One on One

by John Feinstein

  None of that happened. In fact, every time I showed up at a game that season, Knight never said a word about my presence. The only real incident occurred when my friend Kit Klingelhoffer claimed he didn’t have room for me in the building when I requested a credential for the Iowa-Indiana game in Assembly Hall.

  “Kit, don’t do this,” I said. “I know you’re under orders from Knight, but you need to talk him off this ledge. All he’s doing is making himself look bad and selling more books.” (This was February and the book had now hit number one on the bestseller list.)

  “It’s not Knight,” he said. “It’s me. I haven’t got room for you.”

  “Well then you are making Knight look bad. Look, you don’t even have to give me a seat on press row. I’ll watch the game in the press room if you guys want your pound of flesh that way. But don’t create a national incident.”

  The fact that Kit wouldn’t budge made it clear he wasn’t making the call. He wasn’t going to tell Knight he was making a mistake and neither was anyone else at Indiana—including President John Ryan, who wouldn’t take a phone call from George Solomon.

  So instead of going to Bloomington that day, I went to Chapel Hill to see North Carolina play Clemson in a game with first place in the ACC at stake. When Dean Smith walked into his postgame press conference and saw me, he smiled. “John, you know you are always welcome at the University of North Carolina,” he said.

  The entire room cracked up.

  Before I flew down to Chapel Hill that day, I taped an interview with Ahmad Rashad that was to air at halftime of the Indiana-Iowa game. Rashad reported that I had been denied a credential to the game and then said, “John, Coach Knight has called you a pimp and he’s called you a whore, what’s your response?”

  I answered instinctively. “Well, Ahmad, I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress in the morning.”

  Dan Dakich told me later that even Knight acknowledged that was a pretty good line. I have used that story and that line as my opening anecdote when speaking publically for most of the last twenty-five years.

  My being “banned” did become a national story as I had predicted. Marv Albert and Bucky Waters discussed it at halftime of the first game of the NBC doubleheader that day, and Al McGuire brought it up during the Indiana-Iowa game. Bucky stood up for me as did Billy Packer on CBS. Al, always the diplomat, said, “I just hate to see the two of them fighting like this.”

  After Keith Smart hit the shot to win the title for Indiana, Alford found me amid the chaos on the floor and gave me a hug.

  “Careful,” I said. “There could be cameras around.”

  “No more games to play,” he said, laughing.

  THE QUESTION FOR ME once basketball season was over was what next? I was now a “hot” property in publishing, and Esther was all over me for another idea. “Something basketball,” she said. “Anything basketball.”

  “But I thought basketball books didn’t sell.”

  “Shut up, John.”

  I actually came up with two ideas: One was to spend the following season traveling far and wide and writing about the game from different levels—coaches and players after the Holy Grail of the Final Four; players who were in it strictly for the love of the game; referees and anyone and everyone involved in college basketball. Publishers loved that idea. But I wanted a two-book contract, since I knew at that moment I was dealing from strength. My second idea was to go back and talk to the players and coaches from Duke’s 1978 team, which had lost the national championship game to Kentucky after finishing tied for last in the ACC a year earlier.

  Everyone had expected that team—whose top ten players were underclassmen—to come back and win at least one national championship the next couple of years, but it never happened. There were a lot of reasons why, and I knew most of them since I’d been in school when Bill Foster had put that team together in what was one of the most overlooked rebuilding jobs in the game’s history.

  A lot of publishers weren’t thrilled with the Duke idea. In fact, only Peter Gethers at Random House was willing to make a legitimate two-book offer. Jeff Neuman had left Macmillan, and I’m honestly not sure if they even made an offer. But I had known Peter through Esther, so I was perfectly happy to sign with him. The money was considerably higher than $17,500, which would lead, inevitably, to yet another conflict with my boss at the Washington Post, George Solomon.

  I HAD KNOWN THAT the success of A Season on the Brink was going to change my life and my relationship with the Post. In one sense I was very fortunate to have a role model in Bob Woodward. That’s not to imply that the success of the book put me anywhere close to Woodward in any way, shape, or form, but it did give me an idea of how to deal with sudden success.

  In 1982, on the tenth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline. Bernstein had left the Post not long after the publication of All the President’s Men and had tried his hand at television and celebrity. Woodward stayed at the Post and eventually became metro editor. He kept producing best-selling books, even after his partnership (though not his friendship) dissolved with Bernstein. Not surprisingly, Bernstein did most of the talking throughout the interview with Koppel.

  At the end, Koppel asked the two men what Watergate had meant to each of them personally. Bernstein went through a lengthy answer about how it had restored his faith in the Constitution, how it had proved the importance of the media acting in its role as the fourth estate, and the importance of never giving up on a story.

  Woodward said nothing. Koppel finally turned to him and said, “And you, Mr. Woodward?”

  Bob smiled, shook his head, and said, “Well, it was a great learning experience as a reporder.”

  I laughed out loud. By then I had worked for Woodward and considered him a friend. The answer was classic Woodward: asked what breaking the single most important story in the history of journalism meant to him personally, his answer was that it was a great learning experience as a reporter.

