The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Daugherty was one of four Carolina players listed that season at six-ten or more: John Brownlee was six-ten, and Daugherty, Warren Martin, and Timo Makkonen were all at least six-eleven. Naturally, there were no seven-footers. Regardless of Daugherty’s height, he was only seventeen when he enrolled and clearly had remarkable potential. Hale and Hunter were also McDonald’s All-Americans—which was why Duke would have been compelled to take Hunter if he hadn’t chosen North Carolina.

  The other two teams being picked at the top of the polls that fall were Virginia—which returned two-time national player of the year Ralph Sampson, who at seven-four couldn’t possibly be rounded down to under seven feet by Terry Holland—and Houston, which had lost to Carolina in the Final Four and had Hakeem Olajuwon, who was still in many ways learning how to play the game, returning along with All-American forward Clyde Drexler. Georgetown still had Patrick Ewing but had graduated three important seniors and was probably a year away from another Final Four run.

  There was a good deal of talent in the ACC outside Virginia and North Carolina. N.C. State’s top six players were back. Whittenburg, Lowe, and Bailey returned for their senior seasons along with the three sophomores—Lorenzo Charles, Cozell McQueen, and Terry Gannon—who had played often as freshmen. Joining them was Ernie Myers, a six-foot-five-inch McDonald’s All-American whom Valvano had been able to recruit successfully from the Bronx.

  Wake Forest had won twenty-one games the previous season and reached the NCAA Tournament. Maryland was coming off its worst season in years but had added Len Bias to pair with Adrian Branch, who had led all ACC freshmen in scoring the previous season. Clemson had been to the Elite Eight of the NCAAs as recently as 1980 but had a very young team that would struggle in a stacked ACC.

  Finally, there was Duke and there was Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets were in their fourth season in the ACC. Their first two seasons under Dwane Morrison, a chain-smoking, deeply religious man who ended all conversations by saying, “Bless you, brother,” had produced one conference victory—total. Out went Morrison and in came Bobby Cremins, who was a Fourth of July baby in 1947—making him a little more than four months younger than Krzyzewski and fifteen months younger than Valvano.

  Cremins was a Bronx kid who, like a lot of New York players, had found his way to the South to play for Frank McGuire—after McGuire landed at South Carolina in 1964 following his unsuccessful NBA stint in Philadelphia. “When Coach McGuire came to my house he brought the parish priest and a cop from the local precinct because he knew everybody in the Bronx,” Cremins said. “That was pretty much it. I was going even though I had no idea where Columbia, South Carolina, was.”

  Cremins was a very good player on very good teams led by All-Americans like John Roche, Kevin Joyce (also from the Bronx), Tom Riker, and Tom Owens. Cremins was the guy who did everything on offense and defense. He would also say anything. Shortly after getting the Georgia Tech job he told Dean Smith he owed him a huge debt of gratitude.

  “We were playing Carolina in Chapel Hill and we’re up late in the game,” Cremins said. “Dean kept fouling me because I was the worst foul shooter. We won 87–86 because I made all the free throws.” Cremins paused for effect. “Next night I lost my virginity because I was such a hero on campus.”

  In 1969, South Carolina finished second in the ACC and went to the NIT since only one conference team could go to the NCAAs and that was tournament champion North Carolina. In the quarterfinals they played an Army team coached by Bob Knight and captained by a senior guard named Mike Krzyzewski.

  Late in the game, with Army leading, McGuire called time-out to tell his players they were going to come out of their zone and go man-to-man to put pressure on the ball and try to create turnovers. Coming out of the huddle, McGuire turned to Cremins and said, “You know who you’ve got, Bobby?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cremins answered. “I’ve got the kid with the big nose whose name I can’t pronounce.”

  Army and the kid with the unpronounceable name and the big nose won the game.

  Cremins got his first head-coaching job at Appalachian State in 1975 and was successful there, going 100–70 in six seasons. In 1980, hearing that there was no clear-cut candidate for the Duke job, he decided to call Tom Butters. Recognizing the name, Butters took the call. Cremins asked if Butters had hired a coach yet because, if not, he was interested.

  “We’ve got a short list,” Butters told him. “We’re going to make the hire soon.”

  Cremins asked who was on the list. Butters told him.

  “Mike Krzyzewski?” Cremins asked. “The guy from Army? Boy, Tom, you do that, I think you’re making a big mistake.”

  Years later, Cremins laughed at the memory. “I guess it’s fair to say Tom knew what he was doing,” he said. “It worked out okay for him.”

  Cremins arrived in the ACC a year later. His first recruiting class included John Salley, a gifted big man from Brooklyn, and Mark Price, a baby-faced guard from Enid, Oklahoma.

  “I owe Dean Smit [aka Smith] on that one too,” Cremins said. “He and his guys liked Steve Hale. Price would have walked to Chapel Hill to play there. He loved North Carolina. [Cremins actually says ‘Naut Cowlina’ in his distinctive Bronx accent.] If Dean recruits him, I have no chance—zero. But they liked Hale.”

  Hale had a very solid college career and is now a doctor. Price became one of the great guards in ACC history and an NBA All-Star. He was six foot one and looked like a freckled-face choirboy, which he was—he sang in his church choir growing up. But he was stunningly quick with the ball and a dead-eye shooter. He and Salley immediately made Georgia Tech a competitive team, and Cremins quickly became a popular figure in the ACC. Whenever he walked on court at Cameron Indoor Stadium, his prematurely gray hair bouncing up and down in the floppy-haired style he favored, the Duke students began chanting “Grecian” on one side of the court and “Formula” on the other side.

  Cremins loved it. “Jimmy, Mike, and I were the young guns back then,” he said. “Of course for a while it looked like only two of us would survive.”

  He laughed again. “Guess I got that one wrong too.”

  12

  The so-called number-one recruiting class of 1982 met one another for the first time as a group at Mike Krzyzewski’s house late in August after arriving on campus to enroll as Duke freshmen.

  Jay Bilas and Mark Alarie had actually crossed paths on occasion during summer league tournaments, and Bilas and Johnny Dawkins had met when Bilas had been in Washington for a few days that summer and Krzyzewski had suggested he look Dawkins up.

  Bilas had done that. Dawkins had told Bilas to come to his house and that they’d go to a nearby playground where the best players in the area congregated. When Bilas knocked on the door, Dawkins’s little brother answered.

  Or so Bilas thought. “This kid came to the door,” Bilas said. “He looked about fourteen, maybe fifteen. He was really skinny. I said, ‘Hey, is your big brother here?’ ”

  “You mean Johnny?” the kid asked.

  “Yeah, Johnny,” Bilas said.

  “That’s me,” the kid answered.

  “I probably weighed about one forty-five—soaking wet,” said Dawkins, who is now the basketball coach at Stanford. “Jay was embarrassed but he shouldn’t have been. I looked young.”

  Any doubts Bilas might have had about Dawkins upon first laying eyes on him went away when they got to the courts.

  “He was without question the quickest guy I’d ever played with,” Bilas said. “He had an explosiveness that you just don’t see very often. I had heard that he was very good, but seeing him in person was impressive.”

  There was more. “There was a play at the end of our first game where it looked like we had lost,” Bilas said. “I don’t remember exactly what happened, but Johnny got into an argument about it—and won. You don’t win arguments on the schoolyard like that but Johnny argued anyway. We ended up winning the game. That told me something about his tough
ness and competitiveness.”

  Right from the start, Dawkins was the leader of the freshman group. Some of it was his personality and some of it was that he was the best player. “When he said, ‘Let’s do something,’ we did it,” Mark Alarie said.

  And so, that first day at Krzyzewski’s house, when Dawkins said they were all going to drive to Chapel Hill the next day to play in the pickup games at Woollen Gym, there weren’t any questions asked other than, “What time do we leave?”

  In those days, teams couldn’t formally practice in any way until October 15. Early in the fall, players at top schools would gather to play against one another. The best games were usually the ones played in Carolina’s old gym, the same place where Dean Smith had once been hung in effigy outside.

