by Love, Reggie
From the moment I started playing, I’ve always loved the game. Like most kids, football and basketball filled up many of my hours, and I was fiercely competitive at both, but basketball was my favorite. If it was snowing or raining outside, I would back my parents’ cars out of the garage so I could practice my dribbling on the cement floor. My football coaches were always urging me to bulk up, so I did hundreds of crunches, hundreds of push-ups. But no matter how tired strength training left me at the end of the day, I always wanted to hoop.
On paper it made no sense for me to spend all my extra time on the court. I didn’t fool myself. Basketball wasn’t going to get me a scholarship at a college that met my interests in education, nor was the NBA ever going to be my career. I was, ironically, much better at football than basketball. But the minute football season ended, I ate, slept, and lived basketball. My football coaches didn’t love that habit either. They wanted to know why I wasn’t resting or watching film.
In a way, I was training for the job I wanted, not the job I had. I may have been better suited to one sport. But my passion was with another.
It was a dilemma I would go on to encounter in various permutations throughout the next decade. Do you stick with the position you’ve mastered? Or do you push yourself to master the position that seems out of reach? Do you listen to what everyone else thinks is best for you? Or do you listen to your own voice? Do you settle? Or do you dream?
I chose to dream.
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The summer before my senior year of high school, I’d submitted my highlight tape, which David Carrier (my high school coach) had put together for me, to a couple of the Duke basketball coaches. I also had the amazing good fortune to play in front of Mike Krzyzewski, “Coach K,” whose daughter, Jamie Krzyzewski, played girls’ basketball for a rival high school (Durham Academy). I scored 32 points and snagged twenty rebounds—a performance that I prayed would lodge in his memory bank.
I admired Coach K growing up. He was a guy who didn’t have all the physical talent when he played basketball at West Point, but no one ever outworked him. In his career he has led his teams to four NCAA Championships, eleven Final Fours, and four Olympic gold medals (’84, ’92, ’08, ’12). He was a coaching legend; it would give anyone goose bumps to play for him.
When I got to Durham in the summer of 2000, less than a month after graduating from high school, I made friends with incoming freshman point guard Chris Duhon. We bonded during one-on-one full-court pickup games. That summer I was able to build a relationship with the team. I made myself visible to the whole Blue Devil basketball staff, hanging around like some sort of hoops groupie. When the basketball team returned from Thanksgiving holiday after competing in the 2000 Maui Classic in Hawaii, they invited me to a practice. I never expected to play in a game that mattered. There were eight McDonald’s All-Americans on that team (two still playing in the league today): Nate James, Shane Battier, Casey Sanders, Carlos Boozer, Jason Williams, Mike Dunleavy, Chris Duhon, and Nick Horvath. I figured the odds of my ever seeing court time were slim to none, but as of that November, I was an official walk-on. It was a deeply satisfying accomplishment.
I’ll never forget the first day I practiced with the basketball team. Coach K held everyone to such a high standard. He was reviewing game tape and erupted over how the team wasn’t going “hard enough,” and singled out some of the stars for criticism. And this was from a game where Duke had won by a pretty a large margin. And yet the message was, “You’re not physical enough, you know this isn’t good enough. This is not championship basketball; we will not win a championship if we continue to play like this.”
It was my introduction to Coach K’s modus operandi: Always think about how to be your best regardless of who the opponent is. Be sure you can compete at the highest level against anyone, with the same effort and preparation for a championship game as you would have for a pre-season game. Be ready at all times. It was from Coach K that I first heard the phrase “Success is where preparation meets opportunity,” a principle that resonated with how my parents had raised me.
Coach K believed that once you had the Duke jersey on, it was the same as wearing a bull’s-eye on your back. You were carrying the reputation of Duke University on your shoulders. And he feared there would be people who believed they could extract value from that association at your expense. Coach K wanted anyone who intersected with a Duke player to limp away thinking, Those guys are tough; they were there on every play; I never want to come up against those guys again. Coach K never accepted mediocrity. Ever.
That work ethic was well-worn territory for me. When I was a child, my parents had taught me the value of pushing yourself beyond what you believed you could do. And I hated losing more than anything else. I was never one of those people who was “fine” so long as we had “played hard.”
Just as with football, in a long stretch as a walk-on player for the basketball team I didn’t see very much game time, if any. At practice I would guard Shane Battier. I went hard, but let’s be real: I lacked size and talent. A six-foot-five eighteen-year-old up against a six-foot-nine Shane Battier. So practice was really about my getting educated in humility every day.
Well, almost every day. There was one shining moment during my first practice with the team in the ’00–’01 season when the ball bounced off the rim and I dunked it back over Shane. There was almost a moment of silence in the gym. Followed by a few looks of disbelief.
He was captain of the team at the time. And I was a walk-on. And me dunking on him was akin to trying to date his sister. That move would not go unpunished.
That was the last play I made against him the entire season. From that moment on, Shane devoted every second of his remaining time at Duke to keeping me from scoring on him again.
