One on One

by John Feinstein

  “It’s good for Jim that it’s over, believe me,” he said, his eyes dry and clear but red. “No one will ever know what he went through to give that speech in New York.”

  A little less than two years after Valvano died, Krzyzewski found himself in Duke Hospital, the place where Valvano had been treated and had died. Krzyzewski had had back surgery in the summer of 1994 and had tried to come back too soon. On the morning of a road trip to Georgia Tech, Mickie Krzyzewski looked at her husband, who was pale and weak and barely able to stand up to get out of his chair at the kitchen table, and said quietly, “If you get on the plane today and don’t go to the hospital right now and find out what’s wrong, I’m leaving you.”

  Krzyzewski knew she was serious. He skipped the plane trip and went to the hospital, where the doctors ran tests to find out what was wrong.

  “I was convinced I had cancer,” he said. “All I could think about was Jimmy. There was just too much that was the same: He had back problems, I had back problems. He was forty-six when he was diagnosed, I was forty-six. He had three daughters, I had three daughters. I knew it was cancer. I was convinced I was going to die too.”

  It wasn’t cancer. Krzyzewski had simply pushed himself too hard too soon, believing the old Army mantra of mind over matter. Tell yourself your body can do something and it will do it. Only his body was in complete collapse. He was exhausted, burned out—pick your phrase. The doctors told him he shouldn’t coach again that season, which made him feel as if he had failed his team.

  “In the Army, if the leader has to leave his unit, he’s failed,” he said. “I had left my unit. I had failed it.”

  He went to athletic director Tom Butters and offered to resign. Butters told him he wasn’t resigning—he was going to return when he was healthy and take his program back to the top. Which is what he did.

  Almost eighteen years after Valvano’s death, after the V Foundation has raised more than $70 million for cancer research, Krzyzewski’s voice still gets very soft when he talks about Valvano.

  “People always talked about how he let his program at NC State go after the national championship,” he said. “Let me tell you something. The program he built with the V Foundation was as great a job of coaching as anyone has ever done. Look at the legacy he left behind.”

  Part of that legacy is the work Krzyzewski has done to help raise that money. To Krzyzewski, doing that sort of thing isn’t heroic in any way. “To those who much is given, much is expected,” he says, referencing the Bible (Luke 12:48). “I’ve been given a lot.”

  WORKING ON A SEASON INSIDE, surrounded by those guys, was a very different experience than working on A Season on the Brink. Day to day it was a lot more fun, if not quite as mesmerizing.

  Every week I would sit down with the college basketball schedule and decide where to go. I had put together my “list” of major characters before the season, so a lot of what I did was built around them. But if a game or a player popped up who intrigued me, I just got on a plane and went to see them.

  The way that season went may have been best defined by a trip I made in late January. On a Wednesday morning, I flew to Knoxville to have lunch with Tennessee coach Don DeVoe. DeVoe, a very good coach and very good guy, was fighting to keep his job that season. About once a month I’d fly to Knoxville on a game day, meet DeVoe for lunch at a place that had spectacular banana pudding, and then stick around for the game that night.

  On this trip I was supposed to go from Knoxville to Tulsa and then to Tucson and back to Pittsburgh. I was going to interview Oral Roberts—yes, the Oral Roberts—in Tulsa and then go to Tucson to see Steve Kerr, who to this day is one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever encountered, before flying on a Sunday night red-eye to see Paul Evans, then the coach at Pittsburgh, on Monday before his team played Providence that night.

  On Thursday morning I flew from Knoxville to Memphis, en route to Tulsa. From the airport, I called Dave Pritchett, who was an assistant coach at Oral Roberts University. I wanted to make certain I was still all set to talk to Mr. Roberts.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Pritchett said.

  I had first known Pritchett when he was Lefty Driesell’s top assistant at Maryland. He was as Runyonesque a character as there was in college basketball, famous for his recruiting escapades. Dave swears he had one day on the recruiting road during which he rented five cars. Whenever he got to the airport to leave on a trip, he routinely parked his car at the curb right in front of the terminal.

