The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  It was a heat-of-the-moment comment, but it reflected just how intense the relationship between the two men still was at that point. Smith had already been in the Basketball Hall of Fame for ten years; Krzyzewski’s résumé was clearly Hall-of-Fame ready. But each still burned to beat the other. And Krzyzewski was just beginning to learn what it had been like to be Smith for so many years.

  “Look, Dean and I are very different,” Krzyzewski said. “I curse. He doesn’t curse. I’m in your face, he’s the master of the subtle shot. I’ve always said if I was ever president, I’d want Dean in charge of the CIA. The times we got into it on the court, we were both doing the same thing: trying to win a game and trying to protect our players.

  “We couldn’t both win the game. One thing I always knew, every single time I coached against him, was that it was going to be really hard to beat him. He was that good, and most of the time his players were that good. After those first couple of years I had really good players too. I wanted to make sure I did everything I could to give my players a chance to win. I didn’t want to miss something or make a mistake that would give Dean and his players any edge, because if I did, we were probably going to lose. I would guess he came to feel the same way.”

  Smith always felt that way—regardless of the opponent. But, by that March afternoon in 1993, there’s no doubt he felt it most keenly when Krzyzewski was on the other bench. Smith’s team pulled away late that afternoon to win, 83–69, sending the Dean Dome into the kind of paroxysms of joy that—ironically—had rarely been felt until Duke became the kind of power it had become. Beating teams you beat all the time isn’t nearly as much fun as beating teams who are difficult to beat.

  As it turned out, that March was the worst one Krzyzewski had experienced since 1983. After the loss in Chapel Hill, the Blue Devils lost to Georgia Tech in the first round of the ACC Tournament—only the second time in ten seasons they’d failed to win at least one ACC Tournament game. The previous time, 1987, they had advanced to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament. Not this time. With Cherokee Parks, now the starting center and also a key player, hurt, Duke was upset by California—and Jason Kidd—in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Duke had been to six Final Fours in seven seasons and had lost in the round of sixteen in that seventh season. The early departure was surprising—but not stunning given Parks’s injury and the fact that the team had played inconsistently that season.

  “Grant and I had to take on the leadership mantle that season,” Bobby Hurley said. “It wasn’t always easy. As difficult as Christian [Laettner] could be at times, there was never any doubt about the fact that it was his team and he, almost as much as Coach—sometimes even more than Coach—demanded that we compete at a certain level all the time. That kind of thing didn’t come as naturally to Grant and me. We had to take ownership of the team, and at times we struggled to do that.”

  How deep Duke might have gone if Parks had been healthy is hard to say. California, which would be placed on probation not long after its ’93 success, lost in the next round to Kansas—which reached the Final Four.

  “We missed Cherokee, but we just didn’t have it that year,” Krzyzewski said. “Bobby and Grant tried; in fact, Bobby had a great year. It was disappointing for me to see his career end the way it did because he meant so much to me and to Duke.”

  Krzyzewski broke down in the postgame press conference after the loss to Cal while talking about Hurley. It was only the second time he had cried publicly after a game. The first had come four years earlier after the regional final victory over Georgetown.

  “Both times it was about my point guard,” he said. “The kids who have played that position, from [Tommy] Amaker on, have always been very important to me. They’re my coach on the court, and everything we do starts with them at both ends. I’ve always been close to them. Quin [Snyder] had gone through a lot to become the player he became. I think that’s why I reacted the way I did after the Georgetown game. And Bobby?” He paused and shrugged. “I think I cried just because I realized I’d never coach him again.”

  —

  There were no tears for Carolina that March—or April. Even after losing the ACC Tournament championship game to Georgia Tech—which became the fourth number-six seed to win the event (Virginia, 1976; Duke, 1980; N.C. State, 1987)—the Tar Heels went into the NCAA Tournament with a 28–4 record and were the top seed in the East Region.

