The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  It was a little bit mean, but a lot funny. And not inaccurate. When Roy Williams wrote his autobiography after winning a second national championship in 2009, the title was Hard Work.

  At that point, Roy Williams was doing a pretty good job of kicking Mike Krzyzewski’s butt. Duke had beaten Carolina twice in 2004 and had gone to the Final Four that season, losing to Connecticut in the semifinals after leading by eight points with 3:30 to play. The Blue Devils also won the first Duke-Carolina meeting of 2005. Most of the next five seasons belonged to Carolina—in almost every possible way. Beginning with a late-rally victory in the regular season finale in 2005—a win that brought back memories of the old “piss factor” days—the Tar Heels won seven of nine games against Duke through the 2009 season.

  More important, they won two national championships during that stretch and went to three Final Fours. Duke, having gone to Krzyzewski’s tenth Final Four in 2004, didn’t come close from ’05 through ’09, never getting past the Sweet 16. Carolina’s NCAA record those five seasons was 20–3. Duke’s was 7–5.

  Krzyzewski had been very discouraged after the UConn loss in 2004. Losing the lead late and losing the game hurt, especially because he believed the officials had bought into the “Duke gets all the calls” hype and had actually shortchanged his team when the game was on the line.

  “We got screwed,” were his first words to a friend after he had walked out of his postgame press conference. “Jim [Calhoun] didn’t do anything different from what a lot of guys are doing now. From the first minute, every call that went against them he was screaming, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot, Duke doesn’t foul.’ The difference was, these guys bought it.”

  What frustrated him more though was losing players early. Luol Deng, who Krzyzewski had thought would be at least a three-year player because he was an excellent student from a family that seemed to value education, left after his freshman season. Shaun Livingston, an outstanding guard who should have enrolled in the summer of 2004, changed his mind and went straight from high school to the NBA.

  “I’m done,” he said at one point that summer. “I’m gonna recruit kids who want to play college basketball for three or four years, not kids who are passing through to the NBA. How do you establish a relationship with a kid in one year?” He smiled. “Or in no years.”

  The notion was noble—the results were not. It wasn’t as if Duke was awful the next five years, it just wasn’t, well, Duke. The Blue Devils did win three ACC Tournaments (2005, 2006, 2009), but in the tournament that mattered most, they consistently stumbled. In 2005 they lost in the Sweet 16 to Michigan State (preventing another of those Duke-Kentucky regional finals that always seemed to be set up by the committee by “coincidence”). A year later, as a number-one seed, they were stunned in the regional semis again, this time by a less-than-stellar LSU team.

  In 2007 they didn’t come close to the Sweet 16, losing in the first round to Virginia Commonwealth. This came a week after a first-round ACC Tournament loss to N.C. State. The loss to the Wolfpack meant that Duke wouldn’t play in the ACC championship game for the first time since 1997—a run that included seven tournament titles and two losses in the final. The loss to VCU a week later left the Blue Devils with a 22–11 record. It was only the third time since 1984 that a team coached all season by Krzyzewski had lost ten games or more: the ’84 team had been 24–10 and the ’96 team, the year after the leave of absence, had been 18–13.

  Things got a little better in 2008: the team finished 28–6, second to North Carolina in the ACC, before losing in the second round of the NCAAs to West Virginia. A year later the record was 30–7, and for the first time in three years, the Blue Devils returned to the Sweet 16. But they were blitzed there—77–54—by Villanova and then had to watch Carolina cruise to a second national title in five years.

  All was well again in the Carolina family. Roy Williams had come home to return the Tar Heels to glory. The evil rat Krzyzewski hadn’t been slain, but he’d certainly been wounded. North Carolina State, even though it had gone to five straight NCAA Tournaments under Herb Sendek from 2002 to 2006, simply wasn’t a factor—something that so frustrated State fans that they ran Sendek off in spite of the success he’d had. The Wolfpack averaged twenty-one wins a year during Sendek’s last five seasons and reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament in 2005, after upsetting Connecticut—the defending national champion—in the second round.

