Late in the 2012 season, Loyola of Maryland played an important home game against Rider. Jimmy Patsos was Loyola’s coach at the time, having taken over there after thirteen seasons as Gary Williams’s top assistant at Maryland. Like Williams, Patsos looked at Duke as the windmill that Maryland—in the role of Don Quixote—simply couldn’t conquer.
Loyola lost the game, and afterward, Patsos paced up and down in front of his players for several minutes trying to think of something to say. “I want to tell you guys something,” he finally said, his face reddening with each word. “When Gary Williams and I die, if we somehow get to heaven, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go see God.”
He paused for a moment, then continued, voice continuing to rise. “And when God sees us we’re going to say to him, ‘Can you please explain how Mike Krzyzewski got those spoiled, pampered, superstar players of his to play so goddamn hard every goddamn night! How did he do it! I’m a pretty good coach, right? Gary’s a great coach. But there must be some secret that only God knows that allows Krzyzewski to get them to play that way all the time.”
He paused one more time. “I don’t know the secret, Gary doesn’t know the secret. Only God and Mike Krzyzewski know the damn secret and it’s killing me!”
The Virginia game was one of those rare days when Krzyzewski couldn’t find the secret. But he damn well wasn’t going to let his players think they could get away with allowing it to happen again.
Hill’s injury was the price paid—mostly by Hill—for the punishment practice. But everyone got the message the coach was trying to deliver. Four nights later, a ranked Georgia Tech team, still led by Kenny Anderson, came to Cameron. Duke won 98–57, a game that caused Bobby Cremins to wonder if this might be Krzyzewski’s best team.
“They were still young,” Cremins said. “That eighty-six team were all seniors [except for Amaker, who was a junior]. This team had no seniors, but boy were they talented.”
Actually, there were two seniors on the team. One, Greg Koubek, had been put into the starting lineup after the Virginia game even though Brian Davis was likely to play more minutes most nights. The other, Clay Buckley, came off the bench to play serious minutes inside only if someone got in foul trouble. The heart of the team consisted of juniors Laettner and Davis; sophomores Hurley, McCaffrey, and Thomas Hill; and freshman Grant Hill—broken nose and all.
The Georgia Tech game began a skein of twelve wins in thirteen games, including a 74–60 win in Cameron against North Carolina. The Tar Heels had come to town with a 13–1 record, riding an 11-game winning streak. Duke blew open a close game down the stretch. Four days later, they lost at N.C. State, which still had Chris Corchiani, Rodney Monroe, Vinny Del Negro, and Tom Gugliotta. Like Jeff Jones, Les Robinson won his first encounter with Krzyzewski. Although Krzyzewski didn’t go to a Denny’s and vow never to forget that night, he did win his next twelve encounters with Robinson.
As it turned out, Duke and Carolina both arrived in Chapel Hill on March 3 for the regular season finale with conference records of 10–3. There was good reason to believe that the Tar Heels, playing at home, would win the game and the championship. Valvano was undoubtedly in a TV studio that day wondering if Krzyzewski might hang a banner that said “ACC Regular Season Champions—Almost.”
He needn’t have wondered. Duke stunned Carolina and the 21,000 fans in the Dean Dome by winning the game, 83–77. It was the third time in four years that Duke had made the ten-mile trip south down 15-501 and then come back north with a victory. It also meant Duke got to take Friday off because of Maryland’s absence from the ACC Tournament. Duke beat N.C. State on Saturday, and North Carolina beat Clemson on Friday and Virginia on Saturday, meaning the two teams would meet in the championship game for the third time in four seasons.
One of Dean Smith’s many mantras was that it was very hard to beat a good team three times in the same season. He usually rolled it out when his team was about to play a team it had already beaten twice. This time, though, it worked in reverse. The Tar Heels crushed the Blue Devils, avenging the loss a week earlier in Chapel Hill by a final score of 96–74. The game probably wasn’t even that close.
As pleased as he was with the win—it was his eleventh ACC Tournament title—Smith couldn’t resist getting in a little postgame dig at Krzyzewski and Duke.
