The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  The next season, the first time he worked an N.C. State game, Hartzell sought out Valvano and Corchiani before the game and apologized for the mistake.

  “They both couldn’t have been classier about it,” Hartzell said. “I thought the right thing to do was to tell them how sorry I was and they both accepted the apology. That made it a little bit easier to take.”

  Three years later, only a few months before Valvano died, Hartzell ran into him in an airport. He went over to say hello and ask how Valvano was doing.

  “It was just the two of us,” Hartzell said. “I couldn’t help but think about the call in the Meadowlands. I started to say, ‘I hope you know that I’m still sorry—’ I never finished the sentence. Jim put up his hand and said, ‘Stop. I don’t want you to ever think about that again. I mean that.’ Then he gave me a hug. That’s a moment I’ll never forget.”

  There was, of course, no guarantee that State would have won the game, even if Hartzell had called Mourning for his fifth foul and counted the basket. Best-case scenario, the game would have been tied with 1:46 left in regulation. But the traveling call, for all intents and purposes, ended the game. State had to foul. Unlike in 1983, their opponent made the free throws it had to make. The Wolfpack didn’t score again. The final was 69–61.

  An hour after the game had ended, well after midnight, Valvano walked through the bowels of the arena with his head down, unable to hide the pain of this particular L.

  “I thought we were going to win, I really did,” he said. “I can’t tell you for sure we’d have beaten Duke on Sunday, but we’d have had a hell of a shot at it. We know how to play them.” He paused and looked at the rain beating down on the team bus, which sat waiting for him on the ramp leading to the parking lot.

  “Everything that could go right when we had to have it go right happened for us in eighty-three,” he said one more time. “Since then, when we’ve been close…” He stopped for a moment and smiled. “You know, almost…We haven’t caught a break.”

  He sighed and pulled his coat tighter. “Maybe I used ’em all up that year. I hope not but you never know.” He forced one more smile and then—as he did often—quoted from The Godfather.

  “Michael,” he said to an invisible Michael Corleone, “this is the business we’ve chosen.”

  24

  Two days later, with Jim Valvano watching from his living room and Dean Smith not watching at all (“It was a nice day,” he said later. “I went out and played golf.”), Duke beat Georgetown, 85–77, to reach the Final Four for the third time in four years.

  The star of the game was Christian Laettner, who scored 24 points and completely outplayed fellow freshman big man Alonzo Mourning, who was held to 11 points. As it turned out, that game was Laettner’s coming-out party as a great player. A month earlier, Duke and Arizona had played in the same building—a made-for-TV game that was scheduled in part because both had become national powers in the mid-eighties, but also to showcase the country’s two leading candidates for player of the year: Arizona’s Sean Elliott and Duke’s Danny Ferry.

  Ferry won the battle, Elliott and Arizona won the war. With Arizona leading 77–75 and eight seconds remaining, Laettner took the ball on the right wing, drove to the basket with one second left, and, just before he released a shot, was fouled. He went to the foul line, needing to make both ends of the one-and-one to send the game to overtime.

  He missed the front end. As soon as the buzzer sounded, Krzyzewski raced onto the court and grabbed Laettner by the jersey. “Listen to me,” he shouted up at him. “I want you to remember one thing: You didn’t lose the game. You gave us a chance to win the game. Hold your head up.”

  Al McGuire was doing the game on NBC. From the TV announcer location, only a few feet from where Krzyzewski and Laettner were standing, he heard exactly what Krzyzewski said to his freshman center. Later that night, McGuire made one of his classic Al statements while having dinner with Dick Enberg, his close friend and TV partner. “That was one of the most brilliant coaching moves I’ve ever seen,” McGuire said. “I’ll bet you that kid never misses another big shot.”

  Laettner missed almost no shots in the Georgetown game, going 9 of 10 from the field and 6 of 7 from the foul line. The victory put Duke into the Final Four for the third time in four years, meaning that Krzyzewski was now clearly one of the game’s elite coaches.

