One on One

by John Feinstein

  “We weren’t very good to start with, and then they left their starters in the game until the end so we got humiliated. When I was walking into the hotel that night, none of our fans would look at me. They all turned away from me. They were embarrassed. A lot of that night was about hate: I hated what my team had become that season, I hated my opponent, and I hated the fans.”

  After the Duke-Virginia game ended, I stayed at the Omni for the last game of the day between Maryland and Georgia Tech. Late in the second half of a game that ended up going to overtime, Bobby Dwyer, who had been on Krzyzewski’s staff at Army and had followed him to Duke, showed up on press row. I was sitting with Drum when Dwyer grabbed an empty seat—a lot of the North Carolina writers were writing in the press room at that point in the evening—and told Drum and me that he needed our help.

  “You guys need to come to our hotel,” he said. “You’ve got to get Mike out of there. Mickie is in the room crying, convinced they’re getting fired. No one will even look him in the eye. He’s bouncing off the walls. He needs someone from outside the team to get him out of there.”

  Keith and I both had to write when the game was over—and it went to overtime, so it took a while.

  “Are you sure he isn’t going to try and sleep?” I asked as we piled into Dwyer’s car at about 1 a.m.

  “No way,” Dwyer said.

  It was pouring down rain by then. We drove to Duke’s hotel on the outskirts of Atlanta. Krzyzewski, Tom Mickle, and his assistant SID Johnny Moore were waiting in the lobby. We went from there to a nearby Denny’s. As soon as we sat down, the waitress brought everyone a glass of water.

  Moore picked up his glass and held it up as if to give a toast. “Here’s to forgetting tonight,” he said.

  Krzyzewski picked up his glass. “Here’s to never f—ing forgetting tonight” was his return toast.

  I’ve written and told that story often in the past because, to me, it defines Krzyzewski. He knew he had failed as a coach that year. He made no excuses for it. He didn’t blame it on having to play four freshmen or on his seniors wanting no part of the freshmen. That was his fault. Sure, he was mad at Holland, but the fact that his team was lousy wasn’t Holland’s fault.

  “I’ve always been a believer that anger can be a very good thing if you channel it the right way,” he said that day at Georgetown Prep. “I was really angry that night—more at myself than anyone, but also at where we were. I still thought I was a good coach, but I knew I had to do a lot better job than I’d been doing.”

  That may explain why he instantly shot Dwyer down when he brought up the fact that Tom Sheehey, who had made a verbal commitment to Virginia, might still be open to being recruited by Duke.

  “No,” Krzyzewski said before the words were out of Dwyer’s mouth. “First of all, we don’t do that. We’ll kick Virginia’s ass the right way, not that way. Plus, if we can’t win with these kids [the freshmen] and Tommy Amaker [who was an incoming freshman] then we should get fired.”

  When Krzyzewski first arrived at Duke, Drum and I had jokingly started to call him “the captain” as a takeoff on Knight’s insistence on being called “the general”—even though Knight had never risen above the rank of private during his brief stint in the Army while he was coaching at West Point. Krzyzewski had left the Army in 1974 as a captain, so Keith and I started calling him captain. To this day, when Krzyzewski calls me on the phone he always starts out by saying, “Fein, it’s the captain.” (At Duke everyone called me “Fein” since there were about a million guys named John who worked at the Chronicle and that’s what he heard people call me when he first got there.)

  And, almost without fail, that night in the Denny’s will come up at some point in almost every season. Krzyzewski and Maryland’s Gary Williams are among a very small handful of coaches I consider friends. On the night that each won his first national championship, the first thing said on the court as the nets were coming down was a reference to how long I’d known them and how far they had come to get to that moment.

  “Long way from Fort Myer,” Gary said in Atlanta in 2002, almost twenty-four years after I first covered his teams at American when they played their games in the tiny Army-base gym at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia.

  Eleven years earlier, when Krzyzewski won his first national title in Indianapolis, he grabbed my hand when I offered it in congratulations and said, “We’ve come a long way from Denny’s, haven’t we?”

