The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Krzyzewski’s decision to let Gaudet go shocked everyone—including Gaudet. It certainly sent a message to everyone in the program that the coach who was coming back wasn’t going to be messing around.

  Gaudet’s departure in May made him the second coach to leave. The first had been Brey, who had accepted the head coaching job at Delaware shortly after the season ended.

  While Krzyzewski had agonized about Gaudet, he didn’t want Brey to leave. Brey had been with him for eight seasons and, with Gaudet leaving, would be his most experienced assistant—and recruiter.

  “When the Delaware thing came up in late February, my gut told me this was the time to leave,” Brey said. “It had been eight years and I thought I was ready. Plus, I thought Delaware was a very good job for me.”

  Krzyzewski didn’t agree. He wasn’t the least bit happy when Brey told him he was thinking of leaving.

  “Part of it was that C. M. Newton [then the athletic director at Kentucky] had been the one who recommended me to [Delaware president] David Roselle,” Brey said. “They had a relationship because Roselle had been at Kentucky. Mike likes to be the one who mentors his guys through job decisions. He didn’t think Delaware was the right job for me—that I could wait a year and do better. Plus, I think he was nervous about coming back. He had made a decision on Pete, but that was the only change he wanted to make. He didn’t want two openings.”

  Brey and Krzyzewski talked about the Delaware job on a recruiting trip to an AAU tournament in Maryland shortly after the season ended. From there, Krzyzewski flew home while Brey made the drive to Delaware for a final interview.

  “I took the job while I was there,” he said. “I called Mike to tell him and he said, ‘Well, you better come on back and tell the team.’ That was it. He was angry. By the time I saw him that summer, though, he was fine. He understood.

  “When we won the America East Tournament a couple of years later [1998] to get to the NCAA Tournament, the first voice mail waiting for me was from Mike K. Didn’t surprise me. And I know he was thrilled when I got the Notre Dame job. He’s changed a lot—evolved—which has kept him fresh and young. But when it comes to relationships, he’s never changed.”

  —

  Krzyzewski hired Quin Snyder to replace Brey—actually promoted him. Snyder had been working as a graduate assistant while finishing dual postgraduate degrees: an MBA and a law degree. That meant that both assistant coaches on the road recruiting would be former Krzyzewski players: Amaker and Snyder. As it turned out, Brey was the last non-Duke graduate to recruit on behalf of Krzyzewski.

  The second hire was Tim O’Toole, who had been a part-time assistant coach under Krzyzewski’s friend Jim Boeheim at Syracuse. O’Toole was thirty—twenty-three years younger than Gaudet—and brought over-the-top passion to every room he walked into. Which was what Krzyzewski wanted.

  Even so, Duke needed a rebuild—shocking as it seemed—in the spring of 1995.

  Krzyzewski’s return was a relief for the players, but the team he would coach that fall would be a shadow of what the seven Final Four teams had been. Cherokee Parks, by far the ’95 team’s best player, had graduated. So had Erik Meek, who had become a very solid inside player in his junior and senior seasons.

  Krzyzewski had recruited Joey Beard and Greg Newton in the fall of 1993, with the idea that they would provide depth as freshmen and sophomores and then be ready to step in as stars when Parks and Meek graduated. Both had turned out to be examples of the kind of recruiting mistakes Duke had made in the wake of the back-to-back championships. Beard was a McDonald’s All-American and came out of the same high school—South Lakes in Reston, Virginia—as Grant Hill. Comparisons with Hill stopped there. By the end of his sophomore season, Beard had transferred to Boston University having proven he was not an ACC player, much less a star.

  Newton wasn’t at Duke either in the fall of ’95, having been suspended by a Duke student judicial board for cheating on a computer science test. He did return to school and did graduate but, like Beard, never came close to being the player he had been reputed to be coming out of high school.

  The absence of Newton meant that freshman Taymon Domzalski had to start eighteen games at center. Domzalski was a solid backup player but certainly not ready to take on ACC centers for twenty-five or thirty minutes a night. Even when Newton returned, the Blue Devils were still woeful inside.