  They blew through three games before facing Cincinnati in the regional final in the Meadowlands. The Bearcats had reached the Final Four a year earlier and were led by Nick Van Exel, an audacious scorer—and talker. In the game’s first fifteen minutes, Van Exel backed up his talk, draining six three-pointers. At that juncture he had outscored the Tar Heels 21–20 and his team led 33–20.

  Smith made a defensive adjustment at that stage, telling Derrick Phelps to stay with Van Exel, regardless of what the Bearcats were doing offensively. No switches, no traps. In the game’s final thirty minutes, Van Exel made one more basket, shooting 1 of 10 during the second half and overtime. It still took overtime, but Carolina survived, 75–68, meaning Smith would be going to the Final Four for the ninth time in his career.

  After the game, the Tar Heels did a very un-Carolina-like thing. They refused to cut down the nets. The only nets they wanted, they all said in the locker room afterward, were the ones that would be used in the Superdome in New Orleans the following week.

  “We may regret not doing it if we don’t win next week,” center Eric Montross said. “But the goal isn’t to get to New Orleans, it’s to win down there.”

  They did—and they did cut down the final nets, although it took another classic championship game to get Smith his second national title.

  Carolina had to play Kansas in the semifinals, a rematch of the 1991 game in Indianapolis that had ended so disastrously for the Tar Heels—the game lost, Smith ejected by Pete Pavia. This time was different: Carolina controlled the second half and won 78–68, causing Williams to go into one of his third-person speeches, this one about the fact that “any of you who don’t think Roy Williams won’t be pulling for North Carolina harder than anyone Monday night doesn’t know what Roy Williams is all about.”

  Monday night’s opponent was Michigan, the same Fab Five that Duke had blown out in the championship game a year earlier. The Fabs were a year older now and had beaten Kentucky in an electric semifinal on Saturday night. They were as cocky as sophomores as they had been as freshmen. As the Wolverines made their way down the hallway to the court prior to the game, Chris Webber’s voice could be heard clearly: “Hey, Michigan, did you hear, we’re three-point underdogs. Should we even bother going out there? None of these folks have figured it out yet. They think y’all are going to lose. Are you gonna lose?”

  Apparently folks had figured it out—Carolina won, 77–71, meaning those who had given the three points won their bets. Of course it wasn’t nearly that simple. The game had gone back and forth. Michigan led 67–63 with 4:32 left, but Donald Williams hit a critical three-pointer to cut the margin to 67–66. The Tar Heels actually went on a 9–0 run to lead 72–67 with just under a minute to play. But baskets by Ray Jackson and Webber cut the lead to 72–71. With twenty-four seconds to go, Michigan fouled Pat Sullivan. He made the first for a 73–71 lead but missed the second. Webber rebounded.

  At that moment, the entire Michigan team went brain dead. It began when Jalen Rose, the point guard, ran down the court rather than coming back to take the ball from Webber. Carolina trapped Webber, who, spinning to look for help, traveled. The refs missed it. The entire Carolina bench leaped to its feet screaming.

  Webber began weaving his way upcourt, still with no guard help, and, as he got near the top of the key, was trapped again—by Phelps and George Lynch. Once again, he traveled. Once again, no call. But he was still trapped and was going to commit a turnover. Realizing he was in serious trouble, Webber put his hands together to signal for a time-out with eleven seconds left.

/>   Except Michigan didn’t have any time-outs left. It had used its last one after Jackson’s basket with forty-six seconds to go. As soon as Webber signaled for the time-out, the Carolina players on the court began jumping up and down, making a T sign of their own—for a technical foul. They knew Michigan had no time-outs left. Webber, in his panic, had forgotten.

  Coming out of the last time-out, Michigan coach Steve Fisher had reminded his players they had no time-outs left. Smith had told his players that the Wolverines had no time-outs left. The difference was that Smith’s players listened. Listening wasn’t really in Webber’s repertoire. After the game he said he heard teammates yelling “Time-out!” from the bench. That’s entirely possible.

  Williams went to the foul line and made both free throws. Then, after Carolina inbounded because it had possession following the technical, Williams was fouled and made two more. Ballgame. Championship. It was Webber’s last college game. The Fab Five ended up coming four national titles short of the number each had predicted they would win at the Sunday press conference a year earlier.

  Neither Smith nor anyone from Carolina cared very much about that. After having to watch Duke cut down the nets two straight Aprils, it was now—finally—their turn again. Krzyzewski, who was working for CBS that weekend, grabbed a couple of cheerleader pom-poms and helped lead the Carolina students in a couple of cheers.

  There was only one small problem: the awards ceremony. In 1991, Duke’s first championship season, the NCAA had decided to stage an on-court awards ceremony. In the past, the winning team had simply cut down the nets and, at some point, the championship trophy was shipped to campus.

  Now, for the benefit of television, a stage was quickly put together at midcourt and the chairman of the basketball committee presented the trophy to the winning coach with the players standing behind him in NCAA-logo T-shirts and caps that were handed out at game’s end with orders to put them on instantly.

  When the NCAA drones informed Smith that he would be presented with the trophy, he said, “Oh no, not me, give it to the captains.”

  No, he was informed, that’s not the way we do it. Not only will you accept the trophy, you will be expected to say a few words after it is handed to you—and please be sure to thank the basketball committee for doing such a wonderful job putting on the tournament.

  “I was actually angry about it,” Smith said a few years later. “At the very least, it should have been our option to decide who accepted the trophy.” He smiled. “I certainly wasn’t thanking anyone other than my players if they insisted I take the microphone.”

  They did. Smith took the mic and talked for exactly five seconds. “I’m very proud of our players for winning this championship,” he said. He turned and handed the trophy to George Lynch, the team’s most prominent senior, and all but threw the microphone back to Tom Butters, who—in a twist—was chairman of the basketball committee that year.

  In the end, the trophy ended up where Smith most wanted it to be: back in Chapel Hill. No longer did he or any of the Carolina faithful have to hear from the Duke people that Krzyzewski had won more national titles than Smith.

  Carolina would return four starters the following season and would add two gifted freshmen, Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse. Perhaps the tide had turned—again.

  —

  One week after (grudgingly) accepting the championship trophy in New Orleans, Dean Smith was in New York. He was there at the request of Jim Valvano.

  There was no such thing as a bucket list in 1993—the movie that made the phrase a part of the lexicon wasn’t released until fourteen years later—but Valvano had said on several occasions that one of his dreams had always been to throw out a first pitch at Yankee Stadium. Shortly after the ESPYS speech, Valvano was at home one evening talking to his brother Nick when the phone rang. It was George Steinbrenner.

  The Yankees owner had heard what Valvano had said and wanted to invite him to come to Yankee Stadium on April 12 to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day. The Yankees would begin the season with six games on the road and then return home for Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. Valvano was floored by the phone call. He also knew that the chances of him getting to New York again and making it out to the mound to throw a pitch were somewhere between slim and none—with none the heavy betting favorite. He thanked Steinbrenner and told him he would be there if it was at all possible.

  “He hung up the phone and said to me, ‘There’s no way I can go and do that, you go in my place,’ ” Nick remembered. “I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. He invited you. If you can’t go, you explain that you can’t go, or if there’s someone it might mean a lot to, who Steinbrenner wouldn’t mind having do it, send him.’ ”

  Valvano knew almost instantly whom he wanted to send in his place: Dean Smith.

  Like Valvano, Smith had grown up a Yankees fan even though Emporia, Kansas, was a long way from the Bronx. Beyond that, Steinbrenner had close ties to Carolina: his daughter had gone to school there, he’d given a lot of money to the baseball program, and the Yankees had frequently stopped in Chapel Hill en route north at the end of spring training to play an exhibition game there. Since Smith and Steinbrenner knew each other it made sense to Valvano to ask Smith to stand in for him.

  “I think Dean might have been reluctant when Jim first called him,” Nick said. “But then Jim said, ‘It would mean a lot to me if you did it.’ That did it—Dean said yes.”

