The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

Water was served. Mickle picked up his water and said, “Here’s to forgetting tonight.”

  Krzyzewski picked up his water glass and looked at the soggy group around him. “Here,” he said, “is to never f——ing forgetting tonight.”

  And he never did.

  —

  While the Duke people headed home from Atlanta to lick their many wounds, North Carolina and North Carolina State were playing the first game of semifinal Saturday at the ACC Tournament.

  The Tar Heels’ season had gone pretty much as had been expected. They had lost their first two games of the season to ranked teams (St. John’s and Missouri) and had then gone 25–4 the rest of the regular season. They had beaten Virginia twice and had lost two ACC games in February: at Maryland and then at N.C. State.

  State’s victory in Reynolds Coliseum wasn’t just critical—Carolina had won the teams’ first meeting 99–81 in Chapel Hill to drop Valvano to 0–7 against the Tar Heels—it was cathartic. It was also surprising, because Dereck Whittenburg was still out of the lineup nursing the foot he had broken on January 12 against Virginia. Whittenburg had been on fire in the first half of that game, scoring twenty-seven points—aided by the fact that the ACC was using an experimental three-point line that was literally inside the key.

  “I don’t want to say the line is close,” Valvano said one day. “But my mom dropped by practice yesterday and she made nine of ten from behind the line.”

  But with State leading Virginia by five and Reynolds Coliseum in a frenzy early in the second half, Whittenburg accidentally stepped on Virginia guard Othell Wilson’s foot right in front of the State bench. He went down writhing in pain—his right foot broken for the second time in his career. The doctors said he was done—his college career over. Valvano held out some hope for postseason.

  “I knew they were wrong,” Whittenburg said. “I’d made it back in six weeks the first time. I knew I could do it again.”

  Without Whittenburg, State lost that night and then lost four of its next six games to drop to 9–7. It appeared the season was spiraling out of control. Valvano decided to change his offense—going from a lot of high screens designed to set up jump shooters like Whittenburg, Terry Gannon, and Sidney Lowe to a motion offense that opened up the lane. This was especially helpful to freshman Ernie Myers, who was excellent at powering his way to the basket. Myers scored thirty-five points in a rout of Duke (“rout of Duke” was becoming redundant by that point in the season) and State went on a 7–2 skein.

  “It was a scary time right after Whitt got hurt,” Lowe said. “It was scary for me because I’d never played without him since my sophomore year of high school. There were times, especially right after the injury, when I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t going to end the way we want it to.’ But then Coach V made some changes in the offense and Ernie began to play really well. In a lot of ways, Ernie saved our season.”

  On February 19, with Whittenburg almost ready to come back, Carolina came to town. State played an almost perfect game, Lowe dominating the ball in the final minutes when the Tar Heels were trying to rally. A couple of weeks earlier, in a game against Wake Forest, Lowe had been dribbling the clock down and felt a wave of exhaustion.

  “First, I tried to give him [Valvano] the tired sign,” Lowe said, laughing. “He just looked the other way as if he didn’t see me. Then I dribbled over near the bench and shouted, ‘Coach, I think I need a blow.’ ”

  Valvano had nodded. “You’ll get one, Sidney,” he said. “Just as soon as your eligibility is used up.”

  Lowe understood. He wasn’t coming out of any game that was still in doubt. On that euphoric night in Reynolds Coliseum, the thought of a rest never crossed his mind. “No way was I coming out of that game,” he said. “We were all tired, but none of us wanted to come out.”

  Lowe and the Wolfpack made it to the finish line, and the fans stormed the court. Back then, court stormings were a big deal. North Carolina was ranked number three in the country but that wasn’t the only reason to storm the court. It was Valvano’s first win over Smith and finally broke the seven-game losing streak that had started soon after ole Norman left town.

  “It was unbelievably important,” Pam Valvano Strasser said years later. “I think Jim honestly was starting to believe he couldn’t beat Dean, no matter what. To beat them at all felt like a miracle. To do it without Dereck was a miracle.”

