The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Kansas, however, failed to make it to Indianapolis. The Jayhawks, who had ended the regular season ranked number one in the country, were upset in the Southeast Region semifinals by fourth-seeded Arizona. The Wildcats then had to go to overtime in the regional final to beat Providence—the same Providence team that had emphatically ended Duke’s season a week earlier in the second round of the tournament.

  The loss to Arizona was disappointing to Roy Williams, not because it meant he wouldn’t get a third Final Four shot at his old boss but because he was now starting to hear—in his ninth season—that he couldn’t win the big ones.

  “I was walking through an airport the next week on a recruiting trip,” Williams said a few years later. “A guy stops me and says, ‘Do you know that you completely screwed up my bracket by losing to Arizona? Do you know that?’ I should have been polite, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I said, ‘Screwed up your bracket? Your bracket? You think I give a flip about your damn bracket? Losing to Arizona screwed up my life!’ ”

  Williams would live to screw up brackets another day, but his mentor was headed to Indianapolis—the site of his most embarrassing moment in coaching—to face Arizona. The other semifinal would match Kentucky, trying for a second straight national title, and Minnesota, which would become another team on the long list of teams whose Final Four appearance was “vacated” by the NCAA for rules violations. For those scoring at home, there were four in a five-year period: Michigan in 1992 and 1993, Massachusetts in 1996, and Minnesota in 1997.

  Carolina’s hot streak came to a screeching halt against Arizona. The Wildcats had a superb backcourt in Mike Bibby and Miles Simon, and they hounded Shammond Williams into his worst shooting day of the season: 1 of 13 from the field. Point guard Ed Cota wasn’t a lot better at 2 of 9. Bibby and Simon outscored Cota and Williams by a margin of 44–8, and that allowed Arizona, even with the rest of the team scoring a total of 22 points, to win the game, 66–58.

  The loss was crushing for Smith because he really did think the Tar Heels were good enough at that stage to win the whole thing. What’s more, the thought that he might have coached his last game crossed his mind as he congratulated Arizona coach Lute Olson.

  A month later, the subject of his future came up at the tail end of an interview. The Q&A went like this:

  “You said early in the season that the thought of quitting crossed your mind at the end of last season.”

  “I was frustrated with the way that season ended. It wasn’t a fun year.”

  “And now?”

  (Long pause) “I enjoyed coaching this team. I enjoyed the way we got better.”

  “So right now you think you’ll coach next season.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m sixty-six. I enjoyed this team, but I was very tired when the season ended. I’ll see how I feel in October.”

  “What are the chances you’ll coach next season?”

  “I can’t put a number on it. I really can’t.” (A smile) “And if I could, I wouldn’t tell you anyway.”

  —

  On October 9, Smith answered the question: the number was zero. He had decided to retire.

  The entire college basketball world, even his inner circle, was caught off guard. The first person he voiced the possibility to—other than his wife, Linnea—was Bill Guthridge, his hand-picked choice as his successor. Guthridge had been Smith’s top lieutenant for thirty years. He had turned down opportunities to be a head coach somewhere else, and Smith wanted him to get his shot at being the boss.

  On the afternoon of October 8, Steve Kirschner, Carolina’s sports information director, and Rick Brewer, his predecessor, who was still an associate athletic director, began telling media members that there was a press conference the next day and they should probably try to be there. It didn’t take long for word to spread that Smith was going to announce his retirement.

  When he walked in, Smith had a broad grin on his face. The room was packed with media, his players—past and present—and many friends. Someone asked Smith what he hoped people would say about him in the future. He shrugged. “That he knew a little basketball, did a good job, and lived happily ever after,” he said with a grin. “And that he loved his players.”

  It was only when he talked about the players and how much he had enjoyed his relationships with them that his voice cracked and he shed a few tears.

  He certainly wasn’t the only one in the room who did that day. When the news reached Mike Krzyzewski, he was stunned.

  “The thought had never crossed my mind,” he said. “He was as good that last season as he had ever been. That team had talent, but it wasn’t always easy talent to harness. He did that. I guess I didn’t understand how much those last couple of years took out of him.

