When Wilson was hired, Tom Mickle, who was then Duke’s SID, came up with a new slogan for Duke football: “Red Means Go!” The slogan appeared on bumper stickers across the state throughout the fall of 1979. Duke went 2–9 during Wilson’s first season, the worst record in the school’s long football history. The next year Mickle came up with a new bumper sticker: “Duke Football 1980.”
Wilson’s failings were not even close to being Butters’s biggest problem. While Duke people would have preferred not to be awful in football, the sport that mattered to almost all of them was basketball. Bill Foster had rebuilt the program, and while he may not have been ole Dean, he was by far the most important person in the Duke athletic department.
He was also getting ready to leave.
Foster had made up his mind that there was nothing he could do, short of winning a national championship (maybe), that would earn him the respect he believed he deserved. Jim Carlen, who was both the football coach and the athletic director at South Carolina, was looking for a new basketball coach. Frank McGuire, the man whom Dean Smith had succeeded at North Carolina in 1961, was retiring after sixteen seasons, during which South Carolina had left the ACC to become an independent.
McGuire had been extremely successful at South Carolina. He had won the ACC Tournament title in 1971—South Carolina’s last year in the league. The school had decided to bolt from the ACC because the league had a rule in those days requiring that an athlete score at least 800 on the SATs to qualify for a scholarship, and football coach Paul Dietzel believed the rule was hurting his recruiting. McGuire argued against leaving—and lost.
Coaching players he had recruited while South Carolina was still in the ACC, McGuire made the NCAA Tournament the first three years that the Gamecocks played as an independent. But without the ACC, recruiting began to dry up, and by the winter of 1980, McGuire—who was sixty-six—was being pushed toward the door.
Which is where Foster came in. Carlen saw what he had done at Duke and pursued him. Foster liked the attention, but even more than that, he liked the idea of not hearing about Smith on a daily basis from North Carolina fans—not to mention from his own fans.
Foster’s belief that Duke was no longer the place for him was cemented—no pun intended—by the fact that it seemed to be taking forever to pave the lot where he and his coaches parked their cars each morning. When he left, the unpaved parking lot became the public symbol of the problems that had led to his departure.
In truth, the rift between him and Butters was much deeper than that by the time Duke finished the regular season 7–7 in the ACC after starting 12–0 prior to conference play. By then, Butters had very much become a Duke man. Terry Sanford had lived up to his promise to change the school’s profile nationally, raising millions for the endowment and raiding Ivy League schools for some of their top professors. Butters found it insulting that Foster would even consider leaving Duke for South Carolina.
And so, the week of the ACC Tournament, after a tumultuous meeting with Foster, the two men agreed that Foster would announce his resignation the next week—before the NCAA Tournament began. By the time Duke traveled to Greensboro as the number-six seed in the ACC Tournament, rumors were rife that Foster was leaving.
“We heard it all winter,” said Mike Gminski, who was a senior that season and the team’s leading scorer. “Obviously, if he left it wasn’t going to affect me personally, but I think we all believed that Coach Foster was feeling unbelievable pressure.”
Whether it was the rumors that their coach was leaving that fueled them or the embarrassment of a twenty-five-point loss in Chapel Hill in the regular season finale, the Blue Devils became the team they had been early in the year during that weekend in Greensboro. They blew out North Carolina State the first night and did the same to North Carolina in the semifinals. Then they won a dramatic championship game against top-seeded Maryland with the building half empty because a blizzard had hit Greensboro and very few people could get to the Coliseum.
Foster…snow…the ACC Tournament. Again. Only this snowstorm would be his last hurrah at Duke.
—
While Duke was cutting down the nets on that snowy night, Steve Vacendak was thinking about Mike Krzyzewski.
Vacendak had just returned to his alma mater that week as an associate athletic director. Growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Vacendak was a six-foot-one-inch scoring machine who was recruited by most of the national basketball powers. His decision came down to two schools: Duke and North Carolina.