“I just asked Mike in the hallway if he had talked to Tom to find out where we might both be going,” he said to open his postgame press conference.
Two years later, Smith was still smarting from not getting to play Minnesota in the NCAA Tournament. Tom Butters was still on the committee. Smith was making a very pointed point.
Krzyzewski shrugged off Smith’s crack. By then he knew what John Thompson liked to call a “Deanism” when he saw or heard it. His concern was the way his team had played that afternoon. They had spent most of two months steadily improving—peaking in the win a week earlier in Chapel Hill—and then had landed with a thud in the championship game. If Krzyzewski had decided to put up one of Valvano’s “almost” banners, it would have said “Not So Almost” if it was going to be accurate.
As he walked to the bus, Krzyzewski felt he needed to do something to light a fire under his players right away. He didn’t want to wait until the brackets were announced (he had not spoken to Butters, so he had no idea where his team was going) or until practice the next day. He also didn’t think yelling at them was the right thing to do at that moment—he’d already spent most of the afternoon doing that to try to break them out of their malaise. So he went in the opposite direction.
He walked onto the bus, and instead of sitting in the first row on the right the way he always did, he told the driver, who normally started moving as soon as he sat down, to hang on for a minute. He walked back a couple of rows and stood in front of his team.
“Fellas, that was a bad day, you all know it,” he said. “But I’m telling you something right now. We’re going to win the national championship. I know how good you are. Now you guys have to find out how good you are. When you do, we’re going to win.”
It was an audacious thing to say, not only because his team had just suffered through a 22-point loss but because everyone in the sixty-four-team bracket was going to be looking up at Nevada–Las Vegas, which was 30–0 and had played only one game in which it hadn’t won by double digits. The Rebels’ average margin of victory was 29 points. They were being touted as one of the greatest teams in history.
“Remember, we’re going to win the national championship,” Krzyzewski said one more time—and sat down.
A few hours later, Dean Smith got what he wanted—and deserved—when the brackets were unveiled. North Carolina was sent to the East Regional as the number-one seed—meaning its road to the Final Four would go through Duke’s “home” court in East Rutherford. Duke was sent to the Midwest as the number-two seed behind Ohio State. Six of the seven ACC teams eligible for postseason made the tournament. N.C. State was also sent to the East as the number-six seed, meaning it could meet North Carolina only if both made the regional final. The Wolfpack lost to Oklahoma State in the second round. Valvano had gone to the NCAA Tournament seven times in ten seasons. Les Robinson was now 1 for 1. Few in Raleigh would have imagined at that moment that it would be eleven years before State would make the tournament again.
Duke and Carolina both blew through the first weekend easily. In the East, the number-two, -four, and -five seeds failed to make it to the Meadowlands. Syracuse, the number-two seed, lost in the first round to Richmond—which became the first number-fifteen seed to win an NCAA Tournament game. In six years, number-fifteen seeds had been 0–24 before Richmond’s upset. To get to the Final Four, the Tar Heels had to beat twelfth-seeded Eastern Michigan and tenth-seeded Temple in East Rutherford. They hammered EMU, 93–67, but didn’t have nearly as easy a time with Temple, which was one of those sleeper lower-seeded teams. Mark Macon, who had played so poorly in the 1988 regional final in the same building
against Duke, was now a senior. He kept making shots in the second half, finishing with 31 points on 12-of-23 shooting to keep the Owls close before Carolina finally prevailed, 75–72.
It was an important win for Smith. He had not been to the Final Four in nine years, a fact made far more significant by State’s title in 1983 and, perhaps more important long term, Duke’s four trips in the previous five seasons.
“On the one hand, I never really worried about what other teams were doing,” Smith said several years later. “As long as we were good, I was happy. But they were only a few miles away from us. They were always our number-one rival, even during State’s glory years. They were always going to be the number-one threat long term. And he clearly had it going by then. But that day, after we beat Temple, I was just pleased to be going back to the Final Four. It felt as if it had been a while. We’d gotten a little spoiled during that stretch when we went a lot.”