  “At that point in my life, it was hard to imagine not coaching against him. I knew Carolina would still be good and would always be tough to beat because of what he’d built, but I also knew it would be different. There was only one Dean Smith.”

  Krzyzewski sent Smith flowers that day. The note wished him luck and said: “I will never forget that I had a chance to compete against the best.”

  “I meant it,” Krzyzewski said. “Life goes on. But I knew I’d miss trying to beat him.”

  —

  Life in the entire ACC changed when Smith retired.

  It changed most—but perhaps least—at North Carolina. Guthridge ran the program, on and off the court, the same way Smith had. The two men had worked together for thirty years, so that was no surprise. What’s more, Smith had made certain to leave Guthridge with a full cupboard. Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison had come back for their junior seasons. Ed Cota had a year under his belt at point guard, and Shammond Williams—his performance in Indianapolis the previous spring notwithstanding—was still a serious outside threat. Carolina started the season 17–0 before finally losing in overtime at Maryland.

  They almost certainly would have run away with the ACC regular season title except that Duke had come all the way back. Even though freshman center Elton Brand missed a month with a broken foot, the Blue Devils were deep, experienced in the backcourt, and led by a coach who hadn’t enjoyed the three previous seasons very much.

  The ACC regular season title was decided in Cameron on the first Saturday in March. Carolina had easily handled Duke the first time the teams had met in early February, but that was the Blue Devils’ only conference loss. The Tar Heels had slipped a week earlier, losing to N.C. State at home. They needed to win to tie for the title and to be the first seed in the ACC Tournament since a win would mean they had swept Duke. Carolina led for most of the afternoon. But Duke rallied behind Brand, who had just returned to the lineup, and Wojciechowski, playing his last home game, and they won, 77–75. For the second straight season, the Duke students stormed the court.

  Just as Smith had felt a year earlier that it had taken Duke’s best shot to beat the Tar Heels, Guthridge believed that, all things being equal, he had the better team. That was confirmed a week later when they met in the ACC Tournament final and Carolina won easily, 78–63. Both teams went into the NCAA Tournament as number-one seeds, but Carolina went to the East—with the regional in Greensboro, a decided home-court advantage. Duke went to the South, where—surprise—Kentucky was the number-two seed. The committee simply couldn’t pass up the chance to reunite the two schools in a potential regional final.

  Carolina blew through the East. The Tar Heels’ opener was against Navy. The tone for that game was probably best described by Sitapha Savane, Navy’s starting center. “We walked onto the court for the jump and I thought, ‘Hey, I’m jumping against Antawn Jamison! Hey, look, there’s Vince Carter!’ I’d seen them play on TV a million times. I didn’t know whether to play or ask for autographs.”

  Not surprisingly, Carolina won, 88–52. In fact, it won all four games en route to the Final Four by double digits, beating Connecticut in the regional final, 75–64. In his first season as a head coach, Bill Guthridge w
as in the Final Four.

  That game was on Saturday. The next day it appeared that, for the second time in eight seasons, both Duke and North Carolina would be in a Final Four. The Blue Devils built a 17-point second-half lead on Kentucky—and then collapsed. UK point guard Wayne Turner kept beating Duke’s guards off the dribble and getting into the lane. The Wildcats scored time after time, while the Blue Devils kept missing. The final was 86–84, one of those games Krzyzewski still vividly remembered years later.

  “We lost our poise, which isn’t something that happens to us very often,” he said. “They played great down the stretch—don’t get me wrong. But we had control of the game and let it get away.”

  While Kentucky fans have never been able to let go of Christian Laettner’s shot in 1992—to this day they continue to hate him and all things Duke—most Duke people simply saw 1998 as a disappointing loss, nothing more.

  By not making it to San Antonio, the Blue Devils weren’t around for one of the more embarrassing episodes in North Carolina history—far worse than Smith’s ejection in Indianapolis in 1991. It had little to do with the semifinal loss to Utah. It had to do with Makhtar N’Diaye.

