Standing on the court in Indianapolis that night, Krzyzewski was a long way from the Denny’s in Atlanta. He had reached coaching Nirvana.
36
In the summer of 2007, Dean Smith elected to have knee-replacement surgery. He was seventy-six and the pain had gotten to the point that it was difficult for him to play golf at all, much less play well.
“It was elective surgery,” Linnea Smith said. “The reason he did it was golf.” She smiled sadly. “If we had known what was going to happen, obviously, he wouldn’t have had the surgery. But of course there was no way to know what would happen.”
What happened was neurological postsurgical damage. Two years earlier, Smith had noticed that his extraordinary memory was beginning to slip a little. “Every once in a while I reach for a name or a date and it’s not there,” he said. “That never used to happen. I guess when you’re seventy-four this starts to happen.”
Even so, Smith’s memory was still extremely sharp. That was no longer true after the knee surgery. There were whispers in basketball circles that his memory had slipped, but only a close circle of friends knew how much.
By 2009, those friends were concerned because Smith was still driving and would sometimes forget where he was going or how to get there.
“He shouldn’t be driving,” Bill Guthridge said. “Knowing him as I do, I’m not sure he would mind if his life ended now, given the condition he’s in. But the nightmare would be if he got into an accident and hurt or, God forbid, killed someone else. That’s what we’re all afraid of whenever he gets into his car.”
There were still moments when he was the legendary Dean Smith, telling a story in exact detail. In the summer of 2009, he was asked what he remembered about how he met his first wife, Ann. Without missing a beat he explained their first meeting at the 1953 graduation dance minute by minute. He recalled the evening in great detail, talking about how he and Ann had started courting after that night. And yes, he said “courting.” This was 1953.
The subject changed to Bob Spear, the basketball coach at the Air Force Academy who had given him his first college coaching job. Smith and Spear had remained close friends until Spear’s death in 1995.
Smith shook his head. “Tell me something about him,” he said. “Maybe it will come back.”
He was reminded of Spear’s role in his life, not only because he’d hired him but because he had helped him get the job as Frank McGuire’s assistant coach at North Carolina.
He shook his head again and banged his fist on his desk in frustration.
“There’s nothing,” he said softly. “Nothing.”
Dementia goes in only one direction. The moments when the patient is lucid dwindle as time goes by. In 2010, for the first time, Smith’s family acknowledged the illness publicly because there were rumors in the North Carolina media about it. Some reporters knew what was going on but simply chose not to report the story because of their respect for Smith. It was apparent, though, that someone was going to write it or talk about it in the near future. There was no point trying to keep the secret any longer.
Not long after the announcement, Eddie Fogler drove to Chapel Hill from his home in Columbia, South Carolina, to see his old coach. Smith—who by then had stopped driving—was still coming into his office two or three days a week. After returning to North Carolina, Roy Williams had insisted that Smith and Guthridge move out of the basement, and they had been set up in an office suite just a few steps down the hall from the basketball offices. Williams also refused to park in the spot that was reserved for the head basketball coach.
“That’s Coach Smith’s spot,” he said. “Period.”
Before Fogler went in to see Smith, he stopped to say hello to Williams. “Eddie, understand, you may walk in there and he’ll throw his arms around you and start talking about recruiting you in 1965 and tell you what your mother served for dinner on his home visit,” Williams said. “More likely, though, he won’t know who you are. You can’t take it personally. It’s not because he doesn’t still love you.”
Not long afterward, Fogler was back in Williams’s office, tears streaming down his face. “I know it’s not personal,” Fogler said. “But seeing him that way is just awful.”
There were still moments. On February 28, 2013, Smith celebrated his eighty-second birthday. Cake and ice cream were brought into the office, and Williams and his staff went in to sing “Happy Birthday.” Williams could tell by the look in his eyes that Smith was in and out, smiling in recognition of what was going on some of the time, his eyes blank at others.
