The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  “The standards have slipped around here,” he told them. “From now on, everyone’s going to meet my standards, and what we’re producing right now isn’t close to good enough.”

  He was all over his players that afternoon. “I know what’s going on,” he said. “You’re walking around thinking, ‘Hey, we were one play away from beating a good team on the road yesterday. Nothing to feel bad about.’ Well, I’m going to show you twenty chances you had in the game to make that one play.”

  And he did: missed box outs, sloppy screens, failed switches on defense.

  When practice began, Greg Newton, who had come to symbolize the slipping of standards in Krzyzewski’s mind, got tossed. The assistant coaches worried that their boss was unraveling. They also knew exactly why he was so uptight: the next game was against North Carolina. The losing streak against the Tar Heels was seven—dating, like the Wake streak, to 1993.

  After practice on Monday, Krzyzewski stood in front of his team, took out a blue marker, and drew a line on the whiteboard in the front of the locker room.

  “If you have any pride at all,” he said in a measured voice, “you should be saying, ‘That’s the line, Carolina. You aren’t crossing it on Wednesday unless you kill me. You’ll have to kill me to cross that line.’ ”

  —

  Things weren’t a whole lot more cheery ten miles down the road in Chapel Hill.

  Carolina had started the season 9–1, the only loss coming in the opener against a very good Arizona team. But the start of conference play hadn’t gone well at all. Losing at Wake Forest wasn’t unexpected, but the game had been an 81–57 blowout.

  Then Maryland came to town, and Carolina, even with Vince Carter sitting out with a hip pointer, controlled the game for almost twenty-six minutes. When freshman point guard Ed Cota sliced through the Maryland defense for a layup with a little more than fourteen minutes left, the Tar Heels led 66–44 and the faithful could sit back in their comfortable seats and relax.

  Except they couldn’t. Over the next nine minutes, Maryland outscored Carolina 28–2. The only Carolina basket in the run was a putback by seven-foot-three-inch senior Serge Zwikker. The Tar Heels couldn’t score, the Terrapins couldn’t be stopped. Twice Smith did the unthinkable, calling a time-out before the last two minutes of the game. Nothing could stop the onslaught. Maryland outscored UNC 41–9 in the final fourteen minutes and won, 85–75.

  Most of the crowd of 21,444 walked out of the building in a state of shock. No one was more shocked than Maryland coach Gary Williams. “It wasn’t so much beating Carolina that way or getting on that kind of run in that building,” he said years later. “It was beating Dean that way. That was what Dean did to you, not what you did to Dean.”

  That was the first night that the thought that Smith wouldn’t coach forever crossed Williams’s mind. It wasn’t the loss, it was something Smith said to him before the game started. The two men had been chatting casually in front of the Carolina bench when Williams pointed at Carter, who was in street clothes, and asked Smith when he thought he’d play again.

  “If this was fifteen years ago,” Smith said, “there’s a good chance he’d be playing tonight.”

  Williams was taken aback by the comment. Smith never said anything to anyone that might be construed in any way as a put-down of one of his players. Now he was clearly making a comment not so much about Carter but about the players of the tail end of the twentieth century.

  “I looked at him when he said that,” Williams remembered. “And for the first time ever it occurred to me that he was starting to look his age. He looked gray and tired, and the important part of the season was just starting.”

  The loss to Maryland didn’t put a spring into Smith’s step by any means. But it did get his attention. That Saturday, when the Tar Heels played at Virginia, he decided to miss his annual date with the Virginia State Police and ride to and from Charlottesville with his team. This group, he had decided, needed as much of his time and energy as he could give them.

  The good news was that he saved a few dollars by avoiding the speeding ticket. The bad news was that the final result was a third straight double-digit loss, this one 75–63.

  Things got a little better after that with wins over N.C. State and Georgia Tech—the two teams expected to finish at the bottom of the league. But a trip to Tallahassee produced another loss before the Tar Heels played, arguably, their best game of the season, beating Clemson—which came into the Dean Dome ranked number two in the country—61–48. Of course Carolina always beat Clemson at home. In fact, after the Tar Heels beat the Tigers in 2014, Clemson’s all-time record in Chapel Hill dating to 1926 was 0–57.