(FYI: he never got over it. Ten years later, when Shane played for the President’s forty-ninth birthday party round-robin tourney with LeBron, DWade, Kobe, and Chauncey Billups, he was still focused on shutting me down. By then he’d spent a decade in the NBA and earned hundreds of millions of dollars, but old grudges die hard. During one game where he was on the President’s team, I was seconds from scoring when Shane, who wasn’t even guarding me, ran at me like a bat from hell and blocked what I thought was going to be an uncontested layup. His voice echoed through the gym: “Anyone but Love!”)
Outside of Shane burying me day in and day out, being a Duke walk-on was the opportunity of a lifetime. My abilities and knowledge of the game were improving exponentially with exposure to great players and coaches. (This happens in every field, at every level. No one progresses in a pool of folks just like them.) Then, during a game against Maryland, our center Carlos Boozer broke his fifth metatarsal, a bone in his foot. It was also the middle of spring football season. And, without any buildup, Coach K told me in the locker room, “Reggie, next game, we need you to play.”
I was taken aback. I had spent my basketball life believing I would play on the perimeter. I didn’t have anything like Boozer’s build, height, or skill. But Coach K presented it as a flat choice: “You can see playing time as a forward or sit on the bench as a guard.”
I played forward.
* * *
It was a steep learning curve. And I knew I was no Carlos Boozer. But, just as I had when I was tapped without warning to hit the football field, I went in and I did my best.
In both cases, stepping up was an unnerving test of my confidence and abilities. It was also far superior to the alternative: growing comfortable on the bench.
We are all quick to turn ourselves into victims, to protest that life isn’t evenly balanced. Or complain that a teacher, coach, or supervisor is too harsh. Maybe they are—so what? They see something in you that they aren’t getting out of you. It’s good when your superiors hold you accountable to perform at a higher standard. It means they sense a potential that you haven’t quite captured. It means that they see more for you than you do for yourself. Indeed, the time to get concerne
d is when people stop coaching you hard, when people stop expecting more of you.
The game Coach K called me in for was a game against UNC that would decide who won the ACC regular season—a game so hotly anticipated that tickets were going for almost $2,500 on Craigslist. I had no idea when or how much I was going to play. I was so keyed up about the possibility of playing in front of forty thousand spectators in the Dean Dome, my blood was pumping like a geyser. When I hit the floor, I was all over the place, like a raccoon on speed. It took a bit of time to work out that excess energy. Once I did, I pulled down a few rebounds and I defended the seven-foot Brendan Haywood. That felt incredible. I ended up on the court for five minutes, and we managed to pull out a win that many people thought we couldn’t get without Boozer.
A theme in my life was emerging.
6
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YOU ARE NEVER NOT REPRESENTING
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* * *
Among the many lessons Coach K taught me was that no one is bigger than the team. He constantly expressed how the little things counted and every play mattered. Even the smallest plays were important: help-side defense and coming over to take a charge, or blocking a shot to ensure the opposition wasn’t given easy baskets, or setting proper screens to get teammates open, or valuing every possession, or going after every loose ball and rebound and not waiting and expecting someone else to make a play that you could make. Because you never knew which plays would make the difference in a win or loss, you had to treat them all as if they carried the same weight.
Consistent play and stellar conditioning were Coach K’s fundamental pillars. He also believed that any time you stepped onto the court the factors that were under your control—such as effort, defense, and knowing the scouting report and habits of key players on the opposing team—were all things you should have mastered. He understood that raw athleticism can only carry a team so far. He stressed that as a player for West Point, he was never the most talented player on the court, and neither was I at Duke. I was a utility player. Never the star. But we both loved to play. I didn’t join the team because I believed I was going to enter the NBA and earn millions, though it would have been nice. I joined the team for the love of the game. And I think Coach K recognized that passion in me.
During my freshman year, I remember a particular game against Florida State. It was my first matchup against a former AAU rival and occasional teammate, Mike Joyner, who was a much taller and smoother player than I was, the sort of guy you would rather have on your team than have to defend against. During the middle of the game I made a shot at the rim, just laid the ball in the basket like a baby in a crib. The next day, with the team sitting in a U shape watching film of the game, Coach K said in his deadpan voice, “You know, Reggie, you can dunk the ball if you want.” As if I were unfamiliar with the rules of collegiate basketball. My teammates’ laughter only confirmed my intention to dunk the ball at the next opportunity.
One of the more moving things I witnessed while playing for Coach K was his desire to connect us with the military men and women serving in Iraq, to educate us about what real sacrifice looked like and to remind us of our shared good fortune. It was a reality check I sorely needed during my sophomore year, when I fell down the hole of despair after the most humiliating event of my life.
It happened when I was nineteen, right around the end of the ACC regular season. It was spring, so I had football workouts in the morning and basketball practices in the afternoon, attending classes in between. I was studying political science, but I didn’t put much stock in my studies. I would log my B’s, then check off the classes as one less thing I had to worry about. My desire to excel in the classroom had waned. I was consumed with being an athlete.
But the pursuit left me depleted. A part of every weekend was spent watching tape; every day I spent hours sweