—
As important as reading Bilas’s note was to Krzyzewski, a bigger moment came six weeks later. It was a Thursday night in late February when his phone rang. It was Dawkins. Krzyzewski had been pushing him to make a decision. He had even told Dawkins at one point that if Buchanan decided to come to Duke, he would take him.
“I knew what had happened to them the year before,” Dawkins said. “So I understood how he felt. Of course Digger [Phelps] was also recruiting Buchanan and had told me pretty much the same thing. I knew I wanted to go to Duke. They had been the most involved from the start. They were always at my games. I liked the idea that I would be an important part of what they were doing from the start.
“So I told Coach K I was coming.”
Getting Dawkins was a huge breakthrough for Krzyzewski. Bilas was a well-regarded player, but Dawkins was a star. Most people had assumed he would end up at Notre Dame or Maryland. One of those people was Maryland coach Lefty Driesell.
“Duke? How can you possibly go to Duke?” Driesell asked Dawkins incredulously when Dawkins called to tell him his decision.
“Well, Coach, I guess I just wanted to go to college the same place you went,” Dawkins answered.
Other good players were now committing to Duke: Weldon Williams, a six-six guard out of Chicago, and Bill Jackman, a six-nine perimeter player from Grant, Nebraska, also decided to go to Duke. That left Krzyzewski with two scholarships left. He knew he wanted to give one to Mark Alarie. He wanted the last one to go to David Henderson—although he wasn’t certain he’d have the chance to do that.
Alarie had been a Chuck Swenson find. He went to a small private school in Phoenix—Brophy Prep—and was a skinny six-eight as a junior. But Don Meade, whom Swenson described as “the West Coast Howard Garfinkel,” meaning he knew everything about every high school player west of the Mississippi, had told him that Alarie was someone worth pursuing. He was athletic and a good student, and was not being pursued by any of the power schools.
Swenson flew to Santa Clara to see Alarie play in a summer camp only to learn that he’d broken his hand and wasn’t there. “I was upset because I’d flown across the country to see the kid and he wasn’t even there,” Swenson said. “It was a camp with a lot of big-time players, so I thought I’d really get an idea if he was any good. Chances are, his being hurt was lucky for us. If he’d played in that camp and played well, he’d have drawn a lot more attention to himself. As it was, I decided it was important to see him, so I went to watch him practice—even though his hand was still in a cast. He was shooting left-handed, but you could see he had long arms and quick feet. I thought it was worth going back even though Mike was very committed to Bilas at that point.”
Several months later, Swenson finally saw Alarie play—in a pre-Christmas tournament in Sacramento. Swenson liked what he saw. He still has the notes he scrawled during the first half: “Has more inside game than Bilas,” he wrote at one point. At another juncture he wrote, “Tough choice between him and Bilas.”
Near the end of the first half, Alarie was caught alone on a three-on-one break. The guard in the middle made a perfect pass on the wing to a player almost Alarie’s height who soared in for a layup. “The next thing I saw was Alarie’s hand above the [backboard] square cleanly knocking the ball away,” Swenson said. “He made it look easy. As soon as the half ended I ran to a pay phone in the hallway and called Mike. I said, ‘You have to fly to Phoenix as soon as you can to see this kid.’
“Mike was skeptical. For one thing, flying from Durham to Phoenix wasn’t easy, and the season had started. I finally said, ‘Mike, the kid’s better than Bilas.’ Mike started shouting at me: ‘There’s no way he’s better than Bilas! What are you talking about?’ I stuck to my guns and just kept saying, ‘You have to see him.’ ”
And so Krzyzewski flew to Phoenix to see the kid his insane assistant coach insisted was better than Jay Bilas. “It took him about five minutes,” Swenson said. “Maybe less. He turned to me and said, ‘We have to get this kid.’ ”
The bad news was that Stanford was already very involved with Alarie. Brophy Prep kids who were good athletes often went to Stanford. “If you went to Brophy and had the chance to go to Stanford that’s where you went,” Alarie said. “When they got involved, I honestly figured that’s where I was going to go.”