  But Sendek was caught in the Duke-Carolina/Krzyzewski-Williams crossfire. The run to the Sweet 16 was State’s best NCAA Tournament performance since Valvano’s last tournament, in 1989. During that sixteen-year period Duke had gone at least that far thirteen times and Carolina at least that far ten times. Duke had won three national titles and Carolina—including 2005—had won two.

  State fans, having seen the school win national championships in 1974 and 1983, couldn’t understand why their team couldn’t get back to that level or at least close to it. There was another reason Sendek fled when offered the job in 2006 at Arizona State: Jim Valvano.

  Valvano had left State in 1990 under a cloud, which was why he had almost taken the Wichita State job two years later. But in death, he had become larger than life. His valiant fight the last eleven months he was alive; the speech at the tenth-anniversary game; and, of course, the ESPYS speech had left him with a remarkable legacy. What’s more, the V Foundation, his last great coaching job, had raised millions and millions of dollars to fight cancer. There was a V Foundation golf tournament in Raleigh every year and a Jimmy V Classic basketball tournament, staged in New York—usually Madison Square Garden—every December.

  Each year during the Classic, ESPN showed the ESPYS speech on an almost nonstop loop. Those who followed basketball at all knew the speech well. N.C. State fans seemed to know it by heart.

  “I think it’s been very hard for every coach who has followed Jim here,” Pam Valvano Strasser said, sitting in her living room shortly after the twenty-first anniversary of Jim’s death. “In a very real sense, Jim’s still alive to people here. He’s a constant presence. Everyone who coaches at State is compared to him—not just in terms of wins and losses, but in terms of personality. That’s unfair. There was only one Jim.”

  Mark Gottfried is now State’s fourth coach since Valvano’s departure. Les Robinson had one good season and five bad ones. Sendek’s last five seasons were very good, but not good enough. The school then brought back Sidney Lowe, in part because he had a good deal of coaching experience, but also to try to rekindle memories of 1983.

  “You can’t bring back the past,” Lowe, now an assistant coach with the Minnesota Timberwolves, said three years after being fired. “Whoever the coach at State is going to be, he’s got to not only get good players, he’s got to get great players, because those other two guys [Krzyzewski and Williams] are always going to have great players. It’s a tough spot to be in.” He smiled. “Even if you played for Coach V.”

  Lowe matched Sendek’s first season when he upset Duke in the first round of the ACC Tournament and made it to the final. Like Sendek’s team in ’97, the Wolfpack of ten years later ran out of gas, losing to (of course) North Carolina in the championship game. That weekend turned out to be the highlight of Lowe’s five seasons at State. The Wolfpack made the NIT twice but never had an ACC record of better than 6–10. After a 15–16 season in 2011, new athletic director Debbie Yow fired him and hired Gottfried—who has had more success than anyone since Valvano, reaching the NCAA Tournament his first four seasons and making it to the Sweet 16 in 2012 and 2015.

  By almost any standard, Gottfried’s 92–52 record is enviable. But, like the other State coaches, he finds himself wedged between two Hall of Famers. And in the lengthy shadow of Jimmy V.

  —

  In 2010, Mike Krzyzewski turned the tables on Roy Williams—and college basketball—again. And he did it without any one-and-done players.

  The phrase “one-and-done” came into vogue in 2007 when the NBA changed its ru
les to require that a player be at least one year out of high school before he was eligible for the NBA draft. This meant that players like Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwight Howard, who had gone straight from high school to the NBA, would not have been allowed to do so. They would have had to spend a year in college—or overseas—before pursuing the big bucks of the NBA.

  This created the phenomenon of star players making stopovers in college for a year before turning pro. Kentucky coach John Calipari, who did not—as he frequently points out—invent the rule, soon became the man who perfected it. Every year Calipari recruits five blue-chip players and then instantly begins recruiting their replacements. His sales pitch is simple: spend your one year in college with me and I will prepare you for the NBA. He does that superbly and wins lots and lots of games in the process. Plus, since only a handful of his players return for a second year, he doesn’t really have to worry about any pesky questions about academics or going to class.