  They were left with a team built around three guards: Chris Collins, Trajan Langdon, and Steve Wojciechowski: tough kids, the kind Krzyzewski loved to coach, but hardly future NBA stars or even NBA players.

  Still, the season started well. The Blue Devils went to Alaska and won the Great Alaska Shootout, beating Indiana in the semifinals. The win was important for Krzyzewski because Indiana was a solid team, but perhaps more important because it was the first time he had been face-to-face with Bob Knight since the nonhandshake in Minneapolis in 1992.

  The two men shook hands, but neither had much to say to the other. The three wins in Alaska put Duke back into the national rankings for the first time in almost a year, at number twelve. The Blue Devils lost to two other Big Ten teams—Illinois and Michigan—in December but went into conference play 9–2 and still ranked—at number nineteen.

  That didn’t last very long. Almost as if the nightmare of the previous winter was being relived, they dropped their first four ACC games—at Clemson, at home to Georgia Tech and Wake Forest, and on the road to Virginia. The first three games were close—margins of three, five, and three. The fourth wasn’t—Virginia won easily, 77–66.

  On January 18, Duke went to N.C. State with an excellent chance to drop to 0–5 in the conference. The Wolfpack was fighting to save Les Robinson’s job and had played well in the nonconference season, going 10–2—one of the losses to top-ranked Massachusetts. But they had started 1–2 in the conference, and another trip to the Les Robinson game was probably going to be his last appearance there. In Krzyzewski’s absence, State had swept Duke the previous season. The Wolfpack needed to win the game at least as much as Duke did.

  For most of the night it appeared the Wolfpack would succeed. Duke trailed by double digits early in the second half but wouldn’t go away. Chris Collins kept making big shots to keep Duke close until finally the Blue Devils got the ball back, trailing 70–68 with the clock under ten seconds. Everyone in Reynolds Coliseum knew Collins was going to shoot—and they were right. With just over five seconds left, he found an opening at the top of the key and shot. The ball hit the front of the rim, crawled over it, sat on the rim briefly—and dropped in. State missed a shot at the buzzer, and Duke escaped with a 71–70 win.

  In the basement of the building where Jim Valvano had once been king, Krzyzewski cried on the shoulder of his oldest daughter, Debbie. He was relieved and drained—and, he knew, very lucky.

  “That game, that shot that Chris made—they were as big in their own way as any of the famous games we’ve won in March and April,” he said. “That season was a fight, for me, for everyone. That win gave us just enough of a boost to get us back into the NCAA Tournament. The key guy all season was Chris. He was the bridge we needed to get to the next season when we had some reinforcements arriving.

  “We’ve had a lot of great players do great things, but what Chris did that season was as important as anything any of my players has done. That game was critical. We lose that night and I honestly don’t know where that season goes.

  “It was the first step on the road back.”

  There was still a long way to travel.

  32

  Duke’s pratfall in the winter of 1995 wasn’t greeted with a lot of sympathy around the ACC—especially among those in the media with degrees from the University of North Carolina. The joke many of them seemed to find funny was that Krzyzewski’s back had started to really hurt after he got a good look at his team. That line was oft repeated throughout the season in ACC media rooms.

  Dean Smith didn’t have any doubt that Krzyzewski wa
s sick. He would have much preferred to beat Duke with Krzyzewski on the bench than without him. And the team he had almost certainly would have done so even if Krzyzewski had been healthy—although the case might be made that the double-overtime game in Durham might have tipped the other way if Krzyzewski had been in the building.

  Carolina was good—very good. The graduation of Eric Montross, Derrick Phelps, Brian Reese, and Kevin Salvadori had relieved a good deal of the tension in the locker room. All were excellent players and outstanding people—exactly the kind of person Smith loved to coach. But the addition of Rasheed Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse, and Jeff McInnis the previous season had destroyed the chemistry of the national championship team. Adding those three and losing George Lynch had ultimately proven toxic.