This was in 1962 and Dean Smith had just finished his first season as the coach at UNC. Vic Bubas was in his third season at Duke and had already had great success. He had taken Duke to the NCAA Tournament for the second time in school history in 1960—reaching the Elite Eight—and his next two teams had gone 22–6 and 20–5.
Even though North Carolina had won the national championship in 1957, Smith had no such résumé. Because of NCAA violations that had occurred while Frank McGuire was the coach, the Tar Heels had been limited to a 17-game schedule in 1961–62 and had gone 8–9.
Even so, Vacendak’s final decision on where to go to college wasn’t about basketball. “I liked Coach Smith and Coach Bubas,” he said. “Dean Smith was one of the most gracious men I’ve ever met. His attention to detail was amazing. When I visited, he took out a tape measure and measured my arms. I remember he said, ‘Your arms are very long for someone your height. You’ll get a lot of rebounds for a guard and a lot of loose balls.’ I liked that, the attention to detail. I thought that was impressive. He was clearly someone I would enjoy playing for.
“In the end, though, I just felt more comfortable at Duke because it was smaller. It was a very tough decision.”
Vacendak had waited until the last possible minute to make up his mind because he was truly torn. He had gone to bed the night before he had to announce where he was going to school still undecided. When he woke up in the morning his gut told him to go to Duke. His high school coach, Jack Gallagher, insisted that he call Smith personally to tell him the news.
“He could not have been nicer about it,” Vacendak remembered. “He wished me luck, said he knew I’d chosen a great school and he looked forward to competing against me.”
Vacendak played on two ACC championship teams in three years (freshmen were ineligible then) and played in two Final Fours. In 1966, as a senior, he was voted ACC Player of the Year. He played in the ABA for five years before taking a job at Converse in 1971. It was while he was working at Converse that he got a call from Gallagher, his old high school coach.
“Coach Gallagher was friends with Bob Knight,” Vacendak said. “He had actually done some scouting for him and had worked and run his summer camps when he was at Army and when he was at Indiana and they stayed in touch. I was living in Annapolis and would go to see Navy play whenever I got the chance. Coach Gallagher said Army was coming down to play, and their coach was a guy named Krzyzewski, who had played for Coach Knight at Army. He suggested I get in touch with him while he was in town.”
Vacendak did that, and Krzyzewski invited him to come spend game day with him and his team. Vacendak was blown away by what he saw.
“This was a very young coach; I’m not sure he was even thirty yet,” Vacendak said. “But the preparation, the way he connected with his players, was remarkable. There wasn’t a single minute when he was talking when all eyes weren’t locked on him. I figured some of it was that they were all Army kids, but it clearly went beyond that.
“I thought I knew Navy pretty well, but there was nothing I could have told him or his staff about them that they didn’t already know. I remember thinking, ‘This guy is going to be a star someday.’ ”
Vacendak left Converse a couple of years later to get into coaching himself—taking a job at Greensboro College, where he was a one-man staff, taping his players’ ankles, planning the travel, doing all the recruiting. He loved it. Which is why, when Butters approached him about coming back to Du
ke, he was torn.
“I really did like what I was doing,” he said. “But it was Duke. It was my school. So, finally, I took it.”
One reason Butters wanted Vacendak was that Vacendak wasn’t all that eager to take the job. “I’ve always believed in hiring people who don’t necessarily want me to hire them,” he said. “I’d rather have someone who ultimately decides he wants the job rather than someone who needs the job.”
Vacendak finished the season at Greensboro and started his new job in time for the ACC Tournament. As Duke was hammering N.C. State on the tournament’s first night, Butters turned almost casually to Vacendak and said, “I need to tell you what your first assignment is going to be because you need to get right on it.”
Vacendak shrugged. “What is it?”
“I need you to find a new basketball coach.”
For a split second Vacendak thought Butters was joking. But there wasn’t a hint of a smile on his face. Butters filled Vacendak in on what had been going on. He mentioned one name to him: Jack Hartman, the coach at Kansas State—the same Jack Hartman who had put Walt Frazier on Jim Valvano in the 1967 NIT semifinals, pretty much ending Rutgers’s chances of upsetting Southern Illinois.