  There was a game going on when the Duke freshmen walked in. They sat on the floor at one end of the court, their heads resting against the wall while they watched and waited for a turn to play. As luck would have it, Michael Jordan was playing in the game that was going on as they sat down.

  “We’d only been there for a couple of minutes when Jordan caught a pass on the baseline pretty much right in front of us,” Alarie remembered. “He made a shot fake and went to the basket and dunked the ball. As he did it, he bumped his head against the backboard. I was sitting next to Jay, and I looked at him and we both said the same thing: ‘What the f—— have we gotten ourselves into?’ It was pretty intimidating.”

  When the Duke kids got their chance to play, they didn’t last long. “Whoever we were playing took care of us pretty quickly,” Alarie said. “Maybe I was being paranoid, but as we were walking off the court I thought I heard someone say, ‘That’s the best recruiting class in the country?’ Or maybe I was the one thinking it.”

  There were a lot of people thinking the same thing once the season began. Krzyzewski was a little bit like a chemist that fall looking for a combination that would work. He had four seniors who knew that the future of the program lay with the freshmen but still believed it should be their team. There was also the sophomore class, the guys who had been signed the previous spring after all the big names had gone to other places. And there were the freshmen, who believed they should play because, quite simply, they were better than the older guys.

  There wasn’t a lot of love lost between the seniors and the freshmen. It showed—especially on the court. After winning their first two games against weak opposition, the Blue Devils lost four in a row—unheard-of for an ACC team in December. The good news was that the next four games were at home against teams that couldn’t possibly beat Duke.

  Except one of them—Wagner—did.

  Located in Staten Island, New York, Wagner didn’t have one of those dangerous lower-level Division I teams that year. The Seahawks came to Durham with a 2–7 record having just lost at UNLV by 50. They beat Duke, 84–77. At one point early in the second half Dawkins was stripped on back-to-back possessions by Wagner’s Bob Mahala. After the game Krzyzewski didn’t even know Mahala’s name. “We couldn’t stop number ten,” he said.

  That was Mahala. Wagner would go on to finish 10–18, but that night the Seahawks carried their coach, Neil Kennett, off the court. On the night Krzyzewski became college basketball’s all-time winningest coach, Staten Island Advance columnist Cormac Gordon wrote a column about that game almost twenty-nine years earlier and described Krzyzewski and Kennett crossing paths again at a funeral many years later. According to Gordon, Kennett approached Krzyzewski and said, “Coach, I’m sure you don’t remember me…”

  “I remember you very well,” Krzyzewski answered. “Because of you, I haven’t taken an opponent lightly in thirty years.”

  There would be other low moments, but this one was unique because it was in Cameron—which wasn’t close to full that night. The listed attendance was 5,500. When the game was over, those who were there made their feelings known.

  “I think we’re all probably a little blurry on the game,” Bilas said. “But we all remember what we heard going off the court afterwards.”

  To get to the locker room, the players and coaches had to pass directly below the stands in the corner of the gym where most of the alumni and boosters sat. As they did, they could very clearly hear fans—their fans—many of them leaning down over the railing so they were almost in their faces, screaming at all of them in anger.

  “It was almost all directed at Coach K,” David Henderson remembered. “Some of it was profane, but most of it was, ‘You’re a loser’ and ‘You’re out of here, pack your bags!’ That kind of stuff.”

  “That was the gist of most of it,” Bilas said. “They wanted him gone. It made us angry—at them, but also at ourselves for playing so poorly.”

  A new joke began making the rounds in the ACC after the Wagner game: if Krzyzewski could do for Duke basketball in three years what he had done for Wagner basketball in forty minutes, he would be a huge success.

  There were not a lot of yuks in Durham. The team was divided. Some of the seniors were telling the freshmen they might as well transfer because there was no way Krzyzewski would be around beyond their sophomore years—if that long. By mid-February, Krzyzewski had decided to ride the freshmen the rest of the season because they were the future.

  The tension inside the locker room was perhaps best summed up when the team sat down to watch tape after being routed 105–81 by North Carolina in the regular season finale in Cameron. Krzyzewski had started the three remaining seniors: Tom Emma, Chip Engelland, and Mike Tissaw (one, Allen Williams, had left the team at midseason). They were the last of Bill Foster’s recruits.