Stanford made more sense for Alarie than Duke. His father had died a year earlier at the age of forty-three, leaving Mark and his mother to care for Mark’s younger brother, Mike, who had cerebral palsy. Mark knew it was going to be tough on his mom when he went away under any circumstances, but at Stanford, he’d be a short plane flight away.
But Duke had two things in its favor: Rumors were rife in the college basketball world that Stanford coach Dick DiBiaso was going to be fired at season’s end. Alarie didn’t like the uncertainty of committing to a school without knowing who his coach would be. And then there was Krzyzewski’s relentless pursuit of him.
“He made it very clear how much he wanted me to come to Duke,” Alarie said. “I remember having a phone conversation with him in February and he said to me, ‘Tell me honestly where you’re leaning right now.’ I told him it was probably eighty to eighty-five percent Stanford and fifteen to twenty percent Duke. He got angry. He said to me, ‘I just wish you understood as clearly as I do how good a player you are.’ When I thought about it, I knew he was right. I was always a tough self-critic. I finally decided my best chance to become a better player was going to Duke.”
By the time Alarie decided to go to Duke, the same high school scouts who had been ridiculing Krzyzewski’s strikeout season in 1981 were saying he had signed the best high school class of 1982. But Krzyzewski wanted one more player: Henderson.
The biggest issue was politics. Henderson was from the tiny town of Roxboro, North Carolina, and all four ACC schools in the state had recruited him. In fact, it was while recruiting Henderson that North Carolina assistant coach Eddie Fogler first came to the conclusion that Krzyzewski and Duke were going to be formidable opponents down the road.
“I went to see David play in the first round of the state high school tournament,” Fogler said. “I looked around and there were two big-time schools with coaches in the gym: North Carolina with me, and Duke with Krzyzewski. I went back the next night—same thing. I didn’t go back the third night. David’s high school coach called me and said, ‘There was one coach here last night—Krzyzewski.’ I realized this guy wasn’t going to be outworked by us or anybody else.”
The political issue was simple: Duke was also involved with Curtis Hunter, a McDonald’s All-American from Durham. Beating Carolina for Hunter would be a major coup for Krzyzewski, especially since most in-state kids Carolina wanted, Carolina got.
“We all liked Henderson better than Hunter,” Bobby Dwyer said. “We thought he was a better player and a better kid—not because Curtis was a bad kid but because David was special. But if a kid from Durham who was a McDonald’s All-American said yes to us over Carolina, it would be impossible to say no to him. And we only had one scholarship left to give.”
The coaches even talked about trying to convince Henderson to go to prep school for a year if Hunter picked Duke. Henderson would not have gone for that. He would have gone to N.C. State. “I grew up a State fan,” he said. “When I started being recruited, that’s where I thought I’d go. I liked Coach V a lot and I knew the school well. Then Duke got involved.
“I went to a game in Cameron when Duke was playing Wake Forest, and during the game, Coach [Carl] Tacy tripped Danny Meagher as he was running past the Wake bench. I’m sure it was an accident, but Coach K was convinced it wasn’t. I remember him running down and yelling at Coach Tacy about it. I thought, ‘Hey, this guy stands up for his players no matter what.’ That stuck with me.”
In mid-April, after the Final Four, with much fanfare, Curtis Hunter announced he would be going to North Carolina. It was probably the only time in history that Duk
e’s coaches celebrated losing a recruit.
“By then, we all really loved David,” Swenson said. “Nothing had been easy for him. He drove the school bus every day to make extra money. I’ll never forget the first time we went to visit his house, the bus was parked outside because he kept it there overnight. Mike, Bobby, and I were in jackets, dress shirts, and ties. We got out of the car and Mike said, ‘Take off your jackets and ties.’ We were just dressed too formally.
“We all wanted David. First we worried we’d lose him to State. Then we worried we’d lose him to Curtis Hunter.”
Krzyzewski, Swenson, and Dwyer drove back to Henderson’s house after the Hunter announcement to formally offer him a scholarship and ask him to come to Duke. “When Mike said, ‘We’d like to offer you a scholarship,’ David had tears in his eyes,” Swenson said. “We all did. I’m not sure I’ve had a moment that meant more to me in coaching because of who David Henderson was. If he’d never have scored a basket, I’d have been glad we got him.”