  “I always knew where they would tow it to,” he said. “It was cheaper than paying for parking and saved me a lot of time when I was running to get my flight.”

  Dave had some health problems that forced him out of coaching for a while in the early ’80s, but he never stopped recruiting. Once, he and I and Ken Denlinger took one of those hotel vans to an airport. Dave got out of the van and gave the driver a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I think the tip is included in the fee,” Denlinger told Pritchett.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dave answered. “You always give a guy a big bill. You never know when a recruit might be watching.”

  Dave had gotten back into coaching when Ken Trickey had hired him at Oral Roberts. The school built by and named for the TV evangelist played pretty good basketball. Trickey and Pritchett both told me that Roberts was a big fan who often came into the locker room and gave pregame pep talks.

  “There was one about Ulysses S. Grant talking to his men before a big battle,” Pritchett said. “According to Oral [Pritchett always called everyone he ever met by his first name or by a nickname: Dean Smith was “The Music Man” because he was too good for words] Grant told his men they were outnumbered, they had to begin the battle in the dark, and the Confederates were lying in wait for them. He told them all that and then he said, ‘And so I have but one word for you: attack, attack, attack!’ Oral gave this whole speech and he’s screaming ‘attack’ and all our guys are looking at each other saying, ‘Who is this Grant guy?’ ”

  I had asked Trickey and Pritchett if Roberts would talk to me about hoops. Absolutely, I was told. So I was en route when I called Pritchett that morning.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Oral’s gone up into the tower.”

  “He’s done what?”

  “There’s this giant tower on campus and Oral’s gone up there, and he says if we don’t raise ten million dollars God is going to take him home from there.”

  “So I guess he isn’t going to be talking to me today at lunchtime.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  I had never had an interview canceled before because someone had gone up in a tower to raise ten million dollars or have God take him home. It was, if nothing else, a unique excuse. I hung up the phone and wondered what to do next. There was no point in going to Tulsa. I was supposed to fly from there the next day to spend time with Kerr that night. I was staying in Tucson through Sunday to see Arizona play UCLA.

  I called Keith Drum and told him what had happened.

  “Well, I’m about to fly to El Paso to see UTEP play Brigham Young,” he said. “Why don’t you fly there and then go to Tucson out of there tomorrow?”

  Brigham Young was undefeated. Texas–El Paso was the school that had won the most important game in college basketball history in 1966 when it was Texas Western. Don Haskins, the coach then, was still the coach. Why not? I managed to change my flights—it was a lot easier back then—to fly from Memphis to Dallas and on to El Paso. I called the SID at UTEP, who said he’d be glad to get me in that night.

  It was a great game. BYU was led by Michael Smith and UTEP by Tim Hardaway. BYU won late. I learned that Haskins always wore a clip-on tie so he could take it off as soon as the game started. BYU was fun to watch and Michael Smith was one of those guys you liked right away. BYU was going to New Mexico to play Saturday in the famed Pit—the building where Valvano had won his national championship in 1983.

  I decided to change
my plans again. Instead of hanging out in Tucson on Saturday, I’d catch a plane to Albuquerque in the morning, see BYU play New Mexico in the afternoon, and then fly back. I’d still have plenty of time with Kerr on Friday night, Saturday at breakfast, and Sunday after the game before I caught my red-eye flight to Pittsburgh.

  It all worked perfectly. BYU won another great game in the Pit, and I flew to Pittsburgh after Arizona-UCLA on Sunday, arriving at seven in the morning. I slept for several hours and then saw Pitt’s Jerome Lane shatter a backboard during the game that night. In six days I had seen five games in five cities and had been on nine airplane flights. Those really were the days.

  THERE WAS NO ONE I enjoyed more during that season than Steve Kerr. As has often happened in my career, I blundered into him. Actually I blundered into him as the result of blundering into another story.