  Engelland and Emma had been starters for large chunks of their careers. Tissaw’s minutes had gone way down once Bilas and Alarie arrived, but Krzyzewski started him in his final home appearance. On Duke’s first possession of the game, Tissaw took an eighteen-foot jump shot—a shot that was about seventeen feet outside his range. As he played back the tape, Krzyzewski stopped it right after Tissaw released the shot.

  “You see, when I look at this, Tiss,” Krzyzewski said, “all I can think is that you’re just saying ‘f—— you’ to me.”

  There was a long silence in the room.

  “That’s because that’s exactly what Tiss was saying with that shot,” Mark Alarie said thirty-three years later. “It’s probably fair to say that’s how the seniors felt at that stage of the season.”

  —

  The seniors hated their coach and resented the freshmen. The freshmen felt the resentment and the anger and resented it right back. The coach understood the seniors’ frustration on an intellectual level but not on an emotional level.

  “There was a lot of bad feeling,” Krzyzewski said. “I was a young coach, still learning, and I didn’t handle it well. If the blame’s on anyone, it’s on me. We had no leadership at all in the locker room. Johnny [Dawkins] tried but he was still a freshman trying to learn to play in the ACC, and even for him that was hard. By the time we got to Atlanta we were done.”

  Not only done—but humiliated. The Blue Devils were matched against Virginia in the opening round of the ACC Tournament, played that year in Atlanta’s Omni. Virginia led only 59–50 at halftime, thanks in large part to the fact that Ralph Sampson spent much of the first half on the bench with two fouls.

  The game got completely out of hand in the second half and the final score was 109–66. Thirty-two years later, Krzyzewski remembers the score—and most of the night—vividly.

  “I was angry with everyone,” Krzyzewski said. “In fact I hated almost everyone that night. I hated what I’d let my team become. We had no leadership—least of all from me—we were bickering and we didn’t play nearly as hard as we should have played.

  “I hated my opponent because I thought Terry [Holland] had run up the score. I hated my alumni because I knew they were grumbling behind my back that I should be fired and none of them would look me in the eye. Hate can destroy you or it can fuel you. I knew I had to find a way for it to fuel me.�
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  Krzyzewski and Holland got into a shouting match in the hallway outside the locker room after each had finished his postgame press conference. Holland had expressed frustration with Jay Bilas, saying he believed that the six-eight freshman had been trying to hurt Sampson, his seven-four senior.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone,” Bilas said, years later. “I was trying not to get humiliated and I failed utterly.”

  Sampson played only fourteen minutes in the game because of the two first-half fouls and the second-half score. Even in those limited minutes, he scored eighteen points and had twelve rebounds, which might be why—in Krzyzewski’s memory—he played forty minutes, not fourteen. Years later, in a radio interview with Dan Patrick, he said he had been most angry at Holland that night because Sampson played all forty minutes.

  “I guess,” he said, after learning Sampson had played only fourteen minutes, “it just felt like forty minutes.”

  In truth, it felt to the Duke people as if the game would never end. When it did, after Holland and Krzyzewski had yelled at each other, Krzyzewski went back to Duke’s hotel on the outskirts of Atlanta. Mickie was in the room, in tears, convinced that Butters was going to be forced to fire her husband.

  Butters had been set upon by Iron Duke boosters as soon as he walked into the hotel lobby, asking him what he intended to do about the situation.

  “There was no way I was going to fire Mike,” Butters said. “I was still completely convinced he was the right coach. I heard a lot of anger that night from a lot of people. But there were no death threats…yet.”

  Long after midnight, Bobby Dwyer gathered a small group of Krzyzewski friends and convinced his boss that he needed to get out of the hotel and get something to eat. In pouring rain, the group of eight—including two reporters, one accompanied by his wife; Krzyzewski, Dwyer, and his fiancée; and Duke’s sports information director Tom Mickle and his assistant, Johnny Moore—walked into a Denny’s.