  By 2009, Krzyzewski had figured out that his utopian notion of only recruiting players who were going to stay three or four years wasn’t working. He hadn’t been to a Final Four since 2004, and Roy Williams was leaving him in the dust. And so, reluctantly, Krzyzewski jumped into the one-and-done pool with everyone else, getting a commitment in the fall of 2009 from a gifted point guard from New Jersey named Kyrie Irving. Krzyzewski knew he’d only have Irving for a year. He took him anyway.

  And then, in what might have been a message from the basketball gods in whom Krzyzewski believes so ardently, Duke won a national championship the following spring with three seniors and two juniors in the starting lineup. The seniors—Brian Zoubek, Jon Scheyer, and Lance Thomas—had been freshmen in 2007, the year of the first-round flameouts in both the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament.

  None was a star—none was even drafted by an NBA team, although Thomas has played briefly in the league—but along with juniors Kyle Singler (a second-round pick) and Nolan Smith (a late first-round pick), they became a superb defensive unit. They were a throwback Krzyzewski team, one that struggled on occasion to score but was capable of playing shutdown defense for most of forty minutes.

  The season turned around when Krzyzewski decided to put Zoubek, a seven-footer who had struggled with injuries and being offensively challenged throughout his career, into the starting lineup. He was the last piece in what became a superb defensive team. The Blue Devils won the ACC Tournament and then won tough games in the regional semis and final against Purdue and Baylor—playing in Houston, a virtual home court for Baylor—to get back to the Final Four for the first time in six seasons.

  They played their best game of the season to beat West Virginia easily in the semifinals and then met Butler, the ultimate Cinderella team, in the championship game.

  Butler was an amazing story. The Bulldogs played in a one-bid league, the Horizon, and had been the school Krzyzewski had “complimented” ten years earlier when he had said they were the kind of team Duke might play in the second round of the tournament. Now they were playing for the title, Butler having beaten Michigan State in the semifinals.

  They were also playing in Indianapolis at Lucas Oil Stadium, which was a little more than 6 miles from the Butler campus—6.4 miles, to be specific, from Hinkle Fieldhouse, the historic old gym where Butler played its home games. When the Bulldogs, coached by thirty-three-year-old Brad Stevens (who looked twenty-three), made the Final Four the national media went wild with Hoosiers references.

  Milan, the tiny high school that had been the real-life subject of the fictionalized movie, had won the 1954 state championship game in Hinkle Fieldhouse. Bobby Plump, the real-life Jimmy Chitwood, who had made the real-life winning shot against Muncie Central, was a Butler graduate who owned a bar in downtown Indianapolis. Almost every member of the national media made two pilgrimages that week: one to Hinkle Fieldhouse, the other to Plump’s bar to hear the real story about the Milan (not Hickory High) Miracle from Plump.

  On the first Monday night in April the only thing standing between the college version of Hoosiers and the theatrical ending most of America wanted to see was Duke. Who better to play the role of villain than the Blue Devils? Duke had arrived in town on Wednesday to be greeted by a front-page cartoon of Krzyzewski in The Indianapolis Star wearing devil’s horns—it was not because of the team’s nickname—a target on his forehead, and a mustache and goatee. An extremely stupid writer from Miami who had never met Krzyzewski wrote the following paragraph:

  For some reason we know if the devil had a face it would have beady little eyes (like Mike Krzyzewski’s). If he had a voice, it would be nasally and annoying (like Krzyzewski’s) and if he had a name it would be impossible to spell and the sound would follow no laws of language (like, well, you know).

  Funny stuff—if you have a double-digit IQ and think making fun of someone’s ethnicity is clever.

  What could have been a better setting for the finale than in a 71,000-seat football stadium with about 67,000 of the fans in the building pulling for Milan, aka Butler?

  The game was something straight out of a movie. Butler was every bit as good as Duke on the defensive end of the floor. The Bulldogs hadn’t given up sixty points to anyone in five tournament games. They contested every pass. So did Duke. They got in the face of every shooter, every ball handler. So did Duke.