“I was getting ready to leave and go back to my office and I went to say good-bye to him and wish him happy birthday one more time,” Williams said. “As I did, he pulled me down so he could whisper in my ear. He said, ‘I’m so proud of you, Roy. You’re doing a great job.’ I couldn’t stop crying.”
As he retold the story, Roy Williams cried again.
—
Mike Krzyzewski was aware of Smith’s health issues long before the public announcement. Even though they are rivals, those who work in the athletic departments at Duke and North Carolina are friends and colleagues, since they often work on Duke-Carolina events together. Krzyzewski had heard from his staffers, from friends, and from the coaching grapevine that Smith was very ill.
“I didn’t really know how bad it was,” he said. “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know exactly how bad because I hadn’t seen him for a while.”
On June 30, 2011, Krzyzewski saw up close how bad it was. The North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame had decided to honor Krzyzewski, Smith, and the late Kay Yow—the longtime women’s coach at North Carolina State, who had died two years earlier after a long battle with cancer—with their Naismith Good Sportsmanship Awards.
The ceremony was held on that June night in Raleigh, and it was full of bittersweet moments for everyone in attendance.
The evening began with a moment of silence for Lorenzo Charles, the N.C. State forward who had scored the winning basket in the 1983 national championship, capping the extraordinary run of the Cardiac Pack. Three days earlier, Charles had lost control of the bus he had been driving on I-40 between Durham and Raleigh. He had worked for ten years for the Elite Coach company and was driving an empty bus back to Raleigh.
There was speculation later that he’d had a seizure of some kind that had caused him to lose control, but nothing was ever confirmed officially. He died at the scene at the age of forty-seven—the same age Jim Valvano had been when he died eighteen years earlier. He was buried ten spaces down from Valvano in Oakwood Cemetery.
Kay Yow was represented that night by her sister, Debbie, the athletic director at N.C. State. Smith was helped onto the stage by Roy Williams, who spoke on his behalf. While Williams spoke, Smith sat next to Krzyzewski. When Williams finished, as the crowd stood to applaud, Smith tried to stand up to thank the audience and to thank Williams.
“He was wobbly when he tried to get up,” Krzyzewski said. “I could tell he wasn’t going to make it. So I stood up to applaud and at the same time I just slipped my arm underneath his so that he could make it to his feet without anyone noticing that he needed help.”
One person noticed: Williams.
“I saw what Mike did,” he said. “It was one of those very quiet acts of kindness you don’t forget.”
Krzyzewski knew that night that the Dean Smith he’d known and not loved, and the Dean Smith he’d come to love, no longer existed. He was a shadow of himself. And that made Krzyzewski almost unbearably sad.
“It was the cruelest twist of all,” he said. “You’re talking about someone who had the sharpest mind of anybody that any of us ever met. To be robbed of his memory—of all things…” His voice trailed off. “It was unthinkable.”
—
The four seasons following Duke’s 2010 national championship were not filled with joy in Durham, Chapel Hill, or Raleigh.
North Carolina did bounce back after its disastrous 2010 seaso
n, when the Tar Heels failed to reach the NCAA Tournament, to return to the Elite Eight in 2011. But the Tar Heels lost to Kentucky one step short of the Final Four. Duke had beaten Carolina in the ACC Tournament championship game that March without star point guard Kyrie Irving.
The first of the new Duke one-and-dones had injured his toe in a December game against—of all teams—Butler and hadn’t played since then. Irving was able to return in time for the NCAA Tournament, but he had only played eight games and he and his teammates never got comfortable with one another again. Duke was fortunate to beat Michigan in the second round and then was blasted in the Sweet 16 by Arizona.
Debbie Yow had fired Sidney Lowe at the end of the 2011 season and set her sights on Shaka Smart, the VCU wunderkind coach who had taken the Rams to the Final Four that spring, to replace Lowe. She offered him a $1-million-a-year raise—but he turned it down. He had been at VCU for only two years and he vividly remembered how he had felt when his college coach had left after his freshman season.
“I just couldn’t do that to my guys,” he said later. “The day may come but not now. I wasn’t ready.”
Left unspoken was the fact that a lot of coaches were wary about going to work for Yow. During her years at Maryland she had developed a reputation for throwing coaches under the bus if they didn’t have instant success. And she had fought constantly with her most successful coach, Gary Williams. The relationship between the coach and AD had gotten so bad during Yow’s final years at Maryland that when the two of them absolutely had to speak to each other they would call the other’s direct line late at night when there would be no answer and leave a message.
Yow eventually was able to hire Mark Gottfried, who’d had success at Alabama and, like every coach who ever lived, gone into TV after being fired. Gottfried wanted to coach again, so he was willing to deal with Yow. At Gottfried’s introductory press conference, Yow was asked about her attempts to hire Smart and the lack of interest in the job among other coaches who would have seemed to be prime candidates.
“Well, everyone knows Gary Williams sabotaged my search,” she said.
That must have made Gottfried feel great about his new boss.
Whether he was the result of sabotage or not (he wasn’t) Gottfried proved that sometimes it is better as an AD to be lucky than good. Not only did State make the NCAA Tournament in his first season, but the Wolfpack reached the Sweet 16.
Which meant it lasted two rounds longer than Duke did. It was the first time since 1985 that State had still been playing in the tournament after Duke had been knocked out.
Duke was stunned—but not truly stunned—by an underseeded Lehigh team in the first round, a number-fifteen seed beating a number-two seed. The Blue Devils hadn’t played well down the stretch—losing to North Carolina at home in the regular season finale and then to Florida State in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament. The only real highlight of the season had been a late rally in Chapel Hill that had produced a memorable 85–84 victory when Austin Rivers hit a three-point shot at the buzzer to completely stun the Carolina crowd.
Rivers was that year’s one-and-done, having taken the spot vacated by Kyrie Irving when he turned pro after playing eleven games in a Duke uniform. Rivers’s one great moment somewhat overshadowed his otherwise spotty play. If there was ever a highly touted player who could have used another year of college it was Rivers—who completed fewer passes than the average third-string quarterback and seemed to think defense was beneath him.
But that didn’t stop him from leaving. He was still going to be a first-round draft pick (he was taken at number ten in the first round by New Orleans) and being a one-and-done had, by then, become a badge of honor for top players.
“That’s one of the problems with this rule—one of many,” said John Thompson, Jr., the Hall of Fame former Georgetown coach. “Are most of these kids ready for the NBA after their freshman year? Hell no. But they have to go. The money is too big and they don’t want the stigma of being a college sophomore while all the guys they played AAU ball with are in the NBA.”
Krzyzewski certainly feels the same way but feels helpless to fight it.
“I hate it,” he said in the winter of 2015, coaching a team with three one-and-dones in the starting lineup. “My thing has always been about developing relationships with the guys I coach. You can’t do that in one year. But if I don’t have these guys playing for me for a year then I’ll almost certainly have them playing against me for a year.”
Krzyzewski’s one-and-done frustration peaked in 2014. Duke had reached the Elite Eight in 2013 with a team that—surprise—didn’t have a one-and-done player on it. Duke won a major recruiting battle in the fall of 2012 for Jabari Parker, a highly touted six-foot-eight-inch player out of Chicago. Parker’s recruitment was followed so closely that ESPN.com claimed a scoop when it learned not where Parker was going to college but when he would announce where he was going to college.
Much to the chagrin of Michigan State coach Tom Izzo—who thought he had the kid—it turned out to be Duke. Even before the season began the TV talking heads were claiming that Parker, Julius Randle of Kentucky, and Andrew Wiggins of Kansas were the three greatest freshmen in the history of college basketball, perhaps in the history of sports.
