by Steve Beaven
Eldorado High School games are public spectacles, like a circus that comes through once a week each summer and sets up on the town square: every night hot, humid, and ever on the edge of chaos. Everybody knows that getting a seat for an Eagles game means getting to the gym early, before the JV teams play. By the time the varsity takes the floor and Mike Duff wipes the dust from the bottom of his rubber soles, every seat is filled. The people of Eldorado know their days with Mike are numbered, that his astonishing gifts will soon be on display for the entire country to see. So, in the limited time before he leaves to play college ball, before he’s whisked away in a private helicopter by a big-time coach promising the sun and the moon and everything in between, they savor each moment and hold him close like a precious child.
With Joe B. Hall on hand, Mike plays as if everyone on the floor is moving in slow motion—everyone but him. His game is smooth and powerful, depending on what’s necessary at that particular moment. Sometimes he works methodically under the basket, shooting soft, turn-around jumpers over smaller defenders, tipping in his teammates’ misses, and muscling his way to the rim. At 6'7" and 210 pounds, with chiseled shoulders, he is a dominant rebounder, bigger, stronger, and more rugged than nearly every kid on the floor. But recently he’s been working on his jumper, stepping from beneath the basket out to the baseline, to add some variety to his game. When he shoots, both of his arms extend fully over his head and he releases the ball at the apex of his jump with a simple flick of the wrist. It’s a shot that can’t be blocked. It’s a thing of beauty, punctuated by a soft whoosh each time the ball sails through the net. Tonight, Mike drops thirty-seven points on Metropolis High School, breaking Eldorado’s season scoring record. His teammates, however, can’t match his intensity and the Eagles lose by eight. Afterward, Joe B. Hall tells the radio play-by-play man that he likes Mike’s shooting and his explosive move to the basket.
Then he makes his way to the narrow, crowded hallway outside the coach’s office, where the college scouts gather after every game, for an audience with Eldorado’s favorite son.
During the brutal winter of 1977, more than one hundred schools—112, to be exact—chased after Mike Duff. Indiana. Indiana State. Duke. Illinois. A young coach from the army named Mike Krzyzewski. They drove the narrow country highways, from 13 to 45 to 142, past Equality and Muddy and Dykersburg, pulling up to Mike’s house on Organ Street or staking out the high school gym. Eldorado coach Bob Brown deftly managed the flow of coaches at games and practices and advised Mike on the merits of the college programs that pursued him most aggressively. He pitted schools against each other in the newspapers to drive up Mike’s value. Missouri’s Norm Stewart had called, Brown told one reporter, and was due in town next week. He told another writer that Jack Hartman of Kansas State sat with him till 10:00 p.m. on a Sunday night to talk about Mike. And Cincinnati was coming on hard. The coaches, in turn, relied on flattery and other inducements to gain an edge. Wake Forest sent Mike a letter from golf icon Arnold Palmer, extolling the virtues of his alma mater. One coach promised a scholarship to another Eldorado player if Mike would commit to his school. Another told Brown that Mike was good enough to start for his team at that very moment. It didn’t matter whether it was true. What mattered was how it sounded and whether it matched Mike’s own visions of his future.
Coach Hall’s visit was a helpful barometer of Mike’s place among the nation’s top recruits. The year before, Hall had snatched up a hotshot guard named Jay Shidler, the Blond Bomber, from nearby Lawrenceville, and now he was taking a long look at Mike. At that moment, the University of Kentucky was ranked second in the nation, with nine players headed to the NBA. In thirteen months, Kentucky would win its fifth national championship. Hall’s mere presence made a powerful impression on Mike. The Kentucky border lay only twenty miles south of town, and Mike watched UK games on TV all winter. He hoped to make a visit to Lexington in the spring.
Still, coaches from lesser schools hustled into town to make their own impression, employing every tool at their disposal. Some of them even told the truth. Indiana State coach Bob King visited the Eldorado gym that season and made a promise none of his rivals could match.
