The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  The night before, Bob Valvano had flown into Charlottesville to broadcast a basketball game and rented a car at the airport.

  “Valvano,” the man at the rent-a-car desk had said, recognition in his voice and his eyes. “Jim Valvano. Wow. Great to meet you, Coach.”

  Several lines ran through Bob Valvano’s head, not the least of which was, “If Jim is here, we’ve got a hell of a story to tell.”

  Instead, he just smiled, pointed at his driver’s license, and said, “Bob. It’s Bob Valvano.”

  Bob Valvano is a slightly rounder version of his older brother. He has the same jet-black hair, the same easy smile and heartfelt laugh that Jim had. If you close your eyes when he’s talking, you might swear you were listening to Jim.

  “The difference is that even though I’m funny, I’m not as funny as Jim,” Bob said. “No one was as funny as Jim.”

  When Bob was little, he shared a room with Jim. Nick left for college by the time Bob was four, so it was Jim who Bob grew up with. “He was my hero,” Bob said. “He was my hero when I was a kid, he was my hero when I became an adult, and he’s my hero now.”

  Bob has talked about his brother so often since his death that he can do so most of the time without getting emotional. He even wrote a book called The Gifts of Jimmy V. But there is still some pain that’s evident, especially when he talks about his boyhood and about the direction Jim’s life went after he won the national championship.

  “Nick always told me that Jim was a star right from the beginning, from those first days when the nuns took him around school to do his Durante impression.”

  When Bob was old enough to play ball, Jim would play with him. By then he was a high school star in football, basketball, and baseball. “We’d play basketball and he’d do play-by-play during the game. He’d always let me get close to winning and then he’d crush me. He’d say things like, ‘And poor Bobby has absolutely no chance. He’s being humiliated yet again. It’s over for Bobby, it’s over!’

  “I’d run inside crying and my mother would say, ‘If he’s going to do that why do you keep playing with him?’ I didn’t have an answer for that other than, ‘Why would I not play with him? It’s Jim. It’s my big brother—my hero.’ I’m not sure I consciously thought any of that, but there’s no doubt that’s the way I felt.”

  Bob wasn’t as good a player as Jim, who went to Rutgers as a recruited walk-on and became the starting point guard as a sophomore. Bob played at Division III Virginia Wesleyan. He then followed Jim into coaching, mostly at the Division III level. Like Jim, Bob has a lightning-fast sense of humor and a knack for storytelling. He also has vivid memories of his brother’s remarkable rise to coaching stardom and what happened after Lorenzo Charles dunked the ball that night in the Pit.

  “Jimmy always talked about cutting down the last net,” Bob said. “That was his dream from the first day he got into coaching. He never doubted that he could do that. He was a coach’s son who wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps first but always believed he could outcoach anybody. As much as he respected Dean and Mike there was never any doubt in his mind that he could outcoach them. If he’d coached against Wooden, he would have felt the same way, and he worshipped Wooden.

  “I guess some of that was ego. It has to be if you want to be good at something. But it was more than that: it was his feel for the game. People act sometimes as if Jim didn’t study the game. He did—all the time. But he also had a feel for the game that was pretty close to unique. There were times he’d do something in a game that was the exact opposite of what should have been right—and he was right. The Houston game, going out and attacking them, was a perfect example.

  “But it was always about cutting down the last net. Whenever he gave clinics, he’d talk to the kids about that. Then, at the end, he’d make them all carry him on their shoulders, and he’d cut down the net. It made Garf [Five-Star Camp owner Howard Garfinkel] crazy because he always had to pay for a new net. He’d tell Jimmy not to do it again and Jimmy would do it again. Garf would get angry, scream at Jimmy, and then say, ‘So, when are you coming back?’ Because no one ever put on a better clinic for the kids than Jimmy, and Garf knew that.

  “When Iona beat Louisville in the Garden in eighty, Jimmy had the team cut down the nets. That team might have been good enough to win the whole thing if they’d gotten on the kind of roll State got on in eighty-three.

  “Then, almost overnight, Jim goes from being a rising young coach, who was always entertaining and funny, to being a flat-out rock star. He went from coaching in Dean’s shadow to overshadowing everyone. He wasn’t going to walk away from coaching, because he loved basketball and he loved the pressure and intensity of the games. Never practice—the games. Other guys like Dean and Mike will tell you they loved practice first and foremost. Not Jim; he always lived for the games.

  “Then he won the ultimate game. He had just turned thirty-seven and he had lived out his dream. Jim always loved basketball, but he wasn’t basketball obsessed. He woke up after Albuquerque and the thought in the back of his mind was, ‘I’m thirty-seven, I’ve cut down the final net. I’ve done coaching. Now what do I do?’ ”

  Valvano was the seventh-youngest coach to win a national title—a little more than six years older than Branch McCracken, who was thirty-one when he won at Indiana in 1940. No one as young as Valvano was in 1983 has won a title since then. Dean Smith was fifty-one when he won for the first time. Mike Krzyzewski was forty-four. In fact, no coach under the age of forty has won a championship since Valvano.

  For a while, Valvano did what came naturally: He was a star. His speaking fee skyrocketed, and he could have spoken 365 days a year had he wanted to. He didn’t fall that far short. He was on TV all the time. For a while he flew to New York on Sunday nights, did The CBS Morning News on Monday morning, then flew back to Raleigh. He hosted a truly terrible TV show called Sports Bloopers, and he frequently guest-hosted for Bob Costas on his national radio show. He even did color on games for NBC during the season, often coaching a game on Saturday and then flying somewhere to talk about someone else’s game on Sunday.

  “He was so good hosting my show I thought the network might make him the host and let me guest in his place on occasion,” Costas said. “He was a natural.”

  Which is why the Sports Bloopers show was so bad. It was scripted, and the scripts weren’t funny. If Valvano had been allowed to wing it the show would have been much better.

  “You couldn’t script Jim,” Nick Valvano said. “You just had to let him go.”

  Valvano also did a daily five-minute radio commentary every morning on a local Raleigh station. The station set up a special phone line in Valvano’s office that allowed him to call into the station and tape the commentary with studio-quality sound at any hour of the day or night. He never wrote a script. He would call the designated number, look at his watch, and talk for exactly five minutes about whatever was on his mind.

  One morning, after a game, he drove home at about two A.M. and went to bed. “At four thirty I sat bolt upright in bed and realized, ‘I didn’t do the radio bit,’ ” he said. “It’s supposed to air at seven thirty. I can’t do it from home; I gotta go to the office. I get out of bed, get in the car, and drive back to campus. I get to the turn onto campus and the light’s red—it’s one of those long left-turn arrows. It’s five o’clock in the morning so I just make the turn. Sure enough, there’s a cop right there. Pulls me over right away.

  “He comes up to the car, points the flashlight at me, and recognizes me. He says, ‘Coach, you ran the light back there.’ I tell him, ‘I know and I’m sorry.’ He says, ‘Coach, have you been drinking?’ I tell him, no, that I’m coming from home to do the radio bit. He looks at me like I’m crazy and says, ‘Come on, Coach, you gotta do better than that—get out of the car.’

  “I said, ‘Gladly,’ and got out. I was in my pajamas. I said, ‘Now do you believe me?’ He couldn’t stop laughing. He just waved at me to g
et back inside and walked back to his car.”

  Valvano kept his life filled to the brim but not with anything that made him feel fulfilled the way the crusade to cut the final net had kept him fulfilled.

  “He never thought of himself as just a basketball coach,” Pam Valvano Strasser said. “He was an English major in college. He was a reader, a real reader. He liked talking to smart people who weren’t in basketball. It was almost as if he had to prove to himself that he could succeed in something other than basketball. He’d already done that.”

  Or, as Valvano would frequently say late at night—or very early in the morning—“What am I going to be when I grow up?”

  Valvano would always gather friends in his office after games. Like most coaches, he couldn’t sleep after a game, there was just too much adrenaline pumping. Most coaches use that time and energy to review game tape, sometimes until dawn if a loss has been especially aggravating. Valvano wasn’t much for late-night tape watching. For one thing, he could still see almost every play in a game in his mind’s eye, so there wasn’t much need. He almost always knew why his team had won or why it had lost.