  None of this made Smith happy. He was a true believer in the “Carolina Way”—after all, he’d created it—and having dissension in his locker room was intolerable for him. Once Wallace, Stackhouse, and McInnis didn’t have to defer on or off the court, they were much happier. What’s more, Wallace and Stackhouse were over-the-moon talents. With Donald Williams and Pat Sullivan still around to provide stability, there was no doubting that this was a team capable of reaching Smith’s tenth Final Four.

  Not that there weren’t headaches. From midseason on, there were widespread rumors that both Wallace and Stackhouse were going to turn pro at the end of the season. Wallace vehemently denied the first report that he was leaving, and his mother vowed he would stay four years.

  The Tar Heels were ranked number two in preseason polls, behind defending national champion Arkansas, which had returned most of the key players from the team that had beaten Duke in the title game the previous spring. By the time ACC play began in January, they were 9–0 and ranked number one. But they began conference play with a surprising road loss at N.C. State. Then they went on another winning streak, winning their next nine. By the time they beat Duke, 99–86, in the regular season finale in Chapel Hill, they were 22–4 and had finished in a four-way tie for first place (“ACC CHAMPIONS…Four-Way Regular Season Tie” reads the banner) with Wake Forest, Virginia, and Maryland.

  Even with Duke taking the plunge to ninth place, the ACC was extremely deep. Wake Forest had a superb inside-outside combination with Tim Duncan at center and senior Randolph Childress at point guard. Maryland had Joe Smith—who would be the number-one pick in that June’s draft—and Keith Booth. Virginia had three excellent guards and Junior Burrough, perhaps the most underrated inside player in the country.

  Carolina and Wake Forest ended up in the ACC Tournament final, Wake winning an 82–80 overtime classic, thanks in large part to Childress’s 37-point masterpiece. The Deacons went to the East Regionals as the number-one seed, while the Tar Heels were sent to the Southeast Regionals as the number-two seed behind Kentucky.

  All four ACC teams reached the Sweet 16. Maryland lost to Connecticut in the regional semifinals and Wake Forest was upset by Oklahoma State. Virginia, which was the number-four seed in the Midwest, stunned top-seeded Kansas to reach the Elite Eight before losing to Arkansas in the regional final. The Cavaliers played the entire tournament without Cory Alexander, their senior point guard. If they’d had Alexander to deal with Arkansas’s vaunted “forty minutes of hell,” they might have made it to Seattle.

  Carolina did make it there. In the round of sixteen, they had to face Georgetown—another Dean Smith–John Thompson matchup. The Hoyas weren’t nearly the juggernaut they had been through most of the 1980s, but they did have Allen Iverson, who had breathed new life into the program after the Hoyas had gone five seasons without getting past the tournament’s first weekend.

  Iverson and Victor Page formed both a formidable and perhaps unique backcourt: Iverson had been to jail before college; Page would land there after college. They weren’t enough though against the Tar Heels, who won 74–64, to advance to the regional final against Kentucky.

  The Wildcats had been crushing people with their full-court pressure defense. They were talented, experienced, and deep. When they destroyed a good Arizona State team, 97–73, in the regional semis, The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell was moved to write that there really was no point in even staging the rest of the tournament, that a lot of time, money, and effort would be saved just by awarding the trophy to Kentucky on the spot.

  This was pre-Internet. Even so, someone alerted Smith to the column, and by the time the Tar Heels walked into the locker room to prepare for their off-day practice, it was in every player’s locker—the key phrases highlighted.

  Four minutes into the game, Kentucky led, 8–2. Then the always hot-headed Wallace threw a punch at Kentucky’s Andre Riddick and a brief melee ensued. Both players were given technicals but not tossed, and Kentucky went ice-cold for the rest of the half, shooting 9 of 34. Carolina led 32–23 at the break and cruised from there, winning 74–61. After the game, every Carolina player mentioned Boswell’s column as motivation.

  “No one gave us a chance,” was the oft-repeated theme.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. One writer who didn’t cover a lot of college basketball hadn’t given them a chance. But Smith had them convinced that no one had given them a chance. That was part of Smith’s genius: he was a master at convincing people—most important his players—that no one thought the Tar Heels could win.

