The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Book or no book, the issue wasn’t going away. The NCAA was coming to town to investigate, and The News & Observer also had several reporters looking into the charges.

  “Regardless of how much of the book jacket was true or untrue, it awoke the N&O to the fact that there was a possible story that needed to be checked into going on at N.C. State,” said Liz Clarke, who was an education reporter at the N&O at the time. “In the end, a lot of what was claimed turned out not to be true. The violations that the NCAA found were relatively minor. If all of this had happened in today’s world, it would have been looked at as almost nothing. But it was 1989 and Jim Valvano was a very important person in the state of North Carolina. The story couldn’t be ignored.”

  There were, of course, those who saw the N&O’s pursuit of the story as an anti-State/anti-Valvano crusade. One of those who saw it that way—and still does to this day—was Mike Krzyzewski.

  “Jimmy was a threat to Carolina,” he said. “A lot of those people saw this as their chance to get rid of him and remove that threat. In the end, they succeeded.”

  The executive editor of the N&O in those days was Claude Sitton, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist who had graduated from Emory University. He was an old-school newspaper man who could not have cared less about whether the story involved North Carolina State, North Carolina, Duke, or anyone else that the N&O covered on a regular basis.

  Many who worked in Sitton’s newsroom were graduates of North Carolina’s School of Journalism. Most of those who worked on the N.C. State story weren’t sportswriters. After the story broke, Sitton decided he needed reporters who covered education and politics involved because most on the sports staff knew Valvano too well and had been charmed by him through the years.

  There was no doubting that Sitton was right about that. Everyone who covered Valvano had been charmed by him.

  Twenty-five years later, in the academic scandal surrounding UNC’s Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, the N&O broke many of the key stories—stories that embarrassed the school, the football program, and the basketball program. It also brought the NCAA to Chapel Hill. The writer responsible for most of the important stories was Dan Kane, a graduate of St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, New York, who also worked on the news side as an investigative reporter.

  As Mike Cragg, who has worked at Duke for twenty-seven years and is now Mike Krzyzewski’s chief fund-raiser, put it, “When the news side people get involved, that’s when you’ve got a problem.”

  In 1989, regardless of whether they had any biases or not, the news side people from the N&O were involved. If truth be told, there are very few major college football or basketball programs that don’t have blemishes of some kind. Once a major newspaper with good reporters starts looking under all the rocks and inside the crevices, they are almost bound to find something.

  As Clarke points out, what the N&O learned and what the NCAA also learned about N.C. State would barely be worth reporting these days. Some State players had sold sneakers and other gear that they’d been given by the school and had scalped some of their tickets to games. There was little doubt that admissions standards had been compromised—although that charge could be made to one degree or another against any big-time school.

  The most damning stories didn’t involve any rule breaking. The N&O found a clear pattern of what can best be described as academic manipulation. Back then, there were no NCAA rules on academic progress like the ones that exist now. As long as an athlete didn’t flunk out of school, he could remain eligible under NCAA rules. A number of State basketball players—many—would sign up for a full load of classes, then drop any class it appeared they were going to flunk before the end of the semester. Often, they would sign up for the exact same class the next semester and, given the advantage of having taken it once, pass it. Or, if need be, drop it again. In short, many basketball players were staying eligible but weren’t making much progress at all in the direction of the degree.

  “They were gaming the system,” said Clarke, who wrote or cowrote many of the stories. “They didn’t break any rules, they just used the rules to their advantage to keep players on the court helping them win games for as long as possible. The simple fact is this: Jim Valvano’s job description, in reality, was simple: win games. Never once did he fail to live up to his job description.”

  In the charged atmosphere of 1989, the story became in many ways a UNC vs. N.C. State story. The state legislature, populated with many UNC grads, became involved. Sweeping changes to the entire academic system at State were recommended. Bruce Poulton, the chancellor, who was close to Valvano, was forced to resign in the summer of 1989. Even Valvano, who often joked about the paranoia State people had about North Carolina, was swept up in it.

  “It isn’t a coincidence that most of the people who wield power in this state, who are now insisting on a complete revamping of our academic standards, are UNC grads,” he said one night. “If I thought it was a coincidence at this point, I think I’d be naïve.”

  Golenbock’s book was finally published by Carroll & Graf in September 1989 with one of the longest and most convoluted titles in history: Personal Fouls: The Broken Promises and Shattered Dreams of Big Money Basketball at Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State.

  The book cover was one of the few places in the book that contained no misspellings or factual inaccuracies. The book was riddled with them. At one point, Golenbock had Thanksgiving falling on a Friday. At another, he wrote “Kryzewski—tough name to spell,” misspelling it in that sentence. For these reasons, the book was widely panned by critics and its accuracy was questioned by many. But it had already done crippling damage to Valvano if only by “awakening,” as Clarke put it, the N&O’s news staff.

  The title of the book Valvano cowrote in 1991 (ironically enough with a North Carolina graduate) summed up the entire affair quite well: They Gave Me a Lifetime Contract, and Then They Declared Me Dead.

  —

  Jim Valvano’s last appearance in an NCAA Tournament took place on a rainy night in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on March 24, 1989.