None of them quite lived up to the hype. In fact, “led” by Parker and a rare transfer, Rodney Hood, Duke lost in its first NCAA Tournament game for the second time in three seasons. This time the loss was to Mercer, a number-fourteen seed. Parker shot 4 for 14 in the game and was completely outplayed by Jakob Gollon, a sixth-year senior who had missed two full seasons with major injuries. Gollon had 20 points and 5 rebounds and often forced Parker into wild, no-chance shots at the other end. The Bears started five seniors, and when the game was in doubt in the final three minutes they were the team that made all the critical plays.
“They were men,” Krzyzewski said after the game—the point being that his players were not. “They never backed down all day.”
As he sat and answered postgame questions, Krzyzewski already knew that both Parker and Hood—who had transferred from Mississippi State and was a sophomore—were going to leave to turn pro. When someone asked him if he had any thoughts about next season, Krzyzewski just shrugged.
“I don’t even know who’s going to be on my team next season,” he said. “When I know that, then I can tell you what kind of season I think we’ll have.”
Krzyzewski had just turned sixty-seven. He was seventeen wins shy of becoming the first NCAA men’s Division I coach with one thousand victories. He had decided to stay on as the U.S. Olympic team coach through 2016. So there wasn’t any doubt that he was going to continue coaching. There also wasn’t any doubt that it wasn’t quite as much fun as it had once been.
“I still love it,” Krzyzewski said a few months after the loss to Mercer. “I have to be able to adjust to the realities of the game today. What’s happened the last three seasons isn’t acceptable. That’s on me. That’s not because of the one-and-done rule. We all have to live with it. I’ve reinvented myself before; I have to do it again.”
—
In August of 2013, Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski rented a house for a week on a small island near Wilmington called Figure Eight. They had rented there periodically through the years when they had some free time in the summer. They were both aware of the fact that Dean and Linnea Smith had a place somewhere on Figure Eight, but they had never crossed paths in the past.
They were taking a walk on the beach one afternoon when they bumped into Kelly Smith, one of Dean and Linnea’s daughters. They stopped to talk and Mike finally said, “Do you think there’s any chance we could come by the house and see your dad?”
There was a moment of hesitation. “Why don’t you call my mom,” Kelly finally said. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning and I’m not sure about our schedule.”
She gave the Krzyzewskis Linnea’s cell number. As soon as they were back at the house, Mike made the call.
“Of course,” Linnea said instantly. Then she paused for a moment. “Understand, though, that he almost certainly won’t recognize you. In fact, he may not know you’re here. But if you want to come, you’re more than welcome.”
Not long after, the Krzyzewskis walked down to the Smiths’ house.
“Dean was in a wheelchair,” Mickie said. “It was a shock, I think for both Mike and me, to see how far he had slipped. I didn’t think he recognized us at all or, as Linnea had said, was really even aware that we were there.
“But Mike, being Mike, he was doing his mind-over-matter thing. So he just kept talking to him as if it was twenty years ago.”
Mike talked for a while, looking directly at Dean, about how proud he was that Dean was going to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. “I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more,” he said, his voice, according to both Mickie and Linnea, soft and filled with sadness. “What you’ve done as a person is so much more important than basketball.”
They lingered for a while. There really wasn’t much to say, but Mike and Mickie were both thinking this might be the last time they ever saw Dean.
“He just looked so frail,” Mickie remembered. “At one point I thought to myself, ‘If we don’t leave soon, I’m just going to burst into tears.’ ”
Finally, it was time to go. Mike walked to Dean’s wheelchair and leaned down. He took his right hand and formed it into a handshake, put his left hand on his shoulder, and leaned down to whisper in his ear.
“Coach,” he said, “I love you.”
At that moment, Dean looked up at him and Mike saw something—he wasn’t sure if it was recognition or not, but it was something—in his eyes.
And then Dean Smith took his left hand, placed it firmly on Mike Krzyzewski’s right hand, and squeezed it. And then he smiled.
The Legends Club Page 45