  Dean Smith had taken a chance on N’Diaye, accepting him as a transfer after he had first committed to Wake Forest before spending two years at Michigan. N’Diaye was six foot ten and weighed 240 pounds. He had grown up in Senegal but had come to the United States in high school, playing at the famous basketball prep school Oak Hill Academy. Smith rarely took transfers—for one thing he didn’t need them—but N’Diaye had too much potential, or so it appeared, to pass up.

  He never became a starter; in fact, he was known mostly for trash-talking, accumulating fouls and technical fouls. During one stage of that season he had four technicals in three games. But he hit a new low in the Utah game. While in the process of fouling out in fourteen minutes, he had a running verbal, pushing, and shoving battle with Utah’s Britton Johnsen. At one point it appeared that N’Diaye had spit at Johnsen, and the two players had to be separated.

  After the game, N’Diaye claimed that Johnsen had “repeatedly” called him “the N-word.”

  It was the second time that season that N’Diaye had claimed to be the victim of racial epithets. The first had come during Carolina’s win in Chapel Hill over Maryland, when he had insisted that the Maryland fans sitting behind the visiting bench had yelled the N-word in his direction. No one in the area—including the black players on the Maryland bench—heard any such thing.

  When N’Diaye’s claim was repeated to Johnsen, he hotly denied it, as did Utah coach Rick Majerus, who said he would resign if the claim proved true. The next day, after talking to Guthridge, N’Diaye apologized, admitting that Johnsen had not used the N-word once, much less repeatedly. He denied spitting on him and didn’t actually admit he had lied, saying only, “I said some things I shouldn’t have said.”

  Guthridge also issued an apology. It was a terrible way to end what had been a great season. The Tar Heels finished 34–4, but that record was sullied not so much by losing in the Final Four as by N’Diaye’s deplorable behavior. The only good news was that his eligibility was finally used up.

  —

  As it turned out, Mike Krzyzewski’s comeback from the lost season of 1995 wasn’t truly completed until April 2001.

  In 1999, his team reached the national championship game with a 37–1 record, the only loss coming in November to Cincinnati in the Great Alaska Shootout.

  Elton Brand had emerged as a star—he would be the number-one pick in the NBA draft in June 1999—and he had plenty of help from Trajan Langdon, Chris Carrawell, Shane Battier, William Avery, and freshman Corey Maggette. People were ready to label the Blue Devils one of the great teams of all time—a hyperbolic stretch to say the least—before they lost the national championship game, 77–74, to a Connecticut team that was clearly the better team that night.

  UConn had been ranked number one for much of the season and came into the title game 33–2, one of the losses coming when two starters were out injured. Coach Jim Calhoun was in the wonderful position of being able to honestly tell his players that no one was giving them a chance to win. The Huskies came out like a team with something to prove—and proved they were the best team.

  As with 1986, Krzyzewski pinned much of the blame for a championship game loss on himself. This time it wasn’t inexperience—it was health. He was badly in need of hip replacement surgery, and trying to coach when just walking from the locker room to the bench and back was a major effort had worn him down. By the time the championship game was played, he could barely stand up from the bench—Quin Snyder stood to make most of the in-game adjustments—and Krzyzewski had very little of the energy that he felt was important to bring to his team, especially that night.

  “I just wasn’t all there,” he said. “In the championship game, my team needed me to be in their faces, to really get after them. They got behind and started to feel sorry for themselves, and I couldn’t grab them emotionally and say, ‘Stop it!’ They needed a coach who could bring the intensity you should bring to a championship game, and I didn’t have it.

  “UConn was great that night. Maybe if I’d have been one hundred percent we’d have lost anyway. But maybe not. We’ll never know.”

  A year later, Duke won both the ACC regular season and tournament titles again and extended its winning streak against North Carolina to five straight games over two seasons. At that point, Krzyzewski was 6–2 against Guthridge. In all, he had been 14–24 against Smith—13–16 beginning with the “no-hugging” ACC Tournament win in 1984.