  In 1980, Georgia Tech’s first season in the ACC, the Yellow Jackets finished 0–14 in conference play. On the day they came to play in Chapel Hill, Durham Morning Herald columnist Ron Morris wrote a piece headlined “Twenty-Five Reasons Why Tech Will Win Today.” They were all fabricated. They also could easily have come out of Smith’s mouth.

  Years later, at a banquet in Hawaii, the night before North Carolina was to face James Madison—then coached by Lefty Driesell—in the opening round of a holiday tournament, Driesell summed up Smith’s career by saying, “Dean Smith’s the only coach in history to win more than eight hundred games and be the underdog in every one of them.”

  Hyperbole? Perhaps. Did every coach alive try to downplay his team’s talent? Of course. In the fall of 1985, Bobby Cremins told the media prior to the start of the season that his team was “too young” to be ranked number one in the country. The Yellow Jackets started three seniors, a junior, and a sophomore.

  But no one—no one—ever figured out how to gain a psychological edge better than Smith.

  That was why Krzyzewski has often said he would have hired Smith to run the CIA had he ever been president. “I mean it in a good way,” he said with a smile.

  Krzyzewski didn’t always mean it in a good way—thus the 1993 “If I ever start to act like him, talk like him in any way, don’t ask me any questions. Just get a gun and shoot me” remark. And yet, there’s no doubt while Smith’s mind games often bothered his opponents, most would have copied them, given the chance.

  “The sign of being a great coach is how many coaches copy what you do,” Gary Williams said. “No one was more copied than Dean—on and off the court.”

  Since the NCAA had not followed Boswell’s advice, Carolina’s victory over unbeatable Kentucky put them into the Final Four along with Arkansas, Oklahoma State, and UCLA. The site was Seattle—the city where Smith had been forced to rent a car at the last minute in 1984 when Michael Jordan and company had been upset in the round of sixteen by Indiana.

  This time, Smith was on a bus with his team. But he didn’t get the result he had hoped for. The Tar Heels lost to Arkansas in the semifinals. Then UCLA, playing without point guard Tyus Edney, beat Arkansas to prevent the Razorbacks from matching Duke’s back-to-back titles in 1991 and 1992. It was UCLA’s first title in twenty years, dating to John Wooden’s last game in 1975.

  Smith returned to Chapel Hill with mixed feelings about the season. He was pleased that his team had made it to his tenth Final Four and especially happy with the way they had played to get there. But it had been an exhausting winter. Wallace, Stackhouse, and McInnis were not easy to coach. Not long after th
e season ended Stackhouse and Wallace—in spite of all the denials put out by Wallace and his mother—both announced they were passing up their last two seasons of eligibility to turn pro.

  Smith had two hugely talented young forwards, Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison, coming into the program, but he knew losing Wallace and Stackhouse would leave him with a very young team that would lack depth. Even so, he couldn’t honestly say he was sorry to see the two stars depart. He knew 1995–96 might be a long season. He wondered if it might be his last.

  —

  The only one of the four ACC teams in North Carolina that entered the 1995–96 season with serious hopes of a deep tournament run was Wake Forest, which was always viewed by the three Research Triangle teams as kind of a distant cousin since it was about fifty miles west of the other three schools—give or take a few miles.

  The Demon Deacons had Tim Duncan, who probably could have turned pro after his sophomore season à la Stackhouse and Wallace and been the number-one pick in the NBA draft. Duncan was different from most basketball players in that his whole persona wasn’t tied into playing in the NBA or becoming wealthy. He had grown up on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and had actually been a swimmer as a boy before growing to six foot ten and taking up basketball at the age of fifteen.

  Wake Forest coach Dave Odom had heard about Duncan from one of his former players, Chris King, who had played in a tournament on St. Croix and noticed the very skinny, gangly kid who ran the floor like a deer but didn’t look like he knew much about how to play the game. “He’s got potential,” King told Odom. “Hard to know how much.”

  Odom decided it was worth a trip. He had been told that the best players on St. Croix gathered at an outdoor court most afternoons, so he flew down, found the courts, took a seat, and, as the games began, searched for a skinny six-ten kid. No one fitting that description was on the court.