would turn out to be a terrific player.

  “Pete was hugely important to our success. It wasn’t a coincidence that we got good and then got better when he joined the staff. He was my wise old head, the guy who had seen as much or more than me. While I was away it occurred to me that I was the wise old head now. I needed younger guys to push me, keep my energy level up as high as possible. If ninety-five taught me one thing it was that there was no margin for error. If we slipped even a little, people were going to be there to jump on us.”