  And so, on the twelfth of April, Smith walked to the mound in front of 56,704 fans as Valvano’s stand-in. He received a warm, loud ovation—one that he knew was both for Valvano and for him. The Yankees won that day with Jim Abbott pitching a complete game.

  Not long before Smith’s death, Linnea Smith talked about that afternoon.

  “It meant a lot to Dean to have the chance to do it,” she said. “Especially to do it for Jim. In our house, we have pictures all over of Dean with children and grandchildren and with former players and close friends. There’s only one picture on a wall in the entire house that’s just Dean. It’s him, throwing that pitch. That’s how much it meant to him.”

  —

  By the time Smith threw that pitch in Yankee Stadium, Valvano was in Duke Hospital. He had been there most of the time since the ESPYS speech, going home for brief respites when the walls of the hospital felt like they were closing in on him.

  Mike Krzyzewski had visited Valvano throughout the basketball season whenever he was in the hospital. Cameron Indoor Stadium and the hospital were at opposite ends of the Duke campus, but, more often than not, Krzyzewski would walk through campus rather than drive around it to get to the hospital. It gave him time to think—both before he went in to see his sick friend and after he had sat next to the bed for an hour or so and talked or listened or, just as often, laughed.

  “Jim never stopped being funny,” Krzyzewski said. “He would get going on something, and it was as if he was in front of an audience, even lying there with tubes and machines all over the place. There were times we would laugh so hard and so loud that the nurse would come in and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ We’d just wave her out of the room and Jim would keep on going.”

  Jim and Pam both recognized the importance of Krzyzewski’s visits, especially when the in-hospital stretches became longer than the out-of-hospital stretches. Many years later, Pam Valvano Strasser’s voice got very soft remembering those evenings and those visits.

  “When Mike came over, for that hour or so when he was in the room, Jim didn’t have cancer anymore,” she said. “He was a basketball coach again. He and Mike would sit there and tell stories or Jim would do his Dean imitation (everyone did do Dean) or they’d talk strategy. It had to be Mike in that room. It couldn’t be someone who wasn’t a coach, no matter how close they were to Jim. And it couldn’t be just any coach, it had to be a truly great coach, someone Jim really respected, someone who Jim knew had done everything that he’d ever done and, in Mike’s case, more.”r />
  John Saunders visited as often as possible. He saw the exact same thing that Pam saw. “Mike was like an angel who God had sent to help Jim get through this,” he said. “I’m not trying to sound overly spiritual but his presence was beyond important to Jim.”

  Pam remembers sitting in the room one night with Jamie, the Valvanos’ middle daughter, when Krzyzewski walked in. “You could see the joy in Jim’s face the minute Mike walked in,” she said. “We left. I always left the two of them alone when Mike came, and Jamie said to me, ‘What are we, chopped liver?’ I had to try to explain to her that wasn’t it. Mike just had a special role, a very special role, during those days.”

  Those days were important to Krzyzewski too—although he didn’t fully grasp how important until much later.

  “It wasn’t something I thought about, as in, ‘Oh, I have to go see Jim,’ ” he said. “I wanted to see him, in part because I enjoyed it most of the time. When we’d talk, I forgot he had cancer too. He was still Jim—still funny, still unbelievably smart and thoughtful. Sometimes we’d laugh and sometimes we’d cry. Jim had moments when I knew he still thought he was going to beat it somehow, that he wasn’t going to die. I had those moments too. But then there were times when it hit both of us and we’d sit there and cry.

  “But that wasn’t really why it was important to me. I was doing something for someone else for no reason at all other than I knew he needed me. When you do something like that, when there’s no motive or reason to do it, other than it’s the right thing to do, it means as much to you as to the person you’re trying to help.”

  As much as Valvano clung to hope for a miracle, he continued to plan for the nonmiracle. He made Krzyzewski promise that he would take the lead in making the V Foundation real and viable. ESPN had pledged money and its marketing power to the cause, but Valvano knew his famous friends would have to carry much of the load to raise serious money.