The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Almost thirty-three years after their angry first handshake in Greensboro, their last handshake brought both Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski to tears.

  “I can’t even tell you,” Krzyzewski said, recalling the moment, “how much that meant to me.”

  He didn’t need to.

  —

  On the morning of February 8, 2015, Mike Krzyzewski stopped for gas on his way home from church. It was a cold Sunday in Durham, but at least it wasn’t snowing.

  Krzyzewski’s mood was bright. The previous afternoon, his team had hammered Notre Dame, avenging one of his team’s three January losses. Exactly two weeks earlier, Duke had beaten St. John’s in Madison Square Garden on a euphoric afternoon for Krzyzewski’s 1,000th win as a college head coach. The milestones kept piling up. In December 2010, he had won his 880th game, surpassing Dean Smith’s 879 career wins. Eleven months later, also in Madison Square Garden, he had won his 903rd game, making him the all-time wins leader in Division I—taking that spot over from Bob Knight.

  Knight had been in the building that night, working for ESPN, wearing a garish green sweater on air. The fact that Duke was playing Michigan State, whose colors were green and white, was duly noted by those who understood that it was killing Knight to think that anyone was taking the record away from him—much less his former pupil.

  By then, Knight and Krzyzewski had made up. In April 2001, after he had been voted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Krzyzewski called Knight. Their feud had gone on for nine years, so long that neither man was certain exactly what they had fought about.

  When Knight answered the phone, Krzyzewski got right to the point.

  “Coach, I’ve been elected to the Hall of Fame,” he said. “I really don’t care what you’re mad at me about or what I’m mad at you about but neither of us is getting any younger and this needs to stop. If I hadn’t played for you and coached for you, I wouldn’t be going into the Hall of Fame. There’s no one other than you who should introduce me at the induction ceremony.”

  “Mike,” Knight said, “I’d be honored.”

  Hatchet buried—finally.

  And so, the two men had hugged after Duke beat Michigan State that night, and Knight—being Knight—had said, “Not bad for a guard who couldn’t shoot.”

  The win over St. John’s for win number one thousand had been a joyous day. Dozens of former Krzyzewski players had come to New York hoping to see him achieve the milestone. His entire family—Mickie, the three daughters, the three sons-in-law, and all nine grandchildren were there.

  Two weeks later, Krzyzewski and his team were scheduled to fly to Tallahassee in the afternoon to play on Monday night at Florida State. As Krzyzewski pulled into the gas station, his phone buzzed with a text.

  It was from Jon Jackson, one of Duke’s associate athletic directors. It was brief.

  “Coach,” it said, “Dean Smith passed away late last night.”

  Krzyzewski gasped. “Oh no!” he said out loud, stunned.

  “It shocked me,” he said later that morning. “Of course I knew how sick he had been, so maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock. But it was. It really knocked me backwards. Somehow, I thought Dean Smith would never die.”

  He paused and there was a quaver in his voice when he continued. “Of course he won’t ever die. He’ll live forever because of all the things he taught people.”

  Never be proud of doing the right thing; just do the right thing.

  Ten days later, North Carolina’s basketball team made the short trip up 15-501 to Cameron Indoor Stadium to resume college basketball’s most intense rivalry. Prior to tip-off, the players from both teams gathered in a circle, knelt, and put their arms around one another for a moment of silence to honor Dean Smith.

  Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams knelt next to each other, arms around each other. Cameron had never been so silent.

  Moments later, the game began. For more than two hours, the two teams fought and scraped and contested every pass, rebound, and loose ball. When it was finally over, Duke had escaped with a 92–90 win in overtime.

  “Dean wouldn’t have liked the outcome tonight,” Krzyzewski said. “But I know he would have been proud of the game.”

  No doubt he wouldn’t have liked all the fuss being made over him either. But, as Krzyzewski had said to him that day at the beach, no one ever deserved it more.

  EPILOGUE

  For Mike Krzyzewski, 2015 was an emotion-filled year. There were great victories but there was also great loss.