“We’re sitting in Coach Brown’s office,” recalls Gary Barton, an Eldorado assistant coach at the time, “and Coach King told Mike, ‘If you come to Indiana State, we’ll have the best two white forwards in the nation.’”
It was not the last time that Mike Duff would be compared to Larry Bird.
Eldorado rises up out of the flatlands of southern Illinois, a cluster of modest homes and wide green lawns amid underground coal mines and uninterrupted fields of corn and soybeans. Here, in 1977, Mike Duff achieved the near-mythic status reserved solely for high school athletes in small towns. He was the best player in Illinois on one of the state’s best teams. He dated the prettiest girl at Eldorado High School, and his picture was in the paper nearly every day. He was a handsome boy, with a soft, open face and feathered brown hair parted down the middle. The people of Eldorado projected their most cherished virtues onto Mike. He was polite, humble and selfless, kind to the elderly, and a fitting role model for the children. He signed autographs for youngsters outside the locker room after games and coached them at summer basketball camps. One girl used crayons to draw a picture of the two of them in purple Eldorado uniforms, standing on a green court in front of a brown basket, under a violet sky. In speech bubbles, they both said, “Hi.” At the top she scrawled, “I love you.”
Greg Goodley was ten years old in 1977 and obsessed with Eldorado Eagles basketball. He went to the games with his parents, and sometimes, when every seat was filled, he sat on the floor with the other kids, near the players, coaches, and cheerleaders. At Eldorado Elementary School, Goodley and his classmates wrote Mike’s name on their T-shirts, as if they were wearing their favorite player’s jersey. A couple of times, when Mike passed by Greg’s house, he pulled over and shot a few baskets before hopping back into his car and driving away. For Greg, those few moments remained vivid decades later, after he’d had children of his own, after he’d coached basketball at the high school, after Mike left town forever, through all the sadness to come.
Mike found the recruiting process especially draining. He hated the scrutiny. He hated the handshakes and backslaps. The pressure wore him down. It was as if he had been strapped to a plow in the middle of a cornfield, while a long line of coaches stood by and watched, taking measurements and jotting notes. He didn’t mind whether they came to the games. But if he knew a college coach was waiting at the house, he wouldn’t come home until they’d left. Midway through his senior season, Mike told the Eldorado coaches he didn’t want to talk to the scouts anymore. Coach Brown advised him to meet only with a select few. Otherwise, Brown banned recruiters from Eldorado practices, told them that Mike didn’t want to talk, and instructed student managers to hustle him past the college coaches and out of the gym. Duff just wanted to go fishing. He was seventeen years old, overwhelmed, and unable to decide where to play. He’d made official visits to Kansas and Duke. Kentucky was on his short list. Southern Illinois was practically home. His mom liked Missouri.
And then there was a dark horse candidate: the University of Evansville, sixty miles northeast of Eldorado, winner of five small-college national titles. UE had ambitious plans for its basketball team. The College Division and the University Division had been renamed Division II and Division I, and in the fall of 1977 UE would move up to the sport’s highest level. Now the university was searching for a new coach, preferably a young guy, eager to lead a once-proud program into a bright new epoch. Honestly? Everyone in the entire city of Evansville, its burgeoning suburbs, and the farm towns of southern Indiana wanted to bring back Jerry Sloan, who was nearing the end of his NBA career with the Chicago Bulls. His return had been rumored for years, since Sloan led the Aces to national championships in 1964 and 1965. It sounded so natural: as soon as Jerry retired from the NBA, he’d come home to Evansvil
le to take over for his mentor, the legendary Arad McCutchan.
Then he’d bring Mike Duff to town. They’d known each other for years.
Duff and Sloan met on a summer day at a Catholic seminary in the St. Louis suburbs sometime around 1973. Lean and rugged at 6'6" and 195 pounds, Sloan made his name in the NBA as a fierce defender who suffered no fools and never gave an inch, even in practice. Each summer, he worked as a guest instructor at basketball camps in southern Illinois. On the day he met Mike, Sloan had come to Ed Macauley’s Camp for Boys at St. Henry’s Seminary to pass along, in his deep baritone, the very foundation of his competitive philosophy: diving after loose balls. Running nonstop. Playing defense with maniacal zeal. Macauley was a former college and pro star who brought NBA players to his camps every summer to work with slack-jawed boys from small towns, many of whom would never make the high school varsity. The weeklong camps cost a hundred bucks or so, and every year at least one kid played with such skill and athleticism that he left the rest of the campers to consider quitting basketball altogether and joining the Boy Scouts.
That week, Mike dominated every kid in his age group. He didn’t even have his driver’s license yet. But he was already as big as a grown man, nearly as tall as Sloan. When Jerry arrived at camp, the high school coaches told him that Mike wanted to play him one-on-one.
“I’m not playing anyone one-on-one,” Sloan said, deadpan as always. “I couldn’t beat my mother.”
But for celebrity instructors, playing against the camp kids was part of the job. Games of H-O-R-S-E or one-on-one provided each boy a brush with greatness that he could brag about back home. Sloan understood the unwritten rules of the summer camp circuit, and he didn’t mind squaring off against Mike Duff. After a few minutes, though, Sloan called time-out to make a point: Mike would never achieve greatness if he didn’t dive to the floor for every ball like his life depended on whether or not he got it. When their game resumed, that’s what Mike did, playing with a desperation that Jerry Sloan never forgot.
Mike had already been declared a prodigy in his hometown. Shawneetown, Illinois, sat at the tip of the Shawnee National Forest, less than four miles across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Shawneetown was best known as the tiny burg that was completely engulfed by the Ohio River during the great flood of 1937, when waters as high as the windows at the grocery store rushed down Main Street and destroyed everything in sight. The city was rebuilt a few miles inland, and this is where Mike showed the first signs of his immense potential. Even in junior high, he was a rare talent in a town of seventeen hundred, where one player with extraordinary skills could alter the fortunes of the tiny high school’s basketball team. But by the time he was a freshman, Mike had already outgrown the competition in Shawneetown. After Kay and Bill Duff split, Kay moved her son and his three younger sisters seventeen miles northwest to Eldorado, where Mike enrolled at the high school. This did not go over well in Shawneetown. The local fans didn’t want to give him up. So they fought to keep him. The state’s high school athletic association got involved. There were hearings and meetings, and Mike’s family had to hire an attorney to untangle the whole mess. But Shawneetown’s challenge ultimately failed, and Mike began classes at Eldorado High School in 1974.
Not long after school started in Eldorado, Mike stopped by to watch junior varsity football practice. He’d never played organized football before. But his new classmates encouraged him to give it a try, and the coach was happy to have such a big, athletic kid on the team. In his first game, after minimal practice, Mike started at defensive end. It was a Monday night in Eldorado, the Eagles versus Johnston City. Mike was a raw rookie, but it didn’t show. He knocked down a pass and sacked the quarterback twice. He also made a spectacular interception at close range in the Johnston City backfield that Eldorado coaches remember in amazement to this day, like old men recalling their first love. The story spread through Eldorado quickly, embellished further with every telling. Eventually the tale ended with Mike sprinting downfield for a touchdown. But the exaggeration wasn’t necessary. Everyone in Eldorado knew Mike possessed rare skills. They anticipated great things from him. But they didn’t expect him to make his mark so soon, and no one figured he’d do it on the football field. It wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Mike had already made a memorable first impression.
That game, however, was the pinnacle of Mike’s football career. The next game, a week later, was his last. He planted a foot while chasing the quarterback and tore up his left knee. The injury required surgery and delayed his debut for the Eldorado basketball team. But it wouldn’t diminish his skills.