Hartman had played for the great Henry Iba at Oklahoma State and had taken Iba’s defense-first philosophy to heart. He had coached Kansas State to the Elite Eight on three occasions and had gotten the Wildcats to within a whisker of the Final Four in 1975, losing the East Region final to Syracuse in overtime. K-State was about to go to the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time in nine years—an impressive feat in those days when far fewer teams made the tournament.
Butters was impressed. Hartman’s only drawback was his age—fifty-four. “Ideally, I want someone for this job who can really coach defense and is young,” Butters told Vacendak. “Hartman’s not old, but he’s not young. I know he can really coach defense.”
Vacendak said nothing that night, but he already had a name in mind. On the morning after Duke won the ACC Tournament, Bill Foster announced he was resigning from Duke to take the job at South Carolina, effective whenever Duke played its last NCAA Tournament game.
On Monday morning, Vacendak went to work, compiling a list to present to Butters. When the two men sat down to talk, Vacendak went through five names, all of them familiar to Butters: Hartman—as ordered; Bob Wenzel, who had been Foster’s top assistant the previous two seasons after Lou Goetz had become the head coach at Richmond. Wenzel had also played a key role in recruiting the players who had turned the program around. Also on the list was Bob Weltlich, the coach at Mississippi, a Knight disciple who believed in defense first; Tom Davis, another preacher of defense, who was at Boston College; and Paul Webb, who’d had great success at Old Dominion.
Butters knew all the names. Then Vacendak threw out one more. “You said you wanted young,” he said. “This guy’s young and I’ve seen him coach. He is hell on wheels when it comes to coaching defense.
“His name’s Mike Krzyzewski.”
“Who?” Butters asked.
Vacendak repeated the name.
Butters shook his head. “I’ve never heard of him,” he said. “Tell me more.”
4
Michael William Krzyzewski was born February 13, 1947—William and Emily Krzyzewski’s second son. He wasn’t as big as his brother Bill, who was four years older than he was and would go on to be a Chicago fire captain, but he was a gifted athlete. From an early age, he played touch football, basketball, and baseball with a group of friends in the schoolyard at Columbus Elementary School on Augusta Boulevard on Chicago’s North Side.
William Krzyzewski was an elevator operator. Because there was still ethnic bias in many areas of Chicago, he used the name Cross when looking for work. In fact, he had fought in World War II under the name Cross and would be buried under that name. Emily Krzyzewski worked as a housekeeper, often at night at the Chicago Athletic Club, to ensure that there would be enough money to keep her two boys not only healthy but happy.
Bill was never athletically inclined. “He would have been a great pulling guard,” Mike said. “He was big and strong and he had great feet. He danced the polka as well as anyone. But when he walked out the door of our house he turned right and went to hang out with guys who were into cars and music [Bill played the saxophone in the school band]. I turned left and went to the schoolyard to play ball.”
The boys who played in the Columbus schoolyard would later call themselves “the Columbos,” and their leader—and organizer—was Mickey Krzyzewski, which is what they all called him then and what they all call him now.
“Mickey was always the guy who picked the teams, who decided what we were going to play and when we were going to play,” said Dennis Mlynski, who has been Krzyzewski’s closest friend since the two met in elementary school at the age of six. “It wasn’t necessarily because he was the best player, but because he was a natural leader. If he said we should do something in a certain way, we did.”
Krzyzewski was the best basketball player in the group. As a high school freshman, he went out for the football team at Weber High School and made the team—but wasn’t on the list of about thirty kids who were given new equipment. That made him angry. “I wasn’t the best player, but I was certainly one of the thirty best,” he said more than fifty years later, his voice still rising at the memory. “I found out later that a lot of the kids were in CYO programs and they’d been made promises by the coach to get them to go to the school. I was never in a CYO program. So, I got mad and quit.”
And he focused solely on basketball. He went from a nonstarter on the JV team as a freshman to the starting point guard on the varsity as a sophomore. “It wasn’t so much that I grew or anything, it just became what I did, what I worked at,” he said. “All day, every day.”