  Eight days later, Whittenburg was ready to play again. State was a different team though—one that was often fueled by Myers. It took a couple of games for the Wolfpack to adapt from looking to set Myers up to drive the ball to again looking for Whittenburg to shoot the ball from the perimeter. They promptly lost back-to-back games to Virginia and Maryland. That dropped their record to 16–10 overall and 7–6 in the ACC.

  They finally got their act together in the final game of the regular season, crushing Wake Forest 130–89 in the final home game for Whittenburg, Lowe, and Bailey.

  “That game was important even though it didn’t appear to be at the time,” Whittenburg said. “It told us how good we could be when we got rolling. I think everyone had forgotten a little bit how well we were playing the night I got hurt. We needed that reminder going into the ACC Tournament. A lot of people had been saying we were dead. I said, ‘A dead team doesn’t beat someone as good as Wake Forest by forty-one.’ We were a long way from dead.”

  There was some talk going into the ACC Tournament that State—the number-four seed—might get an at-large bid to the tournament if it got to the championship game and lost. North Carolina and Virginia—the Tar Heels were the top seed in the tournament by virtue of their two wins over UVA, even though both teams had finished 12–2—were tournament locks. So was Maryland, which had finished third. Georgia Tech, Duke, and Clemson—the sixth, seventh, and eighth seeds—weren’t going anywhere. Wake Forest, the number-five seed, probably needed one win to get in, because it had a stronger overall résumé than the Wolfpack.

  N.C. State probably needed to win at least two games and make the finals to get a bid. Valvano wasn’t convinced even that would be good enough.

  “We can’t lose again,” Valvano told his team before the tournament. “We need three wins this weekend if we want a bid Sunday night. It’s in our hands now. We can’t leave it in anyone else’s hands. If we lose, it’s out of our hands.”

  —

  The Wolfpack was very lucky to win one game that weekend, much less three. It took a critical last-minute steal by Lowe from Wake Forest star Rodney Rogers to allow State to escape with a 71–70 victory on Friday afternoon—the game being played right after North Carolina had opened the tournament with an easy win over Clemson and a few hours before Virginia’s humiliation of Duke.

  Wake had been leading 70–69 when Lowe stole the ball. He found Lorenzo Charles on the wing, and Charles went to the basket and was fouled. He made both free throws for the winning points. After the game, Lowe was asked if he had thought about waiting for Whittenburg or Bailey to come open or even take the shot himself rather than pass the ball to Charles, whose game at that stage was built around his rebounding and his defense.

  “Never occurred to me,” Lowe said. “I saw that Lo had a lane to the basket and I knew he could make a play—or free throws.”

  Years later, Lowe looked back on that play as a harbinger of what was to come. “I think I believed, we all believed, that whoever was on the court could make whatever play we needed to make,” he said. “I never thought for a second about not giving the ball to Lo. I had complete confidence in him.”

  Georgia Tech’s late-night upset of Maryland set up a semifinal Saturday afternoon that started with Carolina playing N.C. State. There was little reason to believe, especially on a neutral court, that the Wolfpack could repeat the magic it had found in Raleigh three weeks earlier.

  Something happened just before the start of the game that afternoon that may not have affected the outcome but did affect Valvano’s mood.

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nbsp; “Jim and Dean were talking at midcourt just before they blew the players off the court to introduce the lineups,” assistant coach Tom Abatemarco remembered. “Jim always did that with the other coach. It actually helped distract him instead of worrying about every detail—which he did all the time.

  “He comes walking back to the bench and I can see he’s angry. I said, ‘V, what’s up?’ He starts shaking his head and saying, ‘F——ing Dean, f——ing Dean, he just can’t stop himself.’

  “I asked him what he was talking about and he said, ‘Dean just said to me, “So I guess you have to win today and tomorrow if you want to have any chance to make the tournament.” I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to get in my head, get me thinking about that instead of the game. Son of a bitch.’

  “I started laughing. I said, ‘V, guess what, he did get inside your head!’ He shook his head and said, ‘Dammit, you’re right. He did.’ ”

  Smith wasn’t inside the State players’ heads once the game began. With Whittenburg now fully integrated back into the lineup, they were completely convinced that they could play with the Tar Heels. The game went back and forth until Carolina finally pulled away and took a 75–62 lead with a little more than three minutes left. Somehow, helped by Carolina missing several free throws, State rallied—the beginning of a pattern that would continue until the national championship game. Even so, with the score tied at 77, Sam Perkins launched a long jumper from the left wing at the buzzer to try to win the game. The ball went in and out, and the teams went to overtime.

  “I thought it was in,” Lowe said. “I watched Sam’s follow-through and I could tell he thought he made it. To this day, I’m honestly not sure how it stayed out.” He shrugged. “Meant to be, I guess.”

  “Amazing,” Whittenburg said. “The shot’s halfway down—at least. If it stays in we go to the NIT and I’m honestly not sure that V still has a job when the season’s over. Think about it—we would have been to one NCAA Tournament in three years. Even though my injury should have given him a little bit of a break, it might not have. All people would have remembered was that our last important game of the season was another loss to Carolina.”

  Abatemarco never felt as if Valvano’s job was in jeopardy. “But you never know,” he said. “Willis [Casey] was an unpredictable guy. If one of the big Wolfpack Club guys, or a bunch of them, had gone in to him and said, ‘Get that Italian guy from New York out of here,’ it could have happened.”

  It never became an issue because State, after trailing by 6 early in the overtime, rallied again, then made all its free throws in the final minute and won the game, 91–84. Instead of exiting with yet another loss to the Tar Heels, the Wolfpack now had won two in a row against them.

  Even with Smith inside Valvano’s head.

  “I’ve always liked Dean,” Valvano said years later. “I respected who he was and the program he built. But there was never a possible angle he wouldn’t play if he thought it would help him win. It was part of why he was so damn good. But I can also understand why he made guys like Lefty and Terry Holland crazy. There was never any letup.”

  The win over Carolina put State into the tournament final against Virginia—a team it had already lost to twice, including the night Whittenburg was injured. A tense, seesaw game turned when Virginia assistant coach Jim Larranaga was—shockingly—called for a technical foul with 5:15 left and State up 71–66. Whittenburg’s four free throws made it 75–66, and Virginia, which very much wanted to win the game because it was Sampson’s last chance to win an ACC Tournament, never caught up. Hanging on for dear life in the final seconds, State won, 81–78.

  The Wolfpack was in the NCAA Tournament. Valvano didn’t have to worry about his job. And, as it would turn out, he was also about to make Mike Krzyzewski’s job safer—even if that was never his intent.

  13

  Mike Krzyzewski has given a lot of thought to the events of March 1983. Even now, after becoming the first coach in the history of men’s college basketball to win a thousand games, he thinks about what might have been—or, more specifically, what might not have been.

  “I think you can make the case that Jim Valvano saved my job that year,” he said on an unseasonably warm October afternoon more than thirty-one years later. “I know Tom [Butters] has said he never would have fired me, and I absolutely believe that he believes that. But there were a lot of angry people around here after Atlanta.

  “Everyone expected Carolina to go deep into the tournament, so the local media was already geared up for that. The only real surprise was that they ended up not making the Final Four. The shock was that State kept winning and advancing. And they played the entire tournament out west, so the local news departments had to send people out there to cover them.”

  He smiled. “That gave me and, by extension, Tom, cover. The media was so focused on what State was doing that we were out of sight, out of mind. At that point in time, that was the absolute best thing for us. The less people talked about us, wrote about us, even thought about us, the better off we were.”

  There weren’t many in the Triangle expecting much more from N.C. State once the tournament began. As impressive as their ACC Tournament weekend had been, it wasn’t that uncommon for upsets to occur in the conference tournament, where everyone knew everyone and if any team—even the best teams—had any sort of weakness, the opponent knew exactly what it was.

  One example: Whenever North Carolina played Virginia, Dean Smith told his players to back way off Ralph Sampson early in the game and give him room to shoot from the perimeter. Sampson was a reasonably good shooter, especially for someone who was seven foot four.