  A week later, in Seattle, Duke lost in the national semifinals for the second straight season. The Blue Devils jumped to an early 26–8 lead over Seton Hall but began to come apart when Robert Brickey, who had become a key inside player, went down with a leg injury and couldn’t come back. Seton Hall ended up blowing the game open, winning 95–78. The loss was a big disappointment for Duke and a major relief in Chapel Hill.

  “As long as Krzyzewski doesn’t win a national title, he’s still not on par with Coach Smith,” wrote one local columnist. “With any luck, that day will never come.”

  For Krzyzewski, much like Smith, the most disappointing aspect of the loss was that it was the last game for his seniors: Ferry and point guard Quin Snyder, whose last loss took place in his hometown. Still, a team that had looked extremely vulnerable at times during the season had made it to the Final Four. Snyder was graduating, but Krzyzewski had successfully recruited Bobby Hurley, a hard-nosed coach’s son from New Jersey, to be his next point guard. Two other talented guards—Billy McCaffrey and Thomas Hill—had also committed.

  Duke would be good again. So would North Carolina. It had become a given that both teams would be stocked with very good players. The biggest off-season question in the Triangle, though, had little to do with talent or recruiting. It had to do with Jim Valvano.

  —

  Even though it could be argued that Valvano had done his best coaching job in 1989—the miracle of 1983 aside—there was little doubt that the wolves were baying at the door of N.C. State’s lead wolf.

  Personal Fouls had finally been published in September. The News & Observer was still looking into all the academic question marks. State legislators and faculty members were calling for major reforms. And the bad guy in all of it was the same guy who had been both a local and a national hero less than seven years earlier.

  “The whole thing wore him out,” Pam Valvano Strasser said many years later. “He felt let down by the school and by people he had thought were his friends. He stopped being Jim. When he was funny you could almost see him forcing it, trying to keep other people from being depressed about what was going on.”

  She stopped for a moment, hands folded calmly in her lap. But her voice lowered as she continued. “There are doctors who believe that stress, great stress, can lead to cancer. There’s no way to prove what happened that last year at State had anything to do with Jim’s cancer. But you can’t say it isn’t at least possible.”

  One of the people Valvano talked to quite a bit during that season was Krzyzewski. The rivalry between the two had always been intense but never contentious the way it was with Krzyzewski and Smith. The two men’s public personas were very different: Valvano the class clown, Krzyzewski the serious bookworm—ironic since Valvano was a voracious reader and Krzyzewski rarely finished a book. In private, Valvano sometimes mocked Krzyzewski’s superserious approach.

  “I guess they didn’t play Duke basketball,” he would say after his team had beaten Duke, a reference to Krzyzewski frequently telling the media that his team needed to play “Duke basketball,” to be successful.

  Krzyzewski simply said, “That’s not who I want to be,” when Valvano’s name would come up. Mickie, on occasion, referred to “Valvano world,” because clearly it was an entirely different place than where she and Mike lived.

  But the two respected each other as coaches and liked each other. On occasion, the Krzyzewskis and Valvanos would have dinner at the ACC meetings and there was always a lot of laughter. “Jimmy did a killer Dean,” Krzyzewski said.

  “I think, even though there was always a rivalry
between Mike and Jim, they were bonded by trying to figure out a way to beat Dean,” Bobby Cremins said. “All of us felt it but Mike and Jim were right there, surrounded by it every day.”

  Krzyzewski knew what it was like to get pounded by the sports media in North Carolina. Many—if not most—of the state’s columnists had made fun of his hiring and then reveled in his early failures. Almost all of them had sided with Smith during the “double-standard” debate. There was an odd double standard of a different kind. The small handful of Duke graduates in the sports media were always—always—labeled as pro-Duke by most in the Carolina media whenever a Krzyzewski-Smith controversy broke out. No one ever put the same label on the Carolina graduates, at least in part because there were so many of them and there wasn’t the time or space to do so.

  “I think I can say with a lot of confidence that there’s no coach who has had success who’s done it under the circumstances I did,” Krzyzewski said. “Usually—always—if you are a winner you are the program in your area and the media is on your side. We’ve always been the minority here—and always will be. Private schools are almost always the minority because they have fewer alums, but it’s especially true here because our number-one competitor is a state school that’s had huge success and is ten miles away from us.