  “Easiest thing in the world is to come up with reasons why you lost a game,” he often said. “The officials screwed you; a player had a bad night; someone messed up a critical play. I’ve got a million excuses. Here’s the bottom line: a W is a W and an L is an L. None of the rest of it matters. None of it.”

  And so, rather than rehash the game, Valvano and his assistants and invited friends would order pizza and wine, and Valvano would hold court. Time would pass. Pam would call to find out when Jim was coming home. He would tell her, “Soon,” and resume storytelling because he wasn’t close to being ready or able to sleep. People would drift out, and often Valvano would stretch out on the couch in the office amid the now-empty pizza boxes and wine bottles and turn reflective.

  “Dean will coach forever,” he often said. “So will Mike. They like almost everything about the job. Dean would rather not deal with the media, but he does what he has to because he loves the rest of it so much. Mike was born to be a coach. He loves it so much that while he’s hating a loss he’s finding a way to use it to get better. That’s one reason why he’s so good.

  “I’m not like that. We lose and I’m pissed off. I don’t question the outcome—because that’s pointless. I question myself: Did I recruit the wrong players? Am I not coaching them as well as I should? Do I have the right assistants? What’d I do wrong? Where’d I go wrong?

  “And then I say, ‘What the hell am I doing this for? What do I love about this job? The money—yup, love the money. Never ever thought I’d make this kind of money. Practice? Not so much. Recruiting? God no. Dealing with the media? It’s okay, I’m good at it, but if I never did it again would I miss it? Maybe a little. Maybe a couple of guys. But not much.

  “I love the games. I love the damn games. I love the forty minutes. I love the spotlight and I love the pressure and it’s real. The rest of it—what’s real about it? Nothing. And most of it I can do blindfolded. But not the forty minutes. The forty minutes is really hard and I love it. But how many times a year do I get to do it? Thirty-five times—maybe. In a good year. That’s less than ten percent of a year. Is that enough? I don’t know.”

  In truth, it wasn’t enough. Which is why Valvano wandered. His wanderings—and wonderings—didn’t really hurt the team on the court. State’s miracle run, combined with the likeability of the players on that championship team and Valvano’s newfound fame, had allowed Valvano to get into the home of almost any recruit in the country. If you were a big-time player, N.C. State was now on the list of schools you had to consider. And once Valvano was inside the door—or had a recruit on campus—he was going to win recruiting battles more often than he lost them.

  He put together a film to show to recruits and their families when they came to campus that made it almost impossible for anyone to say no to him—or what he was selling, which was supposed to be N.C. State but in reality was Jim Valvano.

  The film began in a darkened gym that slowly lightened to show a mist and a fog billowing through. Then came the sound of someone dribbling a basketball. The sound grew louder and louder until Valvano appeared out of a cloudy mist wearing N.C. State sweats quoting Carl Sandburg, Shakespeare, and John Greenleaf Whittier: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these, ‘It might have been!’ ”

  Valvano didn’t need a teleprompter; he knew all the quotations by heart. After quoting Whittier, the camera dissolved to show highlights from the championship run: Mullen’s miss; Charles’s dunk; Lowe, Bailey, and Whittenburg making plays; Valvano looking for someone to hug, and, finally, hugs—lots of hugs. By this moment the thought that one might not play for Valvano at N.C. State had to be completely gone. What would Whittier have said about such a decision? Finally, the camera came back to Valvano looking into it as the fog and the mist and darkness began to roll back in saying, “Dream the dream…at N.C. State.” With that, he turned and walked back into the darkness.

  Where do I sign?

  The Wolfpack dipped a little bit in 1984 after the departures of Whittenburg, Lowe, and Bailey, but the season was a joyride anyway, an ongoing celebration of the previous spring. Valvano got a commitment that winter from six-foot-eleven Chris Washburn, the most highly rated big man in the country. Charles was now a star and, like Gannon and McQueen, would be back for another season.