Thirty-two years later, Chuck Swenson’s eyes teared up again at the memory.
Eddie Fogler’s eyes don’t tear up when he thinks back to that winter. “The Duke guys wanted Henderson more than Hunter,” he said. “Turns out, they were right.”
Duke now had the number-one-rated recruiting class in the country. That was progress.
“It was,” Swenson said, “an absolute necessity for us to have any chance to survive.”
A highly touted recruiting class guaranteed nothing. What it meant was there was hope. That was a big step for a coach whose team had just finished with the worst record in school history.
11
The goal at Duke going into the 1982–83 season was simple: get better. Try not to go 10–17 again and try not to end the season with a thirty-five-point loss in the ACC Tournament. The presence of the six freshmen was reason to think those modest goals could be achieved.
At North Carolina State, the challenges were completely different—and considerably more difficult. The Wolfpack had won twenty-two games in Jim Valvano’s second season, but in the minds of State fans very few of them had any real meaning. The three games against North Carolina—the last in the ACC Tournament semifinals—had produced the same result that the three games against the Tar Heels had produced a year earlier: loss, loss, loss. The scores didn’t matter; the outcome did.
After a one-year absence, the team had returned to the NCAA Tournament, but a first-round loss to Tennessee-Chattanooga hardly provided any salve to a fan base that found Valvano charming and funny but, if truth be told, not doing any better than, or even as well as, ole Norman had.
During the David Thompson–Monty Towe–Tom Burleson era, in the midst of the 57–1 run that had climaxed with winning the 1974 national championship, ole Norman’s team had beaten ole Dean’s team nine straight times. By the time that run began—in 1972—Smith was about to take Carolina to the Final Four for the fourth time in six seasons, which, unless your name was John Wooden, was an unheard-of sort of run.
The nine-game Wolfpack winning string ended during Thompson and Towe’s senior year (Burleson had graduated) in 1975 when Carolina won in Chapel Hill and in the ACC Tournament championship game. Ole Dean ended up beating ole Norman ten of the last twelve times their teams played.
Even so, the memory of that nine-game winning streak lingered in Raleigh.
“I heard about it all the time,” Valvano remembered several years after his own national title run. “Whenever I spoke to a Wolfpack club or if I was out to dinner it would come up. Sometimes it would be subtle: ‘Gosh, those teams we had back in the seventies were great.’ Sometimes it was less subtle: ‘Remember when David, Tommy, and Monty beat up on the Tar Heels?’ And sometimes it was blatant: ‘Hey, Coach, you ever going to beat Carolina?’ ”
It was moments like those that caused Valvano to make up the story about the fan threatening to kill his nonexistent dog. But in more serious moments he knew, having lived in the state for two years, that not beating the Tar Heels was completely unacceptable.
“In some way, to our fans, beating Carolina was as important, maybe more important, than winning the national championship,” he said. “It wasn’t about Duke. It was never about Duke because back then Mike hadn’t gotten it going and we handled them more often than not. But Dean and Carolina had that aura. The whole light-blue thing. I swore when I got there that I wasn’t going to get caught up in it. You don’t judge the success of your program on how you do against one team—no matter how good that team might be.
“But I knew there were a lot of people who did judge us based on one thing: how we did against Carolina. And, yes, there were times it got to me. I always believed that we could be good and they could be good too. But after eighty-two, when we won twenty-two and made the tournament, I didn’t hear, ‘Hey, nice job, Coach, you won eight more than last year.’ I heard, ‘When are you going to beat Carolina?’ ”
Valvano always did a good job publicly deflecting how much losing destroyed him. He deflected it with his humor and with his ability to instantly break down what had happened in a game as if he were watching it replay inside his head as he spoke. But those who knew him best understood that losing; any loss tore him up and the 0–6 record against Carolina was even worse than that.
“He was always a bad loser—very bad,” Pam Valvano Strasser remembered. “He would come home and just want to be alone, need to be alone. It was very hard at times—on me and on the girls. Their dad was away a lot anyway and then he’d be at home but not be there.