  Carolina had lost in the first round of the 1999 NCAA Tournament to Weber State and barely squeezed into the 2000 tournament as a number-eight seed. Ironically, the deciding vote that got the Tar Heels into the field was cast by Les Robinson—who was on the committee as the athletic director at the Citadel. Jack Kvancz, the athletic director at George Washington, who was also on the committee, remembered what happened when it came down to a final decision.

  “We were down to three teams for one spot,” Kvancz said. “What we do in that situation is we ask the guys in the room who are most familiar with those teams which one they’d like to play least. I turned to Les, knowing he wasn’t exactly a Carolina fan, and said, ‘Okay, Les, which one do you want to play the least?’

  “He shook his head and said, ‘I wish I could say different, but it’s definitely Carolina.’ That put them over the top.”

  Granted that reprieve, the Tar Heels got on a roll and made it to the Final Four for the second time in Guthridge’s three seasons. Duke’s season ended with a Sweet 16 loss to Florida. At the basketball banquet that spring, Guthridge couldn’t resist a jibe: “Duke beat us three times this season,” he said. “They beat us in Chapel Hill; they beat us in Durham; and they beat us back home from the NCAA Tournament.”

  Game, set, match—at least for 2000—to Coach Guthridge.

  Two months later, he stopped being Coach Guthridge. He had proven he could coach—winning more games in his first three seasons than any coach in Division I history. He’d gone to two Final Fours and won an ACC championship. But that wasn’t good enough for many of the Carolina faithful.

  Guthridge wasn’t Coach Smith. And, in their minds, he wasn’t Roy Williams.

  Williams still hadn’t won that elusive national championship, but he had produced consistent winners at Kansas. He was also fourteen years younger than Guthridge, someone likely to be around for a long time once he rode in on his white horse to take the reins of the program.

  Guthridge knew all this and didn’t see any reason to keep winning games and going to Final Fours for a fan base that wanted him gone as soon as possible. So, in June, he announced he was retiring. It was time, apparently, for Roy to come home.

  Only Roy wasn’t so sure he was ready to come home. He loved Kansas and he badly wanted to win a national title there. After performing several versions of Hamlet, he announced he was stay
ing at Kansas—forever.

  This stunned Carolinaworld, especially Smith, who had more or less assumed that when he told Roy it was time to come home, Roy would come home.

  “Maybe the toughest conversation I ever had,” Williams said years later. “I mean, me saying no to Coach Smith? Never in my wildest dreams did I ever dream that day would come. But it did.”

  The final decision on who would be the next coach was supposed to lie with Smith. No one doubted that. Except, apparently, athletic director Dick Baddour, who seemed to believe he should have some say in the hiring.

  After Williams turned the job down, Smith’s next choice was Larry Brown, whose coaching odyssey had taken him to Los Angeles by then as coach of the Clippers. Baddour flew to Los Angeles and Brown took him to lunch at Bel-Air Country Club.

  “I knew Coach Smith wanted me to take the job,” Brown said. “I was dying to take it. It was my dream job. But as we were talking, I had the feeling that Dick didn’t want to hire me. Finally, he asked me if I had a résumé I could give him. At that moment, it was pretty clear to me I wasn’t the guy he wanted. I called Coach Smith and told him I didn’t think I was going to get the job.”

  He didn’t. Neither George Karl nor Eddie Fogler wanted the job either. And so, it fell to Matt Doherty, who was thirty-eight and had one year of experience as a head coach. Doherty had been one of Roy Williams’s assistants at Kansas and had become the head coach at Notre Dame a year earlier. His team had a good—not great—season, finishing 22–15 while reaching the NIT final.

  Like Guthridge, Doherty got off to a great start. By early February the Tar Heels were 21–2—the only losses coming early to defending national champion Michigan State and to Kentucky. They were 10–0 in the ACC, including a win at Duke. Early on, there had been some apprehension about Doherty. He had insisted on bringing his Notre Dame assistants with him—understandable, since they had been hired only a year earlier—but the move left Pat Sullivan and Dave Hanners, both Carolina grads, and Phil Ford, Carolina icon, out of jobs. There were also changes in the office staff insisted upon by Doherty in the name of having his own people working for him. Guthridge had changed nothing. Doherty changed everything.