  “But what Jim went through was different because it wasn’t just sportswriters writing columns saying he was a bad coach or even a bad guy—the kind of thing I went through early. He had people writing that he’d lost control of his program and that it had run amok.”

  What hurt Valvano the most during this period was that he hadn’t run a perfect program, especially after 1983. He had stopped paying attention at times, and as a result a number of players who really couldn’t do the work academically had been taken into the program. That led to, as Liz Clarke called it, the “gaming of the system” academically to keep many of those players eligible. Once the NCAA came to town and once the state began investigating, a happy ending was almost impossible.

  In August, eight months after the initial book-jacket story, Valvano was forced to resign as athletic director. The publication of Golenbock’s book in September brought another round of bad publicity. Then, on December 12, the NCAA announced that it was putting N.C. State on probation for two years—including one season in which it would not be allowed to participate in postseason play. State had already announced self-imposed recruiting sanctions, and the NCAA used that as an excuse not to ban the Wolfpack from TV. The real reason for the non-ban was that the networks and the ACC didn’t want to lose State—or Valvano—from TV for the rest of the season.

  The “major” violations cited by the NCAA were all connected to players selling sneakers—valued then at seventy-five dollars a pair—and their complimentary tickets to games.

  Things got worse in February, when allegations surfaced that Charles Shackleford, who had turned pro after the 1988 season, had been involved in point shaving. Although that was never proven, it did come out later that an agent and a booster had paid him about sixty thousand dollars while he was still in school.

  By then, Valvano knew he was done. Between the sanctions, the recruiting restrictions, and all the allegations swirling, it was going to be nearly impossible to rebuild the program. State still had some very good players, among them Chris Corchiani, Rodney Monroe, Tom Gugliotta, and Vinny Del Negro, but the weight of all the various investigations was finally kicking in.

  The players knew their coach was in trouble. As far back as August, on the day Valvano stepped down as athletic director, Raymond C. Long, the chairman of the N.C. State Faculty Senate, had said he believed Valvano’s resignation as athletic director was only a first step. “My personal opinion,” Long said then, “is that he will need to go.”

  State finished the regular season 18–11, 6–8 in the ACC. Neither Duke nor North Carolina was having overwhelming regular seasons either—at least not by recent standards. The Tar Heels finished the regular season 19–12, the first time they had lost double-digit games in a season since 1966. They were 8–6 in the conference, meaning they tied for third place. The only saving grace was a regular season sweep of Duke. The Blue Devils were 23–7 and 9–5 in the regular season, missing out on a chance to tie Clemson for first on the last day of the regular season when they were blown out by Carolina in Cameron.

  During the month of February, a number of stories cropped up about the league being “down.” Clemson coach Cliff Ellis didn’t especially like reading that. “So I guess what they’re saying,” he said, “is that the ACC is down because Clemson’s in first place.”

  In truth, that was exactly what they were saying.

  The best team in the league was Georgia Tech, which had blossomed late in the season, led by Kenny Anderson, a brilliant freshman point guard, and by Brian Oliver and Dennis Scott, an otherworldly shooter. The three were dubbed “Lethal Weapon Three,” and they would take Bobby Cremins to the Final Four for the first—and only—time in his career.

  There was a shroud, figurative but impossible to miss, hanging over the State campus the week of the ACC Tournament. Everyone knew that regardless of the outcome that weekend in Charlotte—the tournament had been moved there because a new arena had been built for the city’s NBA expansion team—the Wolfpack’s season was going to end there. And, almost certainly, so would Valvano’s eleven-year run as coach.

  On the Monday prior to the tournament, Valvano’s agent, Art Kaminsky, flew to Raleigh to meet with school officials to discuss a buyout. They were far apart: Valvano’s contract called for him to receive $500,000 if he was fired without having committed a felony or major NCAA violations. The NCAA report had been very specific in saying he had not directly broken any rules. His crime had been the NCAA catchall “lack of institutional control,” and that, technically, fell on the school, not an individual. State wanted to pay Valvano one year’s base salary—$106,000—to leave. Kaminsky left town with nothing resolved.