  Yes, he certainly had. And like Gary, he remembered that I’d been around long before he was a star. Which is why I laughed when Mike’s longtime right-hand man, Mike Cragg, was shocked when I told him I’d be riding the bus with the team to Greensboro on the night Krzyzewski would win his 880th game. Cragg has worked with Krzyzewski for twenty-five years, first as Duke’s SID and now as his chief fundraiser and non-basketball confidant.

  “You’re talking to him by phone on the bus, right?” Cragg said that afternoon.

  “No, I’m talking to him from the next seat on the bus,” I said. It had been Krzyzewski’s idea: ride the bus, talk during the ride, and finish up in the locker room while he was killing time before the game.

  “I don’t believe it,” Cragg said. “He never lets anyone not connected with the team on the bus. And no one sits next to him ever except Mickie.”

  To me riding the bus was no big deal. I’ve done it with numerous teams in various sports through the years. Often it is the perfect time to talk to a coach, because there’s not much else for him to do during the ride.

  “Well, I’m riding the bus,” I said, sort of enjoying Cragg’s dismay.

  “I still don’t get it,” Cragg said.

  “I do,” I said. “I was in the f—ing Denny’s.”

  9

  V. and Other Characters

  I WAS NEVER IN a Denny’s with Jim Valvano, but I was frequently in his office at three or four o’clock in the morning.

  Like almost every coach I have ever met, he couldn’t sleep after games. There would be too much adrenaline pumping to just go home, put up his feet, and go to sleep. A lot of coaches use that time and pent-up energy to watch tape. Valvano didn’t watch tape. When NC State played at home in Reynolds Coliseum, he would do all his postgame interviews and then head for his office. Pizza, beer, and wine would be ordered, and Valvano would hold court. His assistant coaches were always there and so were various friends. Often I would show up for games at State, not so much to see the game as to hang out in Valvano’s office afterward.

  Most nights, Valvano’s wife, Pam, would call sometime after midnight to ask when he was coming home. Jim would promise her it would be soon, pick up another slice of pizza, and resume telling stories. Most were hilariously funny. My favorite was the one about the barber. But there were many, many others. Such as the one about the dog:

  “First year here we lose twice to Carolina—get blown out in both games,” he said. “After the second game, an old State alum in a red jacket comes up to me and he says, ‘Now, coach, I know you’re a Yankee so you don’t really understand yet about our rivalries down here, but we can not be losing to the Tar Heels this way.’

  “I tell him I really do understand and next year, gosh darn it, we are going to do a lot better against the Tar Heels. He shakes his head and says, ‘No, coach, you really don’t get it. You see, if you lose at home to the Tar Heels next year, we’re going to have to kill your dog.’

  “I look at him. He’s not smiling. So I say, ‘I get the message, but I do have to tell you I don’t have a dog.’

  “Now he smiles and he says, ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  “Next morning I go out to get the newspaper. On my stoop is a basket with a blanket on it. I look under the blanket and—you guessed it—the cutest little puppy you’ve ever seen is in the basket. There’s a note tied around his neck. It says, ‘Don’t get too attached.’ ”

  Valvano told that story in public. He never did tell the Dean/barber story in public. It had a bi
t of an edge to it, revealing that there were times that he chafed just as Krzyzewski and other ACC coaches did over Dean’s godlike status. This frustration was best summed up once by Lefty Driesell after his Maryland team had won a truly dreadful game, 40–36, over Krzyzewski’s second Duke team. Lefty had opted to hold the ball—there was no shot clock—during most of the second half, and his players had reacted angrily to that decision.

  “We should have killed that team,” said Adrian Branch, who was a freshman at the time. “No way should we have held the ball against them. We kept the game close.” Many of his teammates expressed similar sentiments. I, of course, quoted them in the next day’s newspaper. A couple of days later at practice someone asked Lefty about his players’ comments.

  “Where’d you see that?” Lefty asked. (I wasn’t at practice that day because I was still in North Carolina working, naturally, on a Dean Smith story. Michael Wilbon was there and he was the one who asked the first question and later told me the story.)

  “It was in John Feinstein’s story.”

  “Fahnsteen, Fahnsteen, I’m sick of that name, Fahnsteen,” Lefty said. “All them years, Dean comes into Cole Field House, holds the ball, holds the ball, holds the ball. Evabody says, ‘Dean’s great, Dean’s a genius, Dean’s God!’ Aah hold the ball one game, evabody says, ‘Lefty’s a dog!’ ”

  He was, of course, right. Dean was a great coach and, especially in North Carolina, people did think he was God. Which leads back to a Krzyzewski recruiting story. He was making a home visit during his first season to a kid named Mark Acres, a 6'11" Californian who was good enough to later play in the NBA.

  “It was one of those visits where, as a coach, you know almost right away it isn’t working,” Krzyzewski said. “It’s something in your gut. You know you aren’t getting the kid. But you still have to go through the ritual, make the pitch, tell him everything, and see if by some chance you strike a chord. The entire evening his mom never said a word. So finally I turned to her and said, ‘Mrs. Acres, is there anything at all you’d like to know about Duke? About our program? About how Mark might fit in with us?’

  “She shook her head and said, ‘No, I don’t need to ask any questions. The only thing that’s important is that Mark go to college someplace where he can be close to God.’ ”

  At that point Krzyzewski figured he had nothing to lose. “Well, you know, if Mark comes to Duke, God will be coaching ten miles down the road in Chapel Hill, so you might want to give us some serious thought.”

  Acres went to Oral Roberts.

  A lot of Valvano’s stories weren’t repeatable in a public forum. One he did tell in public was about the year the NCAA changed recruiting rules and took coaches off the road for the entire month of August. “I came home and announced to my wife, ‘I’m going to be home for the entire month of August.’ She said, ‘Great! I want to have sex twenty-five times,’ I looked at her and said, ‘Put me down for two.’ ”

  The stories always stretched well into the night. Eventually people began to trickle out. The pizza was gone, the wine and beer mostly gone. I would linger. The best times with Valvano always came after he stopped performing. Sooner or later—usually later—it would be just him and me and he would turn serious. He would lie down on his office couch and talk about how confused he was about his life.

  “All I ever wanted to do was cut the nets down, win a national championship,” he would say. “When I did clinics at summer camps, at the end I would make the kids pick me up on their shoulders so I could cut down the nets. Then I won the national championship when I was thirty-seven years old. All of a sudden I had done coaching. Maybe I could win it again, but it would never feel the way it felt that first time. It couldn’t.

  “So now I’m looking for the next thing. What do I want to be when I grow up? Do I want to be Dean Smith? No. Do I want to be on TV? I’m good at it, but is there that much to it? I mean really—do I want to spend my life breaking down defenses and talking about how great every coach in the world is? I don’t think so. Do I want to get paid to be funny? I already get paid to be funny when I speak. I mean sometimes I wonder what the hell is real in my life—besides my family.

  “Is there anything real about coaching? Selling yourself to kids, glad-handing alumni, talking to the media? What’s real about it? I’ll tell you what’s real: the forty minutes during a game. That’s real. You win, you lose. There’s no talking your way out of an L. An L is an L and a W is a W. Period. Doesn’t matter what the refs did or didn’t do or anything else.”

  He worried because he knew he wasn’t spending enough time with his three daughters. He was always running—giving speeches, trying to host a variety show in Los Angeles, hosting an awful sports bloopers show, doing the CBS Morning show in New York on Mondays, starting a company that sold blue jeans. He flirted with the NBA and took the job as athletic director at State because he was bored just coaching.

  He took risks on players he probably shouldn’t have taken. He kept winning—reaching the Elite Eight in 1985 and 1986 after the national championship in 1983—but spent less and less time making sure his players were going to class and staying out of trouble. In 1986 he walked into the sparkling new Dean E. Smith Center (aka the Dean Dome) in Chapel Hill and looked up in awe at all the banners hanging from the rafters.