  Still, Smith felt better about his team after the Clemson game and was looking forward to going to Duke—sort of. He never enjoyed himself in Cameron, except when a game was over and his team had won. The Tar Heels had won three straight there, and Smith’s all-time record in the building was 18–17.

  “It’s a very big game for them,” he said the morning the two teams were scheduled to play. “It’s always a bigger game for the home team. And I know Mike has to be tired of losing to us.”

  Mike was very tired of losing to Carolina—and to Smith.

  His pregame talk that night was brief. He walked into the locker room and drew another blue line on the board. Then he turned to his team and said, “Let’s go.”

  That was enough. The game was one of those that has made Duke-Carolina the rivalry it has been for so many years. The game rocked back and forth. Carolina’s size appeared to be too much for Duke with Zwikker, Carter, and Jamison up front. Much to the dismay of his assistants, Krzyzewski had benched Newton, who he thought was coasting, because he was Duke’s only true inside presence and Krzyzewski wouldn’t dare bench him. Krzyzewski dared—starting six-six freshman Chris Carrawell in his place. Newton came off the bench and played as well as he had all season. Duke hung on to win, 80–73, and the students stormed the court. There wasn’t an undergraduate in the building—including Newton and fellow senior Jeff Capel—who had ever been part of a win over UNC.

  Even with the students coming over the scorer’s table in droves, Krzyzewski and Smith stopped to talk when they shook hands.

  “That was a terrific game,” Smith said. “Your guys were great but I’m happy my guys made you work for it.”

  “I think it will make us both better,” Krzyzewski shouted over the din. And, for the first time in seventeen years, they gave each other a tap on the shoulder.

  —

  As it turned out, Krzyzewski was right. The game in Cameron turned out to be a launching pad for both teams. Beginning with the Carolina game, Duke went on an 8–1 run, the only loss being an out-of-conference road loss at UCLA in late February. A week after ending their losing skein against North Carolina, they finally beat Wake Forest and Tim Duncan—at Wake. They got lucky in a game at Virginia when a late officiating error—it was so bad that the officials in question drew a one-game suspension from the league—allowed them to escape with a 62–61 victory. When they returned from UCLA to beat Maryland at home, they raised their ACC record to 12–3 and clinched the regular season title with one game—at North Carolina—left to play.

  They had come a long way since Krzyzewski’s forced departure two winters earlier, going from 3–13 and ninth place to winning the regular season for the fifth time in Krzyzewski’s career.

  “I didn’t feel like we were back at that point,” Krzyzewski said. “But we were on the way back. Jeff Capel struggled early but really turned things around and had a great senior year. We became a good team again, not a great team by any stretch, but a good team.”

  Prior to the Maryland game, while he was explaining to his players why the regular season title was important, Krzyzewski overheard freshman Chris Carrawell whispering “We’re going to win four of them” to fellow freshman Nate James.

  Suppressing a grin, Krzyzewski said, “How about you just worry about winning one bef
ore you start thinking about four?”

  As it turned out, Carrawell knew what he was talking about. Duke won the regular season title outright during all four of his years at Duke.

  As well as they played in February, Duke wasn’t the hottest team in the ACC—or in the Triangle. After losing to Duke in Cameron, North Carolina stopped losing. They beat all the teams they had lost to on the road when they got to play them at home, and they went to Maryland and beat the Terrapins to exorcise the ghosts of the 28–2 meltdown in Chapel Hill. Their 2–5 start was too much to overcome to catch Duke, but they did beat the Blue Devils on Senior Day in Chapel Hill to finish 11–5, which put them in a tie with Wake Forest for second place.

  Many expected Duke and Carolina to rematch a week later in the ACC championship game in Greensboro. Order, it seemed, had been restored. Maryland and Clemson, after their hot starts, had faded to a tie for fourth place.