  To this day, Woodward is still trying to get better. The very best reporters are always asking questions, and Bob still does that. I knew my life was different after Brink. I’d been promoted to columnist and I had more money than I’d ever dreamed of having. But I wanted very much to keep learning and growing as a reporter—if Bob Woodward still had things to learn, God knows I did—and not feel somehow satisfied because I’d been lucky enough to write a bestseller.

  One of the nicest compliments anyone ever paid me was meant at least half in jest. When Sandy Bailey, who was an assistant sports editor at the Post, was asked by someone doing a story on me if the success of the book had changed me, she said, “Unfortunately, not at all.”

  I’d also gotten very good advice from Len Downie, who was then the Post’s managing editor: “I don’t think you’re going to change because of this,” he said. “But what you better understand is that this will change the way people look at you.”

  One person who looked at me differently was George Solomon. George, as mentioned before, liked his reporters young and hungry. As far as George was concerned, the minute the book hit the bestseller list, I ceased being hungry. Or more important, I stopped being someone he felt he could control. The fact that the new dynamic probably wasn’t going to work first became apparent in January. With the book about to go to number one on the bestseller list, Macmillan wanted me to do a more extensive book tour.

  I had plenty of vacation time, but didn’t want to bolt on George in the middle of the basketball season. I went in and explained the situation and told him I needed five days—Monday through Friday—for the tour. I would cover games on the weekend leading into that week and leading out, and leave him with two midweek features that I’d write before I left. Grudgingly, he agreed. I also suggested he send someone to cover Indiana at Iowa that Thursday, the one big midweek game I wouldn’t be able to cover.

  “We don’t need it,” George said. “I d
on’t need to cover a game to promote your book.”

  “George, I don’t need the book promoted. They’re ranked one and four.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Pass.”

  That was fine with me. On Wednesday I was in Indianapolis, preparing for a long day of interviews and appearances, when the phone rang. It was George.

  “I decided you were right,” he said. “We should cover Indiana-Iowa.”

  “Good,” I said. “Who are you going to send?”

  “You,” he answered. “You’re already out there.”

  “George, I’m out here promoting the book.” I looked at my schedule. “I have fourteen commitments tomorrow. The first is at six thirty a.m. and the last is at nine p.m. No way can I make it to Iowa City.”

  “Can’t you just tell them you need to cover a game?”

  “No. This has been set for weeks now. That’s why I told you I need these five days off.”

  “Come on, it’s not that big a deal.”

  “Yes, George, it is a big deal.”

  “So you’re refusing to go?”

  I sighed. This was classic George. “George, I’m not refusing. I can’t.”

  “Great. Thanks for nothing.”

  Looking back, I probably should have gone in to George at the end of that basketball season, when the new book contracts had been signed, and told him that it was time for me to leave the Post. I didn’t want to do that though because I loved daily journalism—still do—and loved being a part of the newspaper. There were few things I enjoyed more than walking through the newsroom for a cup of coffee while working on a story and bumping into someone from the metro staff or national staff and talking to them about what was going on in the real world.

  I thought I could make my new double life—author/daily journalist—work. As it turned out, I was wrong.

  8

  Starting All Over

  THE FIRST THING I did to begin work on my second book was sit down and make a list of people I thought would be good stories during the 1987–88 basketball season: coaches, players, even referees. There were three coaches I knew would be part of the book: Dean Smith, Jim Valvano, and Mike Krzyzewski.

  During my winter in Indiana I had been teased early and often by Knight—and later everyone else as they got to know me—about being “an ACC guy.” Although I consider myself a basketball guy, there’s no arguing that my reporting roots are in the ACC. I started covering ACC basketball as a Duke sophomore, and even though Duke wasn’t very good at the time (a notion people under forty find difficult to grasp), I loved the electricity of the conference, the rivalries, the packed gyms. I also loved the fact that you could see three games on a weekend in the Research Triangle, hopping from Duke to North Carolina to North Carolina State. To me, there was nothing better than a weekend that started in Carmichael Auditorium on Saturday afternoon, then moved to Cameron Indoor Stadium in the evening, and over to Reynolds Coliseum on Sunday afternoon.

  The day I enrolled at Duke as a freshman, the basketball coach was Bucky Waters. Ten days later he resigned—he claims to this day it had nothing to do with my presence on campus—and was replaced on October 18 by Neill McGeachy. The reason the date is significant is that basketball practice began on October 15. It began with athletic director Carl James looking for a coach and a letter to the editor in the student newspaper, written by starting center Bob Fleischer, wondering just what in the world James was up to and if he planned to have anyone coach the team during the season.

  James did have a plan: he was trying to hire Adolph Rupp. Seriously. Rupp had been forced into retirement by Kentucky a year earlier and still wanted to coach. James offered him the job and Rupp was ready to take it. In fact, a press conference was scheduled. But Rupp’s business partner died suddenly and Rupp pulled out, leaving James with a press conference to introduce a new coach and no coach to introduce.