  The losses actually began in December 2013, when his older brother, Bill, his lifelong hero, passed away. Bill Krzyzewski had been a fire captain in Chicago and had become the rock in his little brother’s life when their father died while Mike was in college.

  Bill had been diagnosed with cancer in November, but the outlook had been optimistic after he had surgery just before Christmas. The hope proved to be both false and short-lived. On the day after Christmas, Bill Krzyzewski died.

  “I lost not just my brother, but my rock,” Krzyzewski said, still unable to talk about Bill more than a year later without choking up. “No one ever messed with my brother. He was a big, tough guy, but a gentle, sweet man.

  “Losing your parents is difficult for all of us. But when you lose the person you grew up with, someone just five years older than you, it makes you stop and think—a lot. I tried very hard to deal with it, to compartmentalize, to still give my team everything I had the rest of that season. But I failed. I just couldn’t do it. They didn’t get the best of me that winter and it was my fault.”

  Mickie Krzyzewski watched her husband struggle with his emotions and felt helpless to make it better.

  “Mike always thinks he has to be the one who figures everything out for everyone else,” she said. “He’s the one who people call when they have a problem. Or he calls them. But this wasn’t something he could make better. There was no solution. He was completely devastated, and just telling himself ‘You’re okay, keep moving forward’ wasn’t enough. He needed time to grieve and to deal with the loss. You don’t get to do that in the middle of a basketball season.”

  Which is why, when Duke’s 2013–14 season ended with the loss to Mercer, Krzyzewski blamed no one but himself. As he had done in the past he looked within for answers and for improvement.

  “I went back to the drawing board,” he said. “I had no choice. What I was doing wasn’t good enough.”

  Some of the changes he decided to make were hardly earth-shattering. He learned how to get on Twitter so he could follow his players. “In today’s world, it’s a good way to know what they’re up to and what’s on their minds,” he said.

  He worked on his texting skills so he could text with his players at least once a day when they were away from campus.

  Beyond that, though, he changed his approach to the one-and-dones. He had four talented freshmen joining the team: highly touted center Jahlil Okafor, forward Justise Winslow, and guards Tyus Jones and Grayson Allen. Okafor was considered a lock to turn pro after his freshman season, Winslow was likely to go, and Jones was about fifty-fifty. Allen was more of an afterthought—at least to the NBA.

  “I had to coach them the way I had coached the guys who stayed four years,” Krzyzewski said. “I had to be demanding from day one—not coddle them, not worry about whether they were going to stay or go or that they were ‘just’ freshmen. Today’s kids have played much more basketball when they get to college than kids in the old days. They all play all day, all year. I had to work to try to make them better every day with the understanding that my window to coach them might be closing even after it had just opened.

  “There’s no such thing as a ‘young’ team anymore. Your team is your team. Period.”

  With three freshmen starting from day one—and Quinn Cook the only senior who played at all—Duke was a talented but flawed team—especially at the defensive end of the court. Once, Krzyzewski would have dug in and insisted that his players
learn to play his brand of man-to-man defense: attacking the perimeter, big guys flashing to the top of the key to help on screens, trying to turn defense into offense.

  But after back-to-back one-sided losses to North Carolina State and Miami in mid-January—the latter at home—Krzyzewski realized this team wasn’t able to keep talented guards out of the lane and that the freshmen weren’t going to master his defense by March. If they had been planning to become seniors someday, or even juniors or sophomores, he might have insisted they keep working on becoming good man-to-man defenders. But that wasn’t going to happen. And so Krzyzewski did the unthinkable: he began playing zone.

  “In truth, our problem was more about offense than defense,” he insisted when the season was over. “When we scored a lot of points, which we did often, it took pressure off our defense. But when we began to struggle during that stretch on offense, it affected our defense. Guys weren’t focusing the way they needed to focus. Good defense can lead to good offense. But bad offense can also lead to bad defense.

  “Playing zone made it a little easier for the guys on the defensive end. Not that they weren’t playing hard, but zone is different than man-to-man. And when we started to play man-to-man again, they were more confident and more comfortable with it.”

  The back-to-back losses came with Krzyzewski stuck on 997 career victories. The questions about the 1,000th win were starting to wear on everyone. Then, playing at Louisville, the Blue Devils came out in a zone and stayed in it most of the night. Coincidence or not, they won in one of the toughest road venues in the country.

  Two nights later, at home, they blew Pittsburgh out, meaning Krzyzewski would go for win number one thousand in Madison Square Garden.

  “The basketball gods do work in mysterious ways sometimes,” Krzyzewski said. “The best game I ever played in college was in the Garden [the 1969 upset of South Carolina in the NIT]; the first important tournament we won at Duke was in the Garden [the 1985 preseason NIT]; I went past Coach Knight in the Garden; and now, here I was going for one thousand in the same place.”

  He smiled. “Of course for a good long while there, it didn’t look like the gods were going to let me get it done.”

  In fact, St. John’s led, 61–51, with under ten minutes to play. Then Krzyzewski played a hunch, putting backup center Marshall Plumlee into the game. Plumlee isn’t skilled offensively, but he always brings great emotion with him onto the court, and when he makes plays, he seems to give the entire team a jump start. He did just that on that Sunday afternoon in New York. Duke turned the game around completely, finishing on a 26–7 run to win, 77–68.

  Even though the thousandth win had been inevitable, actually getting there was both joyful and a relief all at once. No more questions about it; no more planning for how to handle it when it came. There were hugs and kisses all around, and then it was back to work. The Blue Devils were 17–2 at that moment but were still a work in progress.

  That was evident three days after the St. John’s game when the team traveled to Notre Dame and lost, 77–73. It had been at Notre Dame a year earlier in the conference opener that Duke had blown a big lead by going dry for a lengthy second-half stretch, a pattern that would repeat itself throughout that season.

  The loss, though, wasn’t the worst part of the trip to South Bend. The day after the game, Krzyzewski announced that he had kicked junior Rasheed Sulaimon off the team. This was stunning, if only because Krzyzewski had never once in thirty-five seasons at Duke thrown a player off the team.

  Sulaimon had come to Duke as a heralded six-foot-five-inch forward from Houston. He was a good student—he was on schedule to graduate in the summer after his junior year—and he had an outstanding freshman season, cracking the lineup as a starter from the beginning and averaging 11.6 points a game.

  But things began to go south a year later. He came back to school out of shape, lost his spot in the starting lineup, and even sat out an entire game—against Michigan—even though he was perfectly healthy. He still had moments: hitting a winning shot against Virginia (after yet another big lead had been blown) and a stunning three-pointer at Syracuse to send the game into overtime.

  But he bickered with his coaches and his teammates and was clearly unhappy with his role. There were rumors he would transfer, but he stayed and had become a productive player off the bench—albeit someone playing a complementary role rather than a starring one. His nonstarting, nonstarring role appeared to be at the heart of his problems, and an incident on the Notre Dame trip—details were never revealed—was apparently the last straw.

  Sulaimon’s dismissal left Duke with ten players in uniform—eight scholarship players and two walk-ons, whose job was to help out in practice. On the afternoon after Sulaimon’s dismissal, Krzyzewski walked into the locker room before practice and went straight to the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  He drew an eight on the whiteboard. He then launched into a speech about why eight was “a cool number,” making jokes about how one meant you were alone, all the way up to nine, which just didn’t look as cool as eight. Then he turned back to the board and said, “This is what eight looks like when it is turned sideways,” drawing a sideways eight.

  “A sideways eight,” he continued, “is what? It’s the sign for infinity. So eight can be infinity, which means that eight is all we need. We have all we need in this room to be successful. Fellas, I’m telling you eight is enough.”

  And so that became the rallying cry for the rest of the season: “Eight is enough.”

  Two nights later, Duke traveled to Charlottesville and, behind a barrage of late three-point shots, rallied to beat undefeated and number-two-ranked Virginia, 69–63.