  Except there was another upstart that prevented the third Duke-Carolina meeting of the season: N.C. State. The Wolfpack had improved slowly but surely throughout the season. After going 0–8 the first time through the conference, they had gone 4–4 the second half of the season. That hadn’t kept them out of what was still called “the Les Robinson game,” but they won it easily and then faced top-seeded Duke the next day.

  And won. Duke started fast but faded almost as quickly, clearly shocked by the fact that the Wolfpack kept hitting shots and didn’t go away. The loss didn’t stun Krzyzewski. He’d had a gut feeling before the game that something wasn’t quite right with his team.

  “It was as if when we won the [regular season] conference, we were done emotionally,” he said. “Our guys had played over their heads for a while. Unfortunately, we came down to earth at the wrong time.”

  They landed hard. Losing to Carolina in Chapel Hill, especially with the regular season title wrapped up, was neither a surprise nor an embarrassment. Losing to eighth-seeded N.C. State in the first round of the ACC Tournament was both.

  As if to prove the win over Duke wasn’t a fluke, the Wolfpack beat Maryland the next day in the semifinals before running out of gas in the second half of the championship game—it was their fourth game in four days—and losing to North Carolina.

  The Tar Heels had gotten to the final with a surprisingly easy semifinal victory over Wake Forest. Like Duke, the Deacons, who had spent a good deal of the season ranked number two nationally, were also fading. The low moment of that Saturday afternoon for them—and a high for Carolina—came late in the game when Serge Zwikker hit a three-point shot for the first time in his career. The final was 86–73.

  The win was Carolina’s eleventh in a row since the loss to Duke in late January. The next day’s 64–54 win over State made it twelve straight and gave Smith his thirteenth ACC Tournament title. It also vaulted the Tar Heels into a number-one seed in the East Regionals. The number two seed was South Carolina, coached by former Carolina player and assistant coach Eddie Fogler. The thought of meeting one of his pupils with a spot in the Final Four at stake wasn’t appealing to Smith.

  For the moment, though, he didn’t have to worry about that. His team would make a short trip down I-85 and I-40 to Winston-Salem for the first weekend of the tournament. Fairfield awaited as a first-round opponent. So did history.

  —

  Duke was given a number-two seed in the Southeast Region and sent to Charlotte for the first weekend. Kansas was the number-one seed in the region, but Krzyzewski wasn’t thinking about the Jayhawks or Roy Williams. He was concerned about winning his first-round game against Murray State.

  Never afraid to try something different, he skipped his usual prepractice talk on Monday. It was a comfortable spring day so he took his players on a field trip across the back parking lot to Wallace Wade Stadium, where Duke played football—very badly—each fall.

  He had the players sit in the stands and sent managers out for ice cream. He told them winter was over—check the weather—and it was spring, which meant new beginnings. The NCAA Tournament should be a new beginning, something to get excited about.

  “It was worth a try,” he said later. “Anything was worth a try.”

  Nothing worked. The Blue Devils did manage to beat Murray State on Friday night in their opener for their twenty-fourth win of the season. It was their last. In the second round, facing a very talented Providence team, they were beaten handily, 98–87. A season that had started poorly, then taken off in February, had ended with a thud in March: three losses in the final four games. After making at least the Sweet 16 eight years out of nine, Duke had failed to get that far for the third straight season.

  “It was a bad ending,” Krzyzewski said. “I can honestly say everyone involved tried everything to keep the momentum we’d had in February going. In the end, we weren’t good enough to go deep in the tournament. We got exposed a little bit at the end.”

  The good news was that reinforcements were on the way. Whether it was because the staff was younger or because Krzyzewski had gone back to being the relentless recruiter Eddie Fogler remembered from the early 1980s, Duke had corralled arguably its deepest recruiting class since the freshman class circa 1982. Two highly touted big men—Chris Burgess and Elton Brand—would replace the quirky (to be kind) Greg Newton inside. Shane Battier would join senior Roshown McLeod at small forward. And William Avery, a talented combo guard, would be added to the duo of Steve Wojciechowski and Trajan Langdon. There would be talent and experience.

  But that was still a year away.