  In both 1985 and 1986, the Wolfpack came within one win of going back to the Final Four—losing in the Elite Eight to St. John’s and then, a year later, to Kansas in a tense game played in Kansas City, a virtual home court for the Jayhawks.

  Valvano was despondent after that loss. He had believed his team was going to win the game. “I thought we had them by the cojones,” he said afterward. “One play, two plays, but what the hell—all the plays went our way in eighty-three. I guess I got every break that year, so now God is evening things up.” He shrugged. “I guess he’s entitled.”

  Good players—very good players—were still going to N.C. State. Things had changed in the Triangle, though: Duke was now a factor. In fact, on the cold January afternoon in 1986 when North Carolina opened its new basketball palace—the 21,000-seat Dean E. Smith Center—North Carolina and Duke were ranked first and second in the nation.

  Even so, Valvano managed to steal some of the thunder surrounding that game and the announcement that the building was going to be named for Smith. Two weeks earlier, the Wolfpack played the last game in Carmichael Auditorium, losing 90–79. The buildup to the Carmichael finale had been hyped in the North Carolina media a little bit less—not much, though—than man’s first landing on the moon.

  Would the Tar Heels’ last memory of Carmichael be a win? Who would score the first basket of the last game? Would Dean Smith start his seniors in their last game in Carmichael? (No, just joking.) Who would score the last basket?

  Valvano had the final word on the final game. After he had shaken Smith’s hand, he had someone throw him a basketball. By then, everyone from Carolina had left the court and all eyes and cameras were on Valvano. He walked to one end of the court and softly tossed a layup through the basket.

  “Now everyone knows the answer,” Valvano said. “I scored the last basket in Carmichael.”

  With that, not unlike Elvis, he left the building.

  16

  If Jim Valvano and North Carolina State had won the national championship in 1983 before Dean Smith and North Carolina won the title in 1982, there might have been some unhappy rumblings among the Carolina faithful.

  After all, the notion that both mean, in-your-face Norman Sloan and funny, outgoing Jim Valvano could win national titles in Raleigh while the iconic Dean Smith couldn’t win one in Chapel Hill might have been more than Tar Heel fans could bear.

  Fortunately, that issue didn’t exist. What’s more, the Tar Heels appeared to be loaded—again—going into the 1983–84 season. Michael Jordan was no
w a junior and, unquestionably, the best player in the country. Sam Perkins was a senior and a lock All-American, and Matt Doherty was also a senior, the kind of player every college coach would love to have on his team. Brad Daugherty had a year of experience. Steve Hale wasn’t Mark Price, but he was a very solid ACC shooting guard.

  Additionally, there was—naturally—another outstanding freshman class, led by a guard from New York named Kenny Smith who quickly lived up to his nickname: the Jet. Depth? Buzz Peterson, who had been the sixth man on the ’82 championship team, was still coming off the bench as a junior. And there were two freshmen big men, Dave Popson and Joe Wolf. Neither was seven feet (of course) but both were talented. Only one player who had played any serious minutes the previous season had graduated: Jim Braddock.

  The three best players on N.C. State’s championship team were gone. So was Ralph Sampson. Maryland had a solid team led by Len Bias and Adrian Branch but appeared to be light-years behind the Tar Heels. The same was true of Georgia Tech, which had come on strong at the end of the previous season. Duke would be better if only because it couldn’t possibly be any worse.

  “I think we all thought everything was in place for us to win again,” Roy Williams said. “You never know what’s going to happen in March, but if we stayed healthy we all thought we were going to be tough to beat. We had size, we had experience, and we had depth.” Williams smiled. “We also had Michael.”

  Jordan had become an iconic figure in North Carolina after his title-winning shot in New Orleans. With Worthy gone and Dean Smith’s freshman shackles removed, he had emerged as a star during his sophomore season. The three best players in the country as the season began were Jordan and two great centers: Hakeem Olajuwon at Houston and Patrick Ewing at Georgetown.

  Smith, as always, tried to downplay expectations. But even he had to admit this was a team that had the potential to be great—better even than the ’82 championship team.