  Even with the loss, Virginia was still clearly going to be formidable down the stretch in the ACC. Kentucky was the last undefeated team and the clear-cut number-one team in the country. No one, including Krzyzewski, was certain what Duke was going to become in March. Duke hadn’t been to a Final Four since 2010. No one was counting on the dry spell ending in 2015.

  —

  Dean Smith’s death on February 7 rocked the basketball world, not because it was a shock but because it was Dean Smith.

  Krzyzewski was one of a handful of non–North Carolina people invited to the private funeral for Smith. He arrived wearing a Carolina-blue tie, which he had not bought for the occasion.

  “Whenever we’re in Las Vegas, I like to go shopping,” he said with an almost sheepish grin. “It’s one of the places where I can put on some sweats and a baseball cap and walk around and go unnoticed. A few years ago, I was buying myself some ties and I saw this one. I’m honestly not sure why I bought it. I didn’t have a specific reason for buying it and I’d never worn it. But when Dean died and I was dressing to go to the funeral, I remembered the tie and I thought putting it on was the right thing to do.”

  Krzyzewski’s genuine grief and the gesture he made by wearing the tie, along with the moment of silence in Cameron ten days after Smith’s death, actually brought on a thaw in relations between Duke and North Carolina. It wasn’t that the games were any less intense; there was just less hostility than usual coming from the fans.

  When Duke went to Chapel Hill for the final game of the regular season, Roy Williams presented Krzyzewski with a plaque commemorating the thousandth victory. The plaque was the idea of Carolina sports information director Steve Kirschner.

  “I caught some grief from some people for it,” Kirschner said. “But for the most part I think all of our people recognized it was the right thing to do.”

  Duke won that night, 84–77, meaning it had gone 14–1 since Krzyzewski started to play zone. The only loss had been at Notre Dame, and the most impressive win had been the victory at Virginia.

  Looking back at how the season played out, Krzyzewski saw the win at UVA as a turning point. “They were very good,” he said. “I mean, they were undefeated, playing at home, and playing with a lot of confidence. But we just kept making plays and shot
s down the stretch. That was something we hadn’t done the year before—closed against a good team. That told me something about this group.”

  Duke lost to Notre Dame—again—in the ACC Tournament, this time in a semifinal game. The Blue Devils and the Irish met three times during the season. Notre Dame won twice. Duke won the other game by thirty points.

  In spite of losing in the ACC semifinals, Duke was given a number-one seed in the NCAA Tournament. A 29–4 record, the win at Virginia, and the 15–2 finish—plus Virginia’s loss to North Carolina in the ACC semis—got the Blue Devils the top seed in the South Region.

  This time, there were no early struggles. Playing in Charlotte on the tournament’s first weekend, Duke blew through Robert Morris and San Diego State—winning by twenty-nine and by nineteen. Then it was on to Houston—the same regional site Duke had gone through in 2010 en route to Indianapolis.

  Utah hung in for the entire night in the round-of-sixteen game, but Justise Winslow, playing in his hometown, made several key plays down the stretch, and the Blue Devils hung on, 63–57. Then, playing second-seeded Gonzaga, they blew open a close game late—something they had gotten in the habit of doing—turning a 51–50 lead into a 66–52 win.

  And, just like that, Krzyzewski was in his twelfth Final Four—matching John Wooden’s record and breaking the tie for second place in the category he had been stuck in for five years with Dean Smith.

  Even so, Kentucky was a heavy favorite to win the championship in Indianapolis. The Wildcats had survived numerous close calls, always able to make a key play when they most needed it, to reach the last weekend with a record of 38–0. Their most notable scare had come in the regional final, where they had to come from five points down late to beat Notre Dame.

  Thanks to the fact that Kentucky was clearly the marquee team, Duke got to play in the opening semifinal game for the first time since 1990. On seven consecutive occasions, CBS had demanded that Duke play in the second game because Krzyzewski’s team drove ratings more than any other.