  Twenty-four hours before Duke’s season ended in Charlotte, the North Carolina basketball family staged a huge celebration eighty miles away in Winston-Salem.

  Carolina’s win in the ACC championship game was the 875th of Dean Smith’s career. That left him one victory shy of Adolph Rupp’s all-time record for Division I coaching wins. Smith actually had mixed emotions about closing in on Rupp.

  He never liked to talk about it, for several reasons. First, as always, he didn’t ever want the spotlight to be on him. What’s more, he wanted the focus to be on this team and this season and the next game. And, finally, he had decidedly mixed emotions about Rupp, whose reputation—in spite of what his apologists said—was as someone who waited as long as he possibly could before racially integrating his Kentucky basketball team.

  Earlier in the season, when Carolina had been struggling, many had thought Smith wouldn’t come close to Rupp until the following fall. But the ten straight wins had put him on the doorstep, and with the first-round game considered a virtually certain victory, it appeared likely he would be in position to break the record in the second round.

  And the opponent looked as if it might be Bob Knight.

  In one of those “coincidences” that always seem to happen when the NCAA basketball committee isn’t thinking about what matchups might be good for TV, Indiana had somehow landed in North Carolina’s bracket as a number-eight seed. That meant the Hoosiers would play Colorado in the first round on Thursday night with the winner playing the Carolina-Fairfield winner on Saturday afternoon.

  Knight and Smith had met twice in the NCAA Tournament: the 1981 final in Philadelphia and the 1984 round-of-sixteen game—Michael Jordan’s last college game—in Atlanta. This was not one of Knight’s better teams—thus the number-eight seed—but then again, the ’84 team hadn’t been one of his better teams either.

  The Tar Heels beat Fairfield, 82–74, on Thursday night, and it seemed as if the entire state of Connecticut—including the Fairfield mascot—lined up to shake Smith’s hand after the game.

  But Colorado upset the committee’s (and CBS’s) ratings applecart by blitzing Indiana, 80–62. The rout was so embarrassing to Knight that he refused to ride with his team on the bus back to their hotel. Instead, in frigid weather, he walked the two miles, no doubt shocked by the one-sided outcome and angered that he wouldn’t have the chance to delay Smith setting the record until the following season.

  CBS had already scheduled North
Carolina as the early game on Saturday, meaning the entire country would see Smith’s attempt to break Rupp’s record—regardless of the opposition. The Tar Heels were on a serious roll and they made a good Colorado team look bad. The final was 80–63, win number 877 for Smith.

  Terry Holland was the chairman of the NCAA basketball committee that season. Holland had retired from coaching in 1990 at the age of forty-eight because of persistent stomach problems and was now the athletic director at Virginia. He and Smith had been through many battles during the sixteen seasons they had coached against each other. Holland certainly hadn’t been happy when Smith waved his finger in Marc Iavaroni’s face at halftime of the 1977 ACC championship game, and Smith hadn’t been thrilled when he learned that Holland had named a dog Dean who “did whine a lot”—even if the dog wasn’t specifically named after the coach.

  Time heals wounds and feuds. Even before the game ended, Holland had instructed the security guards in the Lawrence Joel Coliseum to allow anyone who had played for Smith or coached under him into the backstage area under the stands so they could be part of the celebration.

  “It was just the right thing to do,” Holland said. “I really did want Dean to enjoy that day as much as he possibly could because it was such a remarkable achievement. We’d had our battles but I always respected him and his program.”

  Smith didn’t want to make a big deal out of the record, for all the reasons he never wanted people to make a big deal of him but also because there was still work to do. Carolina was now in the Sweet 16, and Smith was beginning to believe that this team—which had now won fourteen straight—might just be good enough to win a national championship.

  It was on a collision course to meet Kansas—yet again—in the national semifinals.

  34

  North Carolina held up its end of the bargain, beating California and then routing Louisville to win the East Regional. It was the eleventh time Smith had taken a team to the Final Four, and the argument could be made, given the Tar Heels’ 2–5 start in the ACC, that this was the least likely team he had coached to college basketball’s final weekend.