“I always cringed when he’d schedule a tough game as the last one before Christmas because if he lost, he wouldn’t come downstairs on Christmas morning. I’d stall the girls as long as I could and then I’d go upstairs and say, ‘Jim, you have to come down and open presents with your daughters. He would say, ‘I need some more time,’ and I’d tell him he didn’t have any more time. It was Christmas.”
Jim’s older brother, Nick, remembered his brother taking losing hard his entire life. “He was small growing up, didn’t really grow at all until he was a senior in high school,” he said. “He was always trying to prove himself. He was a great athlete. He was such a good hitter as a sophomore in high school they couldn’t keep him out of the lineup. But his arm was so weak he could barely make the throw from second to first on a double play.”
It seemed to Valvano that he was always finding a way to overcome his failings. As a point guard at Rutgers, he could barely dribble the ball at all with his left hand. And yet, he succeeded.
“He’d come down the court and he was all right hand,” said Lou Goetz, who was a teammate. “He had this up-and-down way of dribbling as if he wasn’t going to go forward at all. But then, somehow, he’d create something, find Bobby Lloyd open, and we’d score. He did what he had to do to be an effective player. And, by senior year, he’d made himself into a good shooter too.”
Goetz was two years behind Valvano in school. They were teammates—but never close. Like a lot of people, Goetz was awed by Valvano’s humor and showmanship. But he didn’t always enjoy it.
“Jimmy would always sit in the back of the bus with a group of guys and do his shtick,” Goetz remembered. “He’d do it on the way home, even after losses. Some of us didn’t think that was the time for humor. And I promise you there were times when [Coach] Bill Foster didn’t think it was the time for humor. I can remember him standing up on more than one occasion and screaming at Jimmy to shut the f—— up.”
The bus-ride shticks were a precursor to Valvano’s postgame riffs after losses as a coach. They were a defense mechanism. “You got two choices after a loss,” he would often say. “You can laugh or you can cry. I didn’t want anyone to see me cry.”
The desire to cry, though, was always there.
“I can remember days after a loss when I’d see Mrs. V,” Sidney Lowe remembered. “I’d say, ‘How’s he doing?’ because we knew how hard he took the losses. She’d just shak
e her head sometimes and say, ‘It’s not good today.’ The worst though was after we’d lose to Carolina. It had been a while but at least Dereck, Thurl, and I had won against them as freshmen. Coach V hadn’t done it and neither had any of the underclassmen.”
Which is why Valvano felt an almost desperate need to beat North Carolina and—if possible—do better in both the ACC Tournament and in the NCAA Tournament in his third season. He had joked when he first arrived at N.C. State that he knew he would never outcoach Dean Smith but he hoped he could outlive him. It was beginning to look as if that might be the only way for Valvano to finally beat ole Dean.
—
In Chapel Hill that fall, things were far more comfortable. Dean Smith would never admit that winning the national championship changed his life, but it did, if only because he didn’t have to have assistant coaches spend time statistically proving it was harder to get to three Final Fours than to win one of them.
There were no more questions about the exclamation point needed to finish the sentence on his career résumé. It now read: nine ACC Tournament titles, seven Final Fours, an Olympic gold medal, an NIT championship, and—finally—a national championship. There was only one active coach whose record could measure up to Smith’s and that was Indiana’s Bob Knight, who had won two national titles. But Smith hadn’t been arrested in Puerto Rico while coaching the U.S. Pan American team in 1979, hadn’t stuffed a taunting fan into a garbage can at the Final Four in 1981, and was not considered a sometimes-out-of-control bully.
Smith was proof that you could be a great coach and treat people with respect.
He also had a team that appeared to have an excellent chance to win a second national title in a row. James Worthy and Jimmy Black were gone. But Michael Jordan, now very clearly a star, was back, and so were Sam Perkins and Matt Doherty. What’s more, the freshman class—led by Brad Daugherty, Steve Hale, and Curtis Hunter—was, again, dazzling.
The Legends Club Page 14