  Neither team could score much or build any momentum. The biggest lead all night for either team was five points. And, naturally, the game wasn’t decided until the buzzer. Duke led 60–59 when Kyle Singler missed a wide-open jump shot and Butler rebounded and called time with thirty-three seconds to play. This was the moment when Gordon Hayward—aka Jimmy Chitwood/Bobby Plump—would step into the huddle and say to Stevens, “I’ll make the shot.”

  He almost did. Catching the ball at the top of the key, the six-nine Hayward, who had the ball-handling skills of a guard, tried to go left, then veered right and dribbled to the baseline. As Hayward rose to shoot, Zoubek, seeing him leave his feet, ran at him and forced him to lean back just a little bit to get the shot off. It clanged off the rim, and Zoubek, showing remarkable quickness, turned and grabbed the rebound. He was fouled with 3.6 seconds left.

  Zoubek was not a good free-throw shooter, but he calmly swished the first shot. Then, in a move that almost changed his coaching legacy, Krzyzewski told Zoubek to miss the second shot intentionally. His thinking made some sense: it is much easier for a team to set up a play to get a last-second shot off an inbounds pass—see Duke-Kentucky circa 1992 as the prime example—than off a rebound.

  But 3.6 seconds can be an eternity, especially in a scramble situation off a missed shot.

  As ordered, Zoubek missed the second shot. Hayward grabbed the rebound and began sprinting upcourt as 70,931 people stood and held their breath. Singler, who had done an admirable job guarding Hayward most of the night, came to cut him off—not stop him, but force him to swerve to his right to use up time. But before he could get there, Butler’s Matt Howard almost blew him into the upper deck with a screen that probably would have been a foul at any point in any game—except in the final seconds of a national title game.

  With Singler on the floor checking to see if he still had all his teeth, Hayward charged across midcourt and squared himself to shoot from forty-five feet. The ball was right on line all the way, and for a split second it looked as if it was going in. It hit the glass, then caught the front rim, hung for a moment, and then dropped to the floor.

  Everyone in the building gasped. The majority gasped in disbelief and disappointment. The shot had missed going in by an inch—maybe two. The minority gasped in relief.

  “From where I was [on the floor] it looked like it might go in,” Singler said later.

  Krzyzewski thought the same thing. “What a game,” he said as he hugged his family—wife, children, and grandchildren. “I’ve been in eight of these [national championship games] and this one was the best. They were great. We were great. We won but I
don’t feel as if they lost.”

  If Hayward’s shot had gone in it would have been the greatest finish in college basketball history—perhaps in all of sports history. A miracle shot winning a national championship for a miracle team—against the sport’s Darth Vader. Christian Laettner’s shot and Jim Valvano’s sprint would have been relegated to supporting roles when CBS rolled out highlights every spring. Even though it didn’t go in, Hayward’s shot still took its place in the pantheon of remarkable NCAA Tournament moments.

  If the shot had gone in, Krzyzewski would have been questioned forever about telling Zoubek to miss. It would have been his Bill Buckner moment. (Buckner had 2,700 Major League hits and won Gold Gloves but is only remembered by most for the Mookie Wilson ground ball that skipped through his legs in game six of the 1986 World Series.) If Hayward’s shot had dropped through the basket instead of off the rim, Krzyzewski would have been the coach with three national titles, eleven Final Four trips, and a final-second loss brought on by his decision to tell one of his players to miss a free throw.

  But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, Krzyzewski had his fourth national championship, meaning that only John Wooden, with ten, had more. Adolph Rupp also had four, but those had been won in an era where a team had to win no more than four games to win a title and never had to leave its region of the country to get to the Final Four. The same could be said of nine of Wooden’s ten titles, but ten is a completely overwhelming number—especially since Wooden won them all in a twelve-year period, including seven in a row.

  Krzyzewski was now officially on coaching’s Mount Rushmore. Most people would agree that Wooden, Krzyzewski, Bob Knight, and Dean Smith belonged there. Some would argue for Rupp, but who would you remove to make a place for Rupp?