  “We always hoped he’d make his first one,” Smith said. “Because if he did, he’d stay out there and keep shooting. Where would we rather have him, outside or inside?”

  On the flip side, when teams outside the conference encountered Carolina’s run-and-jump trapping defense, they frequently had trouble handling it. ACC teams, having seen it in the past, not only knew it was coming but almost always knew when it was coming, rendering it far less effective.

  That was one reason Virginia had won the ACC tournament as a number-six seed in 1976 and then, so euphoric about its victory, had lost to DePaul in its first NCAA Tournament game a week later. A year later, Virginia had been the number-seven seed and had come within a whisker of again winning the tournament, losing to top-seeded North Carolina 75–69 after leading late in the championship game. Three years later, Duke had also won the ACC Tournament as a number-six seed. State winning the 1983 tournament as a number-four seed was a surprise but not a shock.

  That 1977 championship game had really been the start of Terry Holland’s simmering feud with Dean Smith. Holland’s best player was Marc Iavaroni, a hard-nosed six-eight forward from Long Island, who would go on to play and coach in the NBA. Iavaroni wasn’t afraid to mix it up, and Smith didn’t like the way he pushed his big men around in the low post. At halftime, Smith confronted Iavaroni on the way to the locker rooms, planting himself in front of him and pointing his finger up into his face to tell him to lay off the physical stuff.

  Iavaroni was hardly bothered by Smith’s indignation. He laughed and continued to the locker room. Terry Holland—and his wife, Ann—were not amused.

  “I was only a few yards away in my seat,” Ann Holland said. “I looked up and saw Dean pointing up at Marc, clearly lecturing him. I wanted to run down there and tell him to stop, but of course I couldn’t.”

  Had Terry Holland been a little bit closer, he undoubtedly would have told Smith to stop. “I was stunned,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe any coach, much less Dean Smith, would behave that way.”

  Actually, Smith yelling at opposing players was, as longtime UNC play-by-play man Woody Durham, a close Smith friend, would say years later, “a bad habit.” For all the intensity of the Duke–North Carolina rivalry, Smith—for some reason—held a special place in his heart, not a good one, for Virginia.
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br />   Dan Bonner, who went on to become one of college basketball’s best analysts, recalls Smith being infuriated when Bonner had two of his best college games against Carolina in his senior season (1975)—including scoring twelve points when Holland’s first team stunned Carolina late that season in Charlottesville.

  “I just don’t think Dean believed I was worthy of being on the same court with his players,” Bonner said years later. “If truth be told, he was probably right. But it really made him angry when I actually played well against them. And yes, I did get kind of physical at times. I was playing against Mitch Kupchak and Tommy LaGarde. I had no chance if I tried to finesse them.”

  Smith’s dislike for the state of Virginia extended beyond the basketball court. He honestly believed there was at least one Virginia state trooper who would lie in wait for him when he would drive back down Route 29 from Charlottesville after his team had played there—which it did every season.

  “It’s always the same guy,” Smith said, standing in the hallway outside his locker room in Virginia’s old gym, University Hall, just prior to his final game there in 1997. “He sees my [North] Carolina plates go by and he pulls me over. He knows the number—I guarantee it. Last time we lost here, I rolled down the window and he said, ‘Tough loss tonight, Coach, license and registration, please.’ ”

  Smith was a notoriously fast driver. Apparently the thought of perhaps slowing down a little until he was safely across the state line hadn’t crossed his mind.

  Smith’s biggest blowup because of his habit of yelling at players took place in 1995, when he and Rick Barnes, then the coach at Clemson, had to be held apart by referees Rick Hartzell and Frank Scagliotta during an ACC Tournament game. Late in a Carolina rout, Smith began yelling at the Tigers’ Iker Iturbe for the same reason he had yelled at Iavaroni: he thought Iturbe was trying to hurt one of his players.

  “If you have a problem with one of my players, you talk to me,” Barnes yelled at Smith that night after seeing Smith pointing and yelling at Iturbe.