By the time he was a senior he was an All-City player and the team’s leading scorer. He was recruited by a number of the smaller schools in the Midwest but none of the important D-I schools in the Midwest showed any interest in him.
Then, in June of 1965—his senior year in high school—when he was still undecided about where to go to college, a young coach named Bob Knight came to visit his house. Knight was twenty-four, only three years out of Ohio State, and had just been named the head coach at Army after his boss, Tates Locke, had left to take the job at Miami of Ohio.
Knight had come to Chicago to recruit a player from Loyola Academy. Gene Sullivan, the coach at Loyola, knew that Krzyzewski was still undecided about where to go to college. “The best player in our league played at Weber,” he told Knight. “And I don’t think he knows where he wants to go to college.”
Knight drove to Weber that day and introduced himself to Krzyzewski’s coach, Al Ostrowski. The thought of one of his players going to West Point blew Ostrowski away. He instantly called William and Emily Krzyzewski to tell them that the basketball coach at the United States Military Academy wanted to come to the house to meet them—and their son.
“I remember when he came in, my dad literally couldn’t believe this was happening,” Krzyzewski said. “Just the thought that West Point might want his son amazed him. Bill hadn’t gone to college—he wanted to be an auto mechanic and he got into that and was doing quite well. So any college was going to be a big deal, but West Point? That was beyond belief.”
Krzyzewski knew nothing about the school, except that—as Knight explained—he’d be going into the army for four years after graduation if he went there. What he did know was that he had no interest in going into the army when he graduated from college.
“I knew I wanted to coach,” Krzyzewski said. “I can’t honestly remember not wanting to coach. I knew I wasn’t a good enough player to play pro ball, but I did think I could teach and I could lead and it was something I wanted to do. But when Coach Knight came to the house and talked about West Point and having a guaranteed job in the army for four years, my attitude was, ‘No f——ing way do I want to be in the army.’ ”
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br /> His parents felt differently. They thought the chance to go to college for free and then serve your country was about as good as it could possibly get for a teenager whose major aptitude seemed to be for playing a game.
“They would talk in the kitchen after dinner every night,” Krzyzewski remembered. “They knew I was in the next room listening. They would talk in Polish, but there are no words in Polish for ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb.’ I would hear a lot of Polish and then, ‘Mike—stupid’ or ‘Mike—dumb.’ It went on like that for a few nights. The message was clear: they couldn’t believe they had raised a son so stupid and so dumb that he didn’t want to go to a great college and be in the army. Nothing would make them more proud. Where could they have gone wrong?”
Krzyzewski laughed at the memory. “Nowadays, when I hear people say their child has to make up his or her own mind about where to go to college I say, ‘No, that’s wrong.’ If you know things your child doesn’t because you’re older and smarter, you owe it to them to let them know how you feel. If my parents hadn’t done that, I have no idea how my life would have turned out—but it wouldn’t have been like this.
“I knew exactly what they were doing—but it worked anyway. I finally got angry and I stalked in one night and said, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll go. If that’s what you want, I’ll go!’ They just looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Good decision.’ ”
It didn’t feel that way when Krzyzewski arrived at West Point for R Day (Reception Day) a few weeks later. For one thing, he got a lot of blank looks when he reported to various places—not because his name was unpronounceable, but because he had been a late addition to the incoming class of 1969. By the time Krzyzewski told Knight he wanted to come, it was June and the incoming freshman class was full. Knight went to his boss, Colonel Ray Murphy, who was then the athletic director, looking for help.
“Colonel Murphy knew everything there was to know about West Point,” Krzyzewski said. “He knew there was no way to add me to the class, but he also knew that by the end of R Day there would be a number of guys who would take one look at what they were facing and go home. So, he penciled my name in at the bottom of all the lists. When I reported places and gave my name, they couldn’t find it alphabetically. Eventually, I figured out what was going on and told them to look at the very bottom of their list. They’d look at me funny but checked my name, and I’d move on.”
The Legends Club Page 5