  There were national championship banners (1957 and 1982) and there were banners for Final Fours and for making the NCAA Tournament. There were banners for ACC championships—tournament and regular season—and NIT championship banners, plus banners for playing in the NIT. There were also banners for players’ numbers that hadn’t necessarily been retired but were “honored.” There were even banners for years when Carolina had tied for an ACC regular season championship. Those banners said “ACC Champions” in bold letters across the top. At the bottom, in much smaller letters, they said “tie.”

  “Look at all those banners,” Valvano said. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to get a banner for the last two seasons that says, ‘National Champions.’ Then at the bottom I’ll just put ‘almost.’ ”

  In 1987, after finishing sixth in the ACC in the regular season, NC State beat Duke, Wake Forest (in double overtime), and Carolina, which had been 14–0 in conference play, to win the ACC Tournament. A year later, the Wolfpack finished second in the conference, although it was upset in the first round of the NCAA Tournament by Murray State.

  Valvano was still riding high during those years, still looking for the Next Thing but making a lot of money during the search. Then came the book—or, more specifically, the book jacket. In January of 1989 a story broke that a forthcoming book on State and Valvano would, according to the jacket, reveal all sorts of improprieties within the program and paint a picture of a program running amok. Sports Illustrated had the manuscript and was preparing to publish an excerpt.

  The source for most of the information in the book was a former State manager. As soon as I heard about the book, I knew it was tainted. The reason? I had received a call about a year earlier from someone who said he had a close friend who had “serious dirt” on Jim Valvano and NC State. To be completely honest, I wasn’t happy to get the phone call. I liked Jim Valvano—a lot. He’d been good to me. The last thing I would want to do was write a story that would bring grief to him.

  But as a reporter I had to hear the guy out and find out if he, or his friend and his so-called “dirt,” were credible. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be doing my job. So I started asking questions. What I got was that the guy’s friend had been a manager at State. He knew all the players and had information detailing multiple rules violations that had taken place. I sighed and told the guy I would have to meet his friend in person.

  “Before you do that,” the guy said, “we have to agree on payment.”

  “Payment?”

  “He wants to be paid for this information. He’s handing you a gold mine.”

  I had no idea what the guy was handing me, but I knew nei
ther I nor the Post was going to be handing him any money. I know that checkbook journalism is practiced in the tabloid world all the time and that TV and radio stations pay athletes and coaches and managers to appear on their air all the time. But if you are trying to write the truth and be fair—a practice I know many people believe doesn’t exist—you can’t pay sources. If you pay a source it can easily lead them to stretch the truth or flat out make things up to keep the money coming. I know there have been important stories broken through checkbook journalism, but the places where I’ve worked simply don’t practice it. Plus, it is a Pandora’s box. You pay one source, others will (correctly) demand they be paid too. People have an absolute right to not tell their stories or be sources of information. But if they choose to be sources or to tell their stories, you have to do everything you can to be sure the information is given voluntarily and with as little axe to grind as possible.

  I’ve only been asked directly for money on one other occasion. That was when I was working on my first baseball book and asked Barry Bonds, then in his final year in Pittsburgh, if we could talk at some point during the 1992 season.

  “You paying?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, if you’re not paying, I’m not talking. And if you put my name in the book, I’ll sue you.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Bonds was saying no or that he was being a jerk about it. The only other person who had turned me down that year was Danny Jackson, who was pitching for the Cubs. When I asked Jackson during spring training if we might talk at some point during the season, he shook his head and said, “I don’t talk to people for books.”

  “Really?” I said. “How many times have you been asked to talk to people for books?”

  I probably should have just let the Bonds thing go and walked away, but I couldn’t resist asking Barry one more question.

  “So when you just did that interview outside with ESPN [we were standing in front of his locker], did they pay you for it?”