  During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, I had picked up a daily update while riding from the gymnastics venue back to the main press center one morning and had spotted a small item that said, “Blatnick wrestles for gold tonight.”

  It meant nothing to me, but I read the item. It said that Jeff Blatnick, a Greco-Roman wrestler in the superheavyweight class, would wrestle that night for the gold medal, having come back from a bout with cancer, specifically non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He’d had his spleen and his appendix removed as part of his treatment.

  I knew nothing about Greco-Roman wrestling. But I knew coming back from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to wrestle for an Olympic gold medal was probably a pretty good story.

  I was en route back to the media center to get something to eat before heading out to boxing when I read the item. As soon as I got there, I found George Solomon and told him I wanted to go to Anaheim (the wrestling venue) that night because there might be a story in Blatnick.

  “You’re off tonight,” George said. “You need a break. The story’s a four-inch bleeder at best. Go get a good dinner.”

  George was never into what he called “tearjerkers” or “bleeders.” But jeez, it was the Olympics, which, when you get down to it, is always about tearjerkers. I told George I was going to go. Maybe I’d get a decent second-day feature out of it. Fine, George said, you’re on your own. I’m not promising you any space. It was the Olympics. I would have plenty of time to go out to dinner when the Games were over.

  After I’d finished my boxing story, I got on a bus headed for Anaheim. The first two things I noticed were that I knew no one on the bus and that no one was speaking English. Greco-Roman wrestling was popular in Europe, completely unheard of and unthought about in the United States.

  Somehow the bus driver got lost—took the wrong exit off I-5 and ended up driving in circles through Anaheim. We were, I can promise you, a long way from Disneyland and from the old Anaheim Arena, where the wrestling was being held. Great, I thought, I’m going to end up riding this bus for three hours and not even get to see Blatnick wrestle. Finally, one of the writers who had been to the arena before figured out where we needed to go and we arrived minutes before the evening program was to start. Blatnick, in the superheavyweight category, was wrestling last. I had plenty of time.

  Before Blatnick wrestled, I realized those on my bus had been a harbinger in terms of the media contingent. There was only one other writer representing a U.S. paper in the building, someone from the Los Angeles Times, which had at least one staffer at every venue. Because of that, Butch Henry, who was in charge of the media for the wrestling venue, greeted me as if I were a long-lost brother. Butch was then the sports information director at Arizona and, like a lot of college SIDs, was working as a volunteer for the U.S. Olympic Committee. He had been assigned to Anaheim and was basically losing his mind since almost no American media outlet, other than the Times, had any interest in his sport.

  “I was hoping the Blatnick story would get some people’s attention,” Butch said.

  “It did,” I said. “From me.”

  “He’s a great guy,” Butch said. “You should meet his parents too. I’ll make sure you get to all of them afterward.”

  That would be helpful. Generally speaking, getting to any athlete one on one at the Olympics was close to impossible. The biggest stars were brought to an interview room and others were asked to voluntarily go to what is called a “mixed zone,” where the athletes stand on one side of a railing and the media stands on the other, somewhat liked caged animals. It’s demeaning and rarely helpful, since it usually ends up with shouted questions, like when reporters yell at the president as he waves, shakes his head, and gets into a limousine.

  I called George to check in. “If the guy wins you might get ten inches,” he said. “But don’t count on it.”

  I wasn’t counting on anything. I just wanted Blatnick to win, give me some wonderful quotes and anecdotes, and let me write a second day story that—based on what I’d already seen in the arena—no one else would have. The problem, at least according to Butch, was that he wasn’t likely to win. The wrestling competition had been watered down in a lot of weight classes because of the Soviet/Eastern Bloc boycott, but the best superheavyweight in the world, Sweden’s Thomas Johansson, was there and was Blatnick’s opponent in the final. He outweighed him by thirty pounds—270 to 240—which is a big deal in Greco-Roman wrestling.