That stretch, from 1967 through 1982, had included seven Final Four trips and a national title.
A little more than two hours after the Tar Heels cut down the nets in the Meadowlands, Duke did the same thing in the Pontiac Silverdome. The Blue Devils’ 78–61 win over St. John’s in the Midwest Region final was never in doubt. In four tournament games, Duke had won by an average margin of 19 points. Its closest game had come in the regional semifinals when it beat Connecticut, 81–67, in a sort-of rematch of the previous year’s regional final. The teams were very different and so was the setting. The result, ultimately, was the same.
St. John’s had upset top-seeded Ohio State just prior to Duke’s win over UConn. But the Redmen simply couldn’t play with Duke, which jumped to an early lead, built the margin to 40–27 at halftime and never looked back. Two hours after celebrating their return to the Final Four after a nine-year absence, North Carolina fans looked up to see that Duke was also going—for the fifth time in six seasons.
While the nets were coming down, Mickie Krzyzewski stood next to the Duke bench with a huge smile on her face. “Dean may be going back to the Final Four,” she said gleefully. “But he’s not going unaccompanied.”
He wasn’t. But there was one consolation for Carolina: Smith would be facing Kansas—coached by Roy Williams—in the first semifinal. Duke would then play Nevada–Las Vegas. The Rebels were 34–0. They were trying to become the first team since Indiana in 1976 to go undefeated.
Almost everyone in college basketball awaited their coronation.
26
Indianapolis was hosting the Final Four for the second time. The NCAA had first brought the event there in 1980. Market Square Arena, which seated 16,530 people and was the home of the Indiana Pacers, had been the venue when Louisville had beaten UCLA for the championship.
UCLA was nowhere near the Final Four in 1991, and Market Square Arena had been replaced as the venue by the Hoosier Dome—home of the Indianapolis Colts—which would seat 47,100 fans for basketball. When the NCAA first started playing in domes, it made a minor accommodation to fans by putting the court at one end of the building so that it was possible to get more fans closer to the action. It was only in 2009 that it moved the court to the middle of the football field so it could sell every possible seat even if most of the sightlines were awful.
The Final Four had a very ACC feel to it, even smack in the heart of Big Ten country. North Carolina and Duke were both playing and so was Kansas, coached by former Smith assistant and acolyte Roy Williams. The only true outsider was the team everyone expected to walk off with the trophy on Monday night: Nevada–Las Vegas.
Vegas had become a rock group in basketball uniforms, traveling with a huge entourage, various roadies, and groupies—not to mention their richer-than-rich fans. The Rebels returned all the key players from the team that had destroyed Duke in the national title game a year earlier. They were, of course, facing NCAA sanctions, but even the NCAA seemed to understand how popular the Rebels had become. It had decided to hold off on handing down punishment to UNLV until after the ’91 season was over. That was a huge relief to CBS, which built most of its regular season schedule around the Rebels and promoted them so shamelessly that some started to refer to CBS as “the official network of the Runnin’ Rebels.”
For Duke, the Final Four run was considered a bonus. Next year, with Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, and Grant Hill all returning, would be the school’s chance to finally win a national championship. Vegas would lose its key players and the Blue Devils would all be a year older. There was no talk in those days of anyone leaving school early for the NBA.
Krzyzewski, though, saw it differently. He hadn’t come off the notion he had voiced to his players as their bus pulled out of Charlotte, that they were going to win the national championship. His initial plan that week was not to even look at the tape of the previous year’s game. But he changed his mind—watching it with his coaches first and then showing it to his team.
“As good as they were, I wanted our guys to see how many times we had chances to stay in the game,” he said. “We were washed out that night. I looked at myself on the bench and I saw no emotion, nothing. I looked at the players and saw the same thing. Vegas was great. We could have played our best game and lost. But we didn’t even come close.”
Vegas’s mascot was a giant shark—in honor of Jerry Tarkanian, aka “Tark the Shark.” After being hounded by Vegas’s pressure defense in the championship game, Bobby Hurley had admitted he’d had nightmares in which he was being attacked by sharks. Now he would be facing those same sharks again.