Ambitious and charismatic, Eldorado basketball coach Bob Brown enjoyed an outsize reputation in the small world of high school basketball in southern Illinois. Charming and profane, just thirty years old, Brown combed his thinning hair across his otherwise bare scalp and wore flashy suits, cut just right, with lapels the size of pterodactyl wings. He cultivated relationships with the media and spoke openly of his efforts to get a college head-coaching job. His flamboyance, titanic ego, and blunt demeanor didn’t endear him to everyone. But many of his assistant coaches and players—including Mike—were utterly devoted to him. Brown didn’t like to be alone, so some nights he’d head to a dive bar out in the country to eat cheeseburgers, drink beers, and talk basketball with his assistant coaches. He smoked a lot, even in the gym, standing beneath the basket during practice with a cigarette cupped in one hand, hidden from view in case the principal or superintendent happened by.
Brown had been a schoolboy legend in the late ’50s and early ’60s at nearby West Frankfort High School. He played at the University of Illinois and then served as a scout and coach for the Illinois freshman team before entering the family furniture business. In 1972, Eldorado High School hired him as a PE teacher and head basketball coach. Brown brought a youthful energy to his new job. In an era when high school and college coaches controlled their teams like dictators and used fear to motivate their players, Brown’s philosophy was different. He was young for a high school coach and took his time with the kids, listened to them, read their moods, and made them laugh. If he yelled and swore at a boy in practice, later on he’d hang an arm over the kid’s shoulder and praise his hustle or his smarts. Brown won a lot of ball games in Eldorado, 121 in five years. In 1974, the season before Mike arrived, Brown’s team finished undefeated and ranked number one in the Class A division before losing in the state tournament.
As a recruiter for Illinois, Brown had traveled the country looking for prospects, hanging out in gyms from Kansas City to New York. But he’d never come across a player as skilled as Mike Duff. As a sophomore with a weak knee, Mike scored thirteen points a game. He averaged twenty-five points the following season, when Eldorado won thirty-one games in a row before losing in the quarterfinals of the state tournament. As a senior in 1977, he turned in one of the greatest seasons in state history, averaging thirty-two points per game—more than any player in Illinois. In four state tournament games, Mike poured in 131 points. The Illinois High School Association later named him as one of the “100 Legends of the Boys Basketball Tournament,” where he joined an all-star lineup of future NBA players, including a pint-size point guard from Chicago named Isiah Thomas.
On February 3, 1977, Jerry Sloan stepped into the upscale Executive Inn in downtown Evansville for his first press conference as the new head coach at the University of Evansville. He wore a gray three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie, his brown hair nearly covering his ears, longer and more stylish than the crew cut he wore fifteen years before. But Sloan hadn’t changed. He answered reporters’ questions with the lantern-jawed sincerity that was his trademark.
After eleven years in the NBA, Sloan had retired and returned, duty bound, to replace the man who’d brought him to town in the first place.
Jerry Sloan grew up in poverty in Gobbler’s Knob, Illinois, a splat on the map sixteen miles from the nearest post office. He was one of ten children raised by
a widow who took no sass from anyone, least of all her kids. Sloan wore bib overalls, graduated from a one-room elementary school, and made a name for himself at McLeansboro High School. McCutchan was one of many college coaches who recruited him. At first, Sloan turned him down in favor of the University of Illinois. But once classes started, he found the Illinois campus big and intimidating. He grew desperately homesick, dropped out of school before practice even began, and moved home. Back in Gobbler’s Knob, he took a job in the oil fields. It was nasty work: wet, cold, and unforgiving. When Sloan came in one night after a day in the fields, his mother asked him whether this was the way he wanted to spend the rest of his life. It was not. So he called Evansville to see whether McCutchan still wanted him. McCutchan didn’t hesitate and Sloan soon moved to Indiana. He enrolled in classes and took a job at the Whirlpool plant as he waited to begin his college career.