  N.C. State had advanced to the round of sixteen to play top-seeded Georgetown with wins over South Carolina and Iowa. In the opening game that night, Duke had beaten Minnesota to advance to the Elite Eight for the third time in four seasons. Duke’s presence in the East Regional and in the Meadowlands had enraged Dean Smith and most living, breathing North Carolina fans.

  Duke and North Carolina had finished tied for second in the ACC during the regular season—a game behind N.C. State. They had split their regular season meetings, each winning on the other’s home court. Duke’s three wins against UNC the previous season, including in the ACC title game, and the fact that Christian Laettner, the gifted center from Buffalo, had chosen Duke over North Carolina had ratcheted the rivalry up even more than in the past.

  Carolina hadn’t won an ACC Tournament since 1982—the year it had won the national championship—and it hadn’t been back to the Final Four since then either. In that span, Duke had won two ACC Tournaments and been to two Final Fours. The only hole in Krzyzewski’s résumé at that stage was the lack of a national championship.

  “We weren’t hearing footsteps at that point,” Roy Williams said. “They were there, right next to us. It wasn’t as if we’d gone backwards; they’d just come charging forward. I think it made Coach Smith even more intense about beating them when we played—if that was possible.”

  There had been more tension between the two schools and the two coaches during that season. In January, North Carolina came to Cameron. Duke had started the season 13–0 and was ranked number one in the country. North Carolina was a mere 14–3 and ranked number thirteen. Jeff Lebo, now a senior, had been injured three nights earlier in a loss at Virginia.

  In short, the perfect Dean Smith setup. He could tell his players quite honestly that they were underdogs—playing on the road, with their point guard injured, against an undef
eated, top-ranked team. Of course Smith always liked to say that a team could produce one excellent performance after the loss of an injured player. He probably neglected to mention that in the buildup to the game.

  Carolina blew Duke out of the building, 91–71.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t Smith’s focus after the game. He had spotted a sign somewhere in the student section that said “J.R. Can’t Reid.”

  The sign wasn’t funny, it wasn’t accurate, and it was mean. There was also a racist tinge to it, and Smith, rightly, was furious. The fact that he couldn’t stand the Duke students to begin with may have added to his anger.

  The problem was, he couldn’t let it go. Krzyzewski also denounced the sign and said he didn’t believe it was in any way a reflection of the way those in the Duke student body felt. “Someone was trying to be funny and failed,” he said. “It was just in poor taste.”

  That didn’t assuage Smith. When the teams were getting ready to play in Chapel Hill, he brought it up again. This time he referenced the fact that his two African American big men, Reid and Scott Williams, had a higher combined SAT score than Duke’s two white big men, Danny Ferry and Christian Laettner.

  Smith’s anger was genuine. He had always been sensitive to racial stereotypes—especially truly dumb ones. But he had gone too far in bringing up anyone’s SAT scores, especially those of two players at another school. “I know their scores because I recruited them,” Smith said.

  Which was exactly the point. Smith had been given Ferry and Laettner’s transcripts in confidence and had broken at least part of that confidence. What’s more, both would have been accepted at North Carolina and, like Reid and Williams, would have done just fine academically. Finally, if anyone understood how incomplete SAT scores were in judging someone’s academic potential, it was Smith.

  Duke won the game in Chapel Hill, and Smith and Krzyzewski barely looked at each other during the postgame handshake. Krzyzewski believed Smith was trying to embarrass Duke by keeping the story alive. Smith wouldn’t back down even a little bit.

  “I call it competitive anger,” said John Thompson, the former Georgetown coach who was very close to Smith and knows and likes Krzyzewski. “You get two guys who are that good at something and are always competing, there are going to be moments like that. Neither one was ever going to back down from a fight.”

  That was the setting as the eight ACC teams headed to Atlanta for the conference tournament. Sitting on his bench not long before Carolina played its first game on Friday afternoon, Smith still insisted he was only trying to bust racial stereotypes.

  Someone asked Smith if he had successfully recruited Ferry and Laettner, and Reid and Williams had somehow landed at Duke, if he would have brought up the SAT scores.

  “If our students held up a sign like that, absolutely,” he said. “But our students would never do something like that. I wouldn’t allow it.”

  The implication was clear: Krzyzewski, somehow, should have prevented the sign from ever appearing. The competitive anger was as high as it had ever been.

  —

  In the opening game of the tournament, N.C. State, the top seed, was stunned by eighth-seeded Maryland, losing 71–49 in about as shocking an upset as anyone had ever seen in the thirty-six-year history of the tournament. Duke and Carolina ended up facing each other in the final. Walking into the building that day, Krzyzewski was so wound up that he walked right past his wife without even noticing that she was standing there.

  “I think Mike has his game face on,” Mickie Krzyzewski said dryly.

  Early in the game, Krzyzewski and Smith had a brief shouting match with each other after Smith encouraged the officials to give Krzyzewski a technical foul while he was arguing a call. Krzyzewski responded by encouraging Smith to shut up, and the two men took a few steps toward each other, pointing and shouting. A few moments later, when Smith was convinced the officials had given Duke a couple of calls to shut Krzyzewski up, he turned and kicked the scorer’s table in frustration.