  So James called McGeachy in that morning—minutes before the press conference—and offered him a one-year contract. McGeachy was willing to accept it as long as he wasn’t labeled an “interim” coach. Interim or not, McGeachy was fired after going 10–16, including a game in Chapel Hill that Duke lost in overtime after leading by eight points with seventeen seconds left. This was with no three-point shot.

  Bill Foster was hired a month after the season ended and began a rebuilding program that would land Duke in the Final Four in his fourth season, which happened to be the year after I graduated. During my four years in college, Duke had a combined record in ACC play of 10–42 and an overall record of 50–56. In those days, when Duke players dreamed of making the Final Four, they were talking about the final four of the ACC Tournament. Duke never won an ACC Tournament game while I was in college.

  Duke being lousy actually benefitted me as a reporter. North Carolina and North Carolina State were the power schools in the state during those years. State, led by David Thompson, won the national championship in 1974. North Carolina, coached by Dean Smith, was good every year. In 1977, my senior year, the Tar Heels lost the national championship game to Marquette.

  Because Duke was bad, the local newspapers often didn’t bother to staff their games on the road. That was a boon to me. I had started covering basketball on a regular basis as a sophomore and had gotten to know a number of the writers, most notably Keith Drum of the Durham Morning Herald and Bob Heller of the Greensboro Daily News—Bob having preceded me at the Chronicle by several years.

  Keith and Bob both took an interest in me and were willing to hook me up with their bosses to set up stringing assignments. “Stringers” were often used by newspapers in the old days to contribute to stories written by staff writers—gathering a few extra quotes to feed to a writer or doing research to add to longer stories. If a stringer was lucky, he would occasionally be allowed to write a story himself.

  Keith and Bob got me assigned to write stories for their papers. Sometimes this involved doing a sidebar on a Duke game when the game merited a second story. Sometimes I covered high school games and, more and more often as I grew as a reporter, I’d be asked to write a game story and a sidebar when their papers didn’t cover Duke on the road. By the time I was a senior, I was also stringing for the Winston-Salem Journal, the Charlotte Observer, and the Associated Press. Generally speaking, I was paid $25 a story; $40 if I did a sidebar. The AP paid me $10 at Duke home games, $25 if a ranked team (always the visitor in those days) was playing, in which case I had to write an “alternate” lead—one that had a feature angle rather than the straight “Jim Spanarkel scored twenty-six points and added seven assists last night to lead Duke to a 79–71 victory over East Carolina…”

  By the end of my sophomore year, there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to work at a newspaper when I graduated. In fact, I had plotted my future fairly specifically: I would get a job at a paper in North Carolina with the intention of working at the Washington Post by the time I was thirty. My parents had moved to Washington when I was a senior in high school and I had fallen in love with reading the Post—especially the sports section. I loved Shirley Povich, who was technically retired but still wrote columns, and Ken Denlinger, who eventually succeeded Povich as the number one columnist. I thought Leonard Shapiro, who covered the Redskins, did an amazing job of bringing a team and a season to life. I loved the style section and reading about national politics in the A-section. Fortunately, you could buy the Post every day in the student union, and I never missed it.

  For all intents and purposes, my major at Duke was the Chronicle, because that’s where I did most of the learning that would take me where I wanted to go when I graduated. Technically, my major was history and I had a number of professors—notably the great Bill Scott—I really enjoyed, but there wasn’t any doubt during my last two years about what I wanted to do.

  The Chronicle was an amazing place. It was completely student run, and the tradition was for the older kids to teach the younger ones.

  By the time I was a senior, I was essenti
ally a full-time newspaper reporter. By then my friend and former roommate David Arneke was editing something called the Carolina Financial Times, so I wrote features for him. I was the Chronicle’s New York Times stringer—which really was stringing work, feeding quotes to the paper for use in lengthy pieces—and I was assistant managing editor and sports editor of the Chronicle, in addition to doing all the stories I was doing for the various local papers.

  On one Duke road trip to West Virginia and Duquesne, I wrote game stories for Durham, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem —in addition to the Chronicle. I had to drive back roads from Washington to Morgantown because the interstate had been closed by a snowstorm, and I almost got stuck after a tractor-trailer had overturned and blocked the road. It took about ninety minutes before police could clear a path for cars to get by, and I was almost out of gas—and heat—by the time we got clear.

  This was in the middle of the energy crisis, and the heat in WVU Coliseum that night was set at 58 degrees. As soon as the game ended—West Virginia won—the heat was turned off. I went to the locker rooms to get quotes and then headed back to the media room to write. I could see my breath as I walked across the court to get back to where my typewriter was waiting for me. I guess all the local guys had gone back to their offices to write, because there were only two people in the room (and, I think, in the building): Tom Mickle, the Duke sports information director, and me.

  I sat at my typewriter writing as fast as my frozen fingers would allow, and Mick stood there with his coat on, taking off his gloves each time I handed him a page so he could feed it into the telecopier, which transmitted back to the newspapers at the lightning-fast rate of six minutes per page. By the time we walked out of the building shortly after midnight, the parking lot was pitch-black and there wasn’t a soul in sight. You want to talk about having good friends, I never had a better one than Tom Mickle.