  The Wolfpack might have been capable of a “win one for the Gipper” run in Charlotte, but because it had been so mediocre in the regular season, it drew Georgia Tech in the first round. The game was close until midway in the second half when Lethal Weapon Three got rolling. The Yellow Jackets won, 76–67.

  Valvano knew he had coached his last game at N.C. State. So did everyone in the media. His press conference was packed. There were very few questions. They weren’t needed because Valvano started talking and hardly paused for breath for the next twenty minutes.

  He was clearly a man in considerable pain. Yes, he said, he knew he’d made some mistakes. But then he began breaking down the various investigations, pointing out—correctly—that the most serious charges against him and his program had been debunked. There had been no out-and-out academic cheating. There was no evidence that he or his coaches had broken recruiting rules. There was no proof of the point-shaving charges.

  Did he deserve punishment? he wondered out loud. Sure. But did he deserve this—being run out of town—which, he implied without ever actually saying it, was about to happen. Absolutely not.

  There were no jokes. None of the self-deprecating humor he had mastered for so many years. Just a man knocked very hard from a pedestal wrestling with exactly why he had fallen so far, so fast. Four weeks later, after the buyout package had been finalized, Valvano resigned. Within two months, he had been hired by ESPN and ABC and had signed a book contract.

  He hoped he had found The Next Thing. Even though he was great on TV from day one, he had not yet found The Next Thing. Eventually, it would find him.

  —

  North Carolina and Duke both had very good NCAA Tournament runs after being bounced early in Charlotte.

  The Tar Heels lost in the first round of the ACC Tournament to Virginia and were given a number-eight seed in the Midwest Region, their lowest seed—by far—since the tournament committee had started to seed teams formally in 1979. That meant they had to play top-seeded Oklahoma in the second round.
Rick Fox hit a buzzer-beating shot to give Carolina a 79–77 upset win. By beating the Sooners, Carolina extended its string of Sweet 16 appearances to ten in a row. But that was as far as they went, losing to Arkansas, 96–73, five days later in Dallas.

  There was hope, though, in a superb recruiting class, led by seven-foot Eric Montross—who opted not to stay home in Indiana and play for Bob Knight—and guards Brian Reese and Derrick Phelps. In the meantime, though, the Tar Heels had to sit back and watch Duke reach the Final Four again.

  The Blue Devils didn’t look anything like a Final Four team for most of the season. They weren’t as dysfunctional as the 1983 team, which had freshmen and seniors who barely spoke to one another. But there were three seniors—Alaa Abdelnaby, Phil Henderson, and Robert Brickey—who had all had up-and-down careers. There was Laettner, who was the team’s best player but just a sophomore. And there were the three freshman guards—Bobby Hurley, Billy McCaffrey, and Thomas Hill—who were all learning on the job.

  That was especially true of Hurley, who had been handed the ball as the team’s point guard on day one of practice. Krzyzewski had done the same thing with Tommy Amaker, but Amaker had been more mature as a freshman, and he had a young but already blooded group of sophomores to look to every night. Hurley wasn’t 100 percent sure whom he could trust night in and night out, and he had a temper. Often, he pouted over a bad call or a teammate’s messed-up play. There was no doubting that he was gifted, but at that point in his career, he was wildly inconsistent.

  After being bounced by Georgia Tech in the ACC semifinals, the Blue Devils were sent to Atlanta as the number-three seed in the East Region. They were fortunate to survive the first weekend, having to come from behind late in their second-round game to beat St. John’s, 76–72. They caught another break when UCLA, the number-seven seed, upset Kansas, the number-two seed, that same day.

  The St. John’s win sent Duke back to its home away from home, the Meadowlands. It would play UCLA in one regional semifinal, while Clemson, which had been dropped to a number-five seed after losing to Virginia in the ACC Tournament semifinals, played top-seeded Connecticut.