  Somehow, Blatnick won. He took Johansson down in the second period and then hung on for dear life in the third. Unbeknownst to me, ABC decided to switch over to the match at the start of the third period. The announcers quickly explained Blatnick’s story and, at 10:30 on the East Coast, the entire country suddenly knew who Jeff Blatnick was and what he was trying to do.

  When the match ended, with the crowd going crazy, ABC interviewed Blatnick. With tears running down his face, Blatnick delivered the line that became his signature: “I’m a happy dude.” Remember, this was 1984, before anyone really said dude. Blatnick cried again during the playing of the anthem at the end of the medal ceremony. As soon as it was over, Butch came over and said quietly, “Follow me. Don’t say anything, just walk right behind me.”

  He led me to a hallway that was marked restricted, nodding at the security guard as if they were old friends. We walked the length of the hallway to an area marked, “Drug-testing. Competitors and officials only.”

  Standing there were Blatnick’s parents. Jeff was inside doing his mandatory postmatch drug test. Butch introduced me as if I were Bob Woodward, Edward R. Murrow, and Ernest Hemingway rolled into one. Both had been crying and both were eager to talk. It turned out they had not only dealt with Jeff’s cancer but had lost their younger son, Mike, in a car accident. I wrote as fast as I possibly could while they talked.

  After several minutes, Jeff came out of the drug-testing room. He still had the medal looped around his neck. He didn’t say a word, just walked over and enveloped his parents in hugs. Then he took his medal off and put it around his mother’s neck. “This is for you,” he said. “And for Mike.”

  I still get chills thinking about that moment. Butch had walked away so Jeff’s parents introduced me. Jeff could not have been friendlier. The only reason we didn’t talk longer was because it occurred to me that it was after eleven o’clock in the East and the deadline for the paper’s main edition—home delivery—was midnight. I thanked the Blatnicks, got a number for Jeff in the athletes’ village in case I needed it, and raced back to press row to call George. I was prepared to launch into a speech pleading for more space when he answered.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he said.

  “Talking to Blatnick and his parents,” I said.

  “Good. Start writing.”

  “I am but I really need more space…”

  “Write as much as you want. Just write fast.”

  “What?”

  “They switched to it on TV. Everyone saw it. [Len] Downie saw it. They want it for A-1.”

  “A-1?”

  “Yes. Now stop saying I told you so and write.”

  I wrote. And wrote. My lead was
direct: “America cried with Jeff Blatnick last night.”

  Then I let the story tell itself. It ran at the top of A-1 with a huge picture of Blatnick on his knees after the clock had hit zero with tears running down his face.

  All of which was great. What was greater was reading the Los Angeles Times lead the next morning: “Americans earned three more wrestling medals last night in Anaheim, including a gold from superheavyweight Jeff Blatnick.”

  Oh my God! The only lead I can think of that missed the point by a wider margin than that one was an AP lead on a soccer game in South America that read (I’m making up names here): “Jose Olivero scored on a header in the fifty-seventh minute last night to give Alamos a 1–0 victory over Laredo in a game marred by the pregame deaths of twenty-two people during a riot outside the stadium.”

  That one was a lot worse. But this was pretty bad.

  The next day Blatnick was brought to the media center and was interviewed en masse. He had officially become a star. But I had gotten him one on one and already written the story, thanks to Butch Henry.

  Four months later, I encountered Butch again. I was in Albuquerque to cover a Georgetown–New Mexico game. Georgetown was the defending national champion and George sent me to New Mexico on my way to Hawaii to cover Maryland in the annual Rainbow Classic. I couldn’t complain about the assignment, even if John Thompson and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms at that moment. This was the season after my infamous “Hoya Paranoia” story.

  I got to Albuquerque on Friday. Because the Georgetown game had been a late add-on to New Mexico’s schedule (I still don’t know why Thompson wanted to play out there, but knowing him it was probably an easy way to spend a couple of days in Las Vegas, a place he loves more than life itself), the Lobos were actually playing Arizona on Friday and then Georgetown on Saturday.