The last time Saunders visited him, most of the visit was consumed with Valvano giving him instructions on who was to be on the board of directors and what role he wanted each of them to play. “At one point he started to talk about Mike,” Saunders said. “And he just said, ‘You’ll never know what he’s meant to me,’ and he broke down.”
The last time the two coaches talked was a few hours before Valvano died.
“The doctor told me before I went in that it was very close,” Krzyzewski said. “He said I should walk in thinking this would be the last time I would talk to Jim.”
Valvano knew too. He couldn’t talk long because he was so weak, but he told Krzyzewski whom he wanted to speak at his funeral and how much he had meant to him in the final months. “We said things to one another that I’m not sure brothers say to each other,” Krzyzewski said. “Those last few weeks, that last night make me cry whenever I think of them, but I cherish them too.”
On April 28, 1993, on a spectacular spring morning in North Carolina, Jim Valvano died. His family was with him and so was Mike Krzyzewski.
One last time, Krzyzewski made the walk from the hospital across campus and back to his office. He sat in a chair and said quietly, “It’s good for Jim that’s it over.”
What he didn’t understand at that moment was that for him, it was far from over. Valvano’s death—and the way he died—would stay with him for a long time.
30
Jim Valvano was buried in Raleigh’s Oakwood Cemetery. His black headstone included the following nine words: “Take time everyday to laugh, to think, to cry.”
They packed about seven hundred people into the church for his funeral, with most of the college basketball world in attendance. Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith sat a few yards away from each other in a front pew. Every ACC coach attended. Pam Valvano Strasser remembers feeling as if it were a state funeral of some kind. “It felt as if the entire city shut down that day,” she said. “All for Jim.”
Storm clouds were already forming around the N.C. State program three years after Valvano’s departure. Once the Valvano-recruited players left, Les Robinson’s team began to struggle. One problem was out of Robinson’s control: even though the NCAA had found State not guilty of the most serious charges it investigated, it had found enough to dock the school scholarships. The loss of scholarships, combined with the way Valvano had been swept out, had made recruiting difficult for Robinson and his staff.
Ironically, just as he had inadvertently helped divert some attention from Mike Krzyzewski’s troubles in 1983, Valvano did the same for Robinson ten years later. His illness, the speech at the ’83 reunion celebration, the ESPYS speech, and then his death made the Wolfpack’s 8–19 season less important to State fans.
Even so, just four years after winning the ACC regular season title and perhaps being one missed call away from reaching the Elite Eight for the third time in five seasons, State had very quickly gone from being a program that could very much hold its own with the powers in Chapel Hill and Durham to one that was firmly ensconced near the bottom of what was now a nine-team ACC.
Florida State had joined the league in 1991, a move made by Commissioner Gene Corrigan and the presidents of the member universities strictly to try to improve the ACC’s status as a second-rate football league. Even though Georgia Tech had shared a national championship (with Colorado) in 1990, the Yellow Jackets had done so by winning a second-tier bowl game against a 6–6 Nebraska team. Corrigan wanted a legitimate national power in the league, and Florida State was exactly that.
The Seminoles were also pretty good in basketball. They were coached by Pat Kennedy, who had been Valvano’s top assistant at Iona and had succeeded him there when he left for N.C. State. Kennedy’s team made an instant impact on the conference, not only by finishing second in the regular season race in 1992 but with an 86–74 win in Chapel Hill in December.
As it turned out, the Seminoles’ victory wasn’t the headline of the day. That came after the game when FSU guard Sam Cassell was asked about his team’s ability to come into the Dean Dome for the first time and walk out with a fairly easy victory. “It’s kind of a wine and cheese crowd,” Cassell said. “They really didn’t bother us.”
Boom—in eight words Cassell had summed up the way most of the conference felt about playing in the Dean Dome. The place would be loud in February when Duke came to town for what was a crusade game for the Tar Heels, but most of the time the building was more like a library than a basketball arena.
“It was never the same as Carmichael,” said Bob Bender, who played for Duke in Carmichael and coached for Duke in the Dean Dome. “Carmichael wasn’t a lot different from Cameron. Not as tight around the court but tight enough. The ceiling was low and it held the noise. There were times playing in the Dean Dome felt a little bit like playing on a neutral court.”
Cassell’s comment infuriated Dean Smith—because he knew it was accurate. He had already demanded that some students be brought downstairs closer to the court. Now he wanted more. And he wanted the “wine and cheese” crowd to perhaps consider a pregame beer and a shot if it would get them going.
A year later, when Florida State came to town, the Tar Heels rallied from 21 points down in the second half to win, 82–77. Naturally, the crowd was pumped up and wild in the final minutes of the game. In fact, as Pat Kennedy left the court, the two ushers assigned to get him safely from the bench to the locker room screamed at him, “How’d you like the wine and cheese crowd tonight, Coach?”
Kennedy didn’t like being heckled by people who were supposed to ensure his safety and let the Carolina people know that. The following season a professional security person—John Dubis—was assigned to escort the visiting coach to and from the floor.
What was clear by then was that Florida State’s basketball team had impacted the ACC.
The other impact made by the Seminoles was the creation of an 8-9 game in the ACC Tournament. It was played on Thursday night, with the winner joining the other seven teams in what were now euphemistically called “the quarterfinals,” as if more than one (bad) team had won a game to get to that point. No one ever likes to use the term “play-in game,” but that’s what the 8-9 game was. Unfortunately for Les Robinson, his team landed in the Thursday night game for four straight seasons, which is why people began calling it “the Les Robinson game.”
In 1998, two years after Robinson was kicked upstairs by State to be athletic director, the conference—at the urging of the coaches—changed the tournament format. Instead of one game between the two bottom teams on Thursday, it paired the number-one seed against the number-nine seed and the number-seven seed against the number-eight seed on Thursday. The 7-8 winner advanced to the “quarterfinals” to play the number-two seed, while the winner of the 1-9 game got a bye to the semifinals.
It was a ludicrous format, but the coaches liked it because they believed the Les Robinson game had become a scarlet letter: play in it too often and there will be calls for your head. They missed the point entirely: finish eighth or ninth too often and your head was going to be lopped off regardless of whom you played on Thursday night.
No doubt if Valvano had lived to somehow coach in the 8-9 game he would have called for his own firing. In fact, as athletic director, he might have simply fired himself.
—
At Duke and North Carolina, there were no concerns about playing in an 8-9 game as the 1993–94 season began. The two schools had won the last three national championships. They had combined to play in eight Final Fours dating to 1986 (Duke, six; North Carolina, two), and they had won five of the nine ACC Tournaments during that stretch.
Carolina began the season ranked number one and Duke began it ranked number four. By the time they met for the first time in early February, the Blue Devils were 15–1 and ranked number one; the Tar Heels were 17–3 and ranked number two.
Duke had lost Bobby Hurley and Thomas Hill to graduation, but Grant Hill had moved to
point guard, Antonio Lang had taken over his forward spot, and Cherokee Parks, now a junior, had emerged as an offensive force. Two talented young guards, sophomore Chris Collins and freshman Jeff Capel, gave Krzyzewski flexibility in the backcourt.
Carolina appeared loaded for another serious run at a national title. Only one starter, George Lynch, had graduated, and the addition of Rasheed Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse, and Jeff McInnis had given Dean Smith a team that had experience, depth, and as much talent as any team he had coached since the 1984 team—Michael Jordan and Sam Perkins’s last season in Chapel Hill.
As it turned out, though, Wallace, Stackhouse, and McInnis proved to be subtraction by addition. Each believed he should be starting and playing major minutes. On the basis of sheer talent, that was probably true. But Smith wasn’t about to take playing time away from juniors and seniors—especially juniors and seniors who had been an important part of a national championship team—in favor of freshmen, regardless of their talent.
At their best, the Tar Heels were very formidable. In fact, they easily won both meetings with Duke that season. But they managed to stumble often enough against less-talented teams that Duke had a two-game lead in the conference standings when the teams met in Durham in the regular season finale. Carolina won the game, 87–77, causing Duke assistant coach Mike Brey to say, “They hate us so much that they forget how much they hate each other when they play us.”
Hyperbole? Perhaps—but not by much.
Earlier in the season, when Maryland played at Carolina, Gary Williams had taken his team to the Dean Dome for a game-day shootaround. Carolina was finishing its shootaround as the Maryland players walked in the direction of the court.
“We’re coming on while they’re coming off,” Williams remembered. “As soon as Rasheed [Wallace] hit the tunnel, I heard him say, ‘Free at last, free at last.’ I didn’t have the sense they were a happy group.”
If there was one thing Smith disliked as much as losing, it was any kind of dissension within the ranks. Carolina managed to play well in the ACC Tournament, beating Virginia in the final after the Cavaliers had upset Duke in the semifinals. Winning the ACC Tournament made the Tar Heels the number-one seed in the East Region of the NCAA Tournament. Duke went to the Southeast as the number-two seed behind Purdue.
It appeared that Carolina was getting its act together at exactly the right time. Stackhouse had played so well off the bench in the ACC Tournament that he had been voted the MVP. Maybe, the media speculated, Smith had found the balance at just the right time.
He hadn’t. Carolina actually struggled for much of its first-round game in Landover, Maryland, against sixteenth-seeded Liberty. Then, facing ninth-seeded Boston College, the Tar Heels fell behind and couldn’t make one of their Houdini-like escapes. BC center Bill Curley outplayed all the Carolina big men, with 25 points and 10 rebounds. The Eagles hung on to win, 75–72. It was the first time since 1980 that Carolina had failed to reach the round of sixteen.
In the meantime, it turned out to be Duke that was finding new life at the right time. It hadn’t been an easy winter for Krzyzewski. He wasn’t feeling especially good because his back was bothering him. His team was inconsistent. The two losses to Carolina rankled, as did the semifinal loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament. Standing in a corner of his locker room after that game, Krzyzewski said, “Good for the Virginia kids. They deserved to win the game. They showed up to play. We didn’t.”
But, once again, Duke showed up to play when the bright lights of March were turned on. They hardly looked dominant in a first-round win over Texas Southern, but they played superbly to beat Michigan State in the second round. They moved on to Knoxville, where they beat Marquette—the Warriors had upset Kentucky in the second round, denying CBS a rematch of the Philadelphia Classic of 1992—and then beat top-seeded Purdue in the regional final. Grant Hill outplayed national player of the year Glenn Robinson in the game, but the real differences were Capel, who scored 19 points—11 above his season’s average—and Antonio Lang, who also scored 19 and helped Hill hold Robinson to 13 points (on 6-of-22 shooting), which was 18 points below his season average.
Remarkably, Duke was in the Final Four for the seventh time in nine seasons. The Blue Devils went on to beat Florida—which had taken out Boston College in the East Region final—in the national semifinals but came up just short of a third national championship in four years, losing the title game to Arkansas, 76–72.
Even so, Krzyzewski was once again the toast of college basketball. Only John Wooden—who was in another stratosphere when it came to NCAA play—had ever put together a run better than Krzyzewski’s. UCLA had not only reached the Final Four eleven times in twelve seasons, from 1964 to 1975 it had won on ten occasions. Wooden had been to twelve Final Fours; Smith had been to nine. Krzyzewski was now third in line with seven—and had just turned forty-seven. Smith was still going strong but was sixty-three.
Krzyzewski wasn’t sure he was going to come back to go for Final Four number eight. He hadn’t been especially happy that winter, in part because of the pain in his back, but also because he—and Mickie—were both hit with wanderlust.
Krzyzewski had given serious consideration to leaving Duke only once. That had been in the spring of 1990, when the Boston Celtics were looking for a coach and Dave Gavitt, who had left his job as Big East commissioner to take over the Celtics, contacted Krzyzewski. Gavitt wanted Krzyzewski to meet with Red Auerbach—the iconic coach, general manager, and then team president—to talk about the job.
The Bulls hadn’t been invented as Chicago’s NBA team until 1966. By then, Krzyzewski was at West Point. His team as a kid had been the Celtics for the simple reason that they were the NBA’s dominant team.
“To be honest, I’d have probably flown to Washington to have the chance to have lunch with Red even if I had zero interest in the job,” Krzyzewski said. “I did have interest, though, because it was the Celtics, it was Dave, and it was Red.”
Krzyzewski asked Auerbach if the meeting could be quiet and private. He didn’t want anyone at Duke or in the media getting any ideas until and unless he had serious interest in the job. “He said, ‘No problem, kid, leave it to me. I’ll pick you up at the airport.’ ”
Auerbach was as good as his word—at least the part about picking him up at the airport. “He rolled up in a silver Mercedes with a license plate that said ‘Celtic’ on it,” Krzyzewski said, laughing at the memory. “Then he took me to a restaurant where everyone—I mean everyone—knew him.”
There were few places in Washington that Auerbach could go where everyone didn’t know him. He had lived there since getting out of the navy in 1946 and taking the job as coach of the Washington Caps in what was then the fledgling Basketball Association of America—later known as the National Basketball Association. Even after becoming the coach in Boston in 1950, Auerbach and his family had maintained their residence in Washington because Nancy, his oldest daughter, had a serious case of asthma and her doctor did not think she would do very well spending winters in Boston.
Saying no to Auerbach and Gavitt wasn’t easy for Krzyzewski. But he felt the job at Duke still wasn’t finished, because he hadn’t yet won the national championship. And the recent memory of the 103–73 Vegas humiliation was still front and center in his mind’s eye. “I couldn’t walk away with that loss following me,” he said. “If the timing had been different, I don’t know what I would have done. But the timing wasn’t different.”
Four years later, both the timing and the circumstances were different. Krzyzewski had won two national championships. He wondered if maybe he needed to start fresh, find a new challenge. Mickie thought it might be time to leave Duke. She felt her husband was being taken for granted by the people running the school.
“It had gotten to the point where it was, ‘Oh, okay, you made the Final Four again—but why didn’t you win the national championship?’ ” she said. “It felt as if they’d forgotten all the work that had
gone into getting where we were.”
Mickie Krzyzewski was so convinced her husband’s time at Duke was over that one of her first comments after the Arkansas game was, “It would have been nice for Mike to win one more championship before leaving.”
The offers were certainly there: the Miami Heat wanted him and so did the Portland Trail Blazers. NBA commissioner David Stern called to encourage Krzyzewski to take one of the two jobs. Mike and Mickie finally went away for a week to talk the whole thing through, take a deep breath, and think about it.
“When I thought about it, I just didn’t want to leave,” Krzyzewski said. “I realized that Duke wasn’t perfect—but neither was I. I love Duke and I love doing the kind of work I do. I like the idea that I can have a positive effect on the kids I coach. If that sounds corny, so be it.”
No one at Duke thought it was corny. Tom Butters even got a good laugh out of the whole thing.
“I got all sorts of letters, just like I had in 1990, from boosters telling me I had to find a way to keep Mike,” he said. “They said, ‘Pay him whatever it takes—we’ll raise the money for it.’ ” Butters smiled at the memory. “A lot of those letters came from the same people who had written to me in 1983 and 1984 telling me they’d have my head on a platter if I didn’t fire the SOB.”
Another smile. “I keep them at home—all in the same box.”
—
By the time practice began in October, Krzyzewski’s back was so painful he couldn’t stand up from the start of practice until the finish. He finally agreed to let the doctors run more tests, and, sure enough, they found a torn disc in his lower back. The only way to fix it was through surgery.
The diagnosis didn’t thrill Krzyzewski. He knew he had a team that needed a lot of improvement before the season began. But he also knew he had no choice: he wasn’t helping his players by being in constant pain every day. On October 22, he had the surgery. The doctors told him to rest for a month. He was back at practice in two weeks.
The Legends Club Page 37