  No one had ever seen that. The message was clear: Smith was tired of all the fawning over Duke in the national media and he absolutely did not want to lose another ACC championship game to Krzyzewski.

  He didn’t. Carolina made just enough plays in the endgame to hang on and win. On the game’s last play, with his team down 77–74, Ferry launched a shot from just beyond half-court that went all the way around the rim and finally spun out.

  “If that had gone in,” Smith said later, “I’m not sure the old coach would have been around for overtime.”

  It was as close as Smith had ever come to admitting that he really wanted to win a game.

  With the victory, Smith was convinced his team would be sent to the East Regionals, meaning it would play its first two games in Greensboro and then go to the New Jersey Meadowlands. When the brackets were unveiled that evening, Duke was in the East as the number-two seed and Carolina was in the Southeast as the number-two seed.

  Smith was furious. As luck would have it, Tom Butters, the Duke athletic director, had gone on the basketball committee that year as the ACC’s representative. Smith was 100 percent—at least—convinced that Butters had manipulated the selections to send Duke to Greensboro and back to the Meadowlands—a place from which it had already advanced to the Final Four twice in three years.

  Naturally, the committee’s version was different. It had placed Carolina in the Southeast Region as a reward for its victory over Duke. The number-one seed in the East Region was Georgetown. Even though the committee didn’t formally rank the four number-one seeds back then as it does now, Georgetown was overwhelmingly considered the number-one seed in the tournament. Oklahoma was the number-one seed in the Southeast, and the consensus in the committee room was that it would be tougher for a number-two seed to beat Georgetown to get to the Final Four than to beat Oklahoma to get to the Final Four.

  Smith, needless to say, wasn’t buying it. He was convinced that Butters had gotten his school a spot in Greensboro and then, if it advanced, in East Rutherford—both in buildings that were homes away from home for Duke.

  Duke almost didn’t make it to East Rutherford, having to beat a very good West Virginia team in the second round. Carolina beat Southern University and UCLA in Atlanta, meaning it would play Michigan, the number-three seed in the Southeast, in Lexington, Kentucky, in the round of sixteen. Duke did not have to play Stanford, the number-three seed in the East. The Cardinal was upset in the first round by Siena, which then lost to Minnesota, the number-eleven seed. Smith spent most of the next week explaining how he would have much preferred playing Minnesota than Michigan.

  He was right. Duke cruised by Minnesota. Michigan, which would go on to win the national championship, beat Carolina. Glen Rice, Michigan’s senior guard, was on a shooting tear. Rice would become famous in a nonbasketball way many years later when reports would surface that he’d had a fling with a young sportswriter named Sarah Palin when Michigan played in the Great Alaska Shootout.

  After the loss to Michigan, Smith was his usual self, saying he wasn’t disappointed for himself but for the team’s seniors, Jeff Lebo and Steve Bucknall. He also knew—without saying it—that J. R. Reid, then a junior, had played his last game at Carolina, since he would be turning pro.

  Once his press conference was over, Smith stood in a Rupp Arena hallway and talked to some of his local writers about the season. When he was finished, several of them thanked him for his help and cooperation throughout the winter. This is a ritual beat writers and coaches go through after a team has played its final game.

  As Smith shook hands with Ron Green, Jr., of The Charlotte Observer (a non-Carolina graduate) he looked at Green and said, “I wish we could have played Minnesota.”

  To Smith, that was the season’s legacy.

  Several hours later, with Duke having already beaten Minnesota, N.C. State and Georgetown battled late into the night for the right to play the Blue Devils on Sunday. Valvano’s team had been
rejuvenated in the tournament, and he was completely convinced they could beat Georgetown and would beat Duke, given the chance to play Krzyzewski’s team for a third time.

  With a little under two minutes to play, Georgetown led 64–61. The Wolfpack’s Chris Corchiani caught the ball on the left side of the lane and drove to the basket, appearing to slide between two Georgetown defenders—one of them star center Alonzo Mourning, who had four fouls. The ball went in the hoop and, on TV, Billy Packer said, “There it is,” referring to Mourning’s fifth foul. It appeared that Corchiani would go to the line with a chance to tie the game—and Mourning on the bench.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Rick Hartzell, an ACC official who had advanced to the Sweet 16 for the first time, looked at Corchiani, looked at Mourning, and then—remarkably—signaled that Corchiani had traveled.

  “No way was that a travel,” Packer said as CBS showed a handful of replays.

  The only real question was whether there was a foul. The basket clearly should have been good. Ten rows up from the court, Fred Barakat, who was the ACC’s supervisor of officials at the time, buried his head in his hands when he saw the call. Hartzell would go on to become one of the better officials in the country. But that night—and that call—has haunted him.

  “I’ve never looked at a replay, too painful,” he said. “Fred let me know afterwards in no uncertain terms that I’d missed it. What was worse was Lou Bonder, who was the officiating supervisor at the Meadowlands, telling me in the hallway that, if not for that call, Tommy [Lopes], [Jim] Bain, and I were going to the Final Four. We’d had a very good game up until then. Those five seconds are pretty painful to think about for me, even now.”