But Hurley was a very different player. Midway through his sophomore season, Krzyzewski had asked Pete Gaudet to put together a tape showing Hurley’s various on-court reactions to bad calls (or what he thought were bad calls), bad plays by teammates, and bad plays of his own. Gaudet was the king of the video machine. He was always putting together specialty tapes. Most of the time, though, they were of an opponent running a certain offense or of the shooting technique of a Duke player who was struggling. This was different.
Hurley looked at the tape and was shocked.
“His basic reaction was, ‘Is that really me?’ ” Gaudet said. “He was stunned that he looked that way on the court. I told him it wasn’t so much about his facial expressions but about what those facial expressions said to teammates, to officials, and to opponents. I told him I thought it was probably pretty hard for him to move on to the next play if he was still sulking about the past.”
The “whine” tape, as Krzyzewski called it, changed Hurley’s demeanor—and his play. There were still moments, but far fewer of them. As his confidence grew, his teammates’ confidence in him grew. The Hurley who arrived in Indianapolis wasn’t having nightmares about sharks; he was dreaming about beating them.
Most years, a matchup between two glamour teams like North Carolina and Kansas, especially one that had a teacher-pupil coaching matchup, would have been CBS’s prime-time game. But Vegas was the story, the one team that truly drove ratings. The fact that it was matching up with the team it had hammered a year earlier in the title game made that game the more appealing one for TV.
Kansas was a wonderful story. Roy Williams had succeeded Larry Brown in the spring of 1988 after the Jayhawks had won the national title, and Brown, who couldn’t stand being happy for too long, decided to leave to return to the NBA in San Antonio. About fifteen minutes after Williams arrived, he found out that Kansas would be ineligible to play in postseason in 1989 because of violations that had occurred on Brown’s watch. In his third season, Kansas had upset both Indiana and Arkansas in the Southeast Regionals to make the Final Four.
Kansas outplayed Carolina in the second half to win the game, 79–73. Unfortunately, the Jayhawks’ remarkable trip to the championship game was completely overshadowed by the events of the game’s final minute.
Kansas led, 76–71, with thirty-five seconds left when Rick Fox fouled out, fouling to stop the clock. Dean Smith had been dueling with referee Pete Pavia for most of the ev
ening. Pavia had teed Smith up in the first half when he had argued a foul called on Pete Chilcutt. Now Smith slowly walked Kenny Harris, who was subbing for Fox, in the direction of the scorer’s table. As he did, he repeatedly asked Pavia, “How much time do I have?”
The third time Smith said it, Pavia—who had worked games for Smith long enough to know Smith’s sarcasm when he heard it—gave him a second technical, which meant automatic ejection. The entire building was shocked.
Pavia was an experienced and respected referee. But he probably shouldn’t have been working that night. At fifty-three, he was battling cancer and, as a result, was taking a good deal of medication. Colleagues had noticed that he’d become short-tempered on the court and wondered if the meds were affecting him. Three nights earlier, working the NIT championship game, he had tossed Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs.
A sweet and gentle man by nature, Pavia had developed a reputation for being quick on the draw when it came to technical fouls. Everyone wanted to overlook his temper because they knew what he was going through, but he probably shouldn’t have been working such a high-stakes game at that point in his life.
What’s more, like a lot of officials, Pavia wasn’t a fan of Smith’s sarcasm. They’d all heard it. Lenny Wirtz, the veteran ACC official who had dueled with Smith for years, had once teed him up for telling him that North Carolina’s record in games Wirtz worked was worse than with any other official. After that game, Smith had said, “You know, Lenny and I have been together for twenty-five years. I think we’re entitled to a divorce.”
Pavia knew Smith wasn’t asking how much time he had because he needed to know. “You think for one second Dean Smith didn’t know a rule?” Pavia asked a year later, shortly before he died. “He was trying to give me a hard time but wasn’t going to get in my face because he didn’t want to get tossed. The second time he said it, I put up my hand to say, ‘That’s enough, Dean.’ Then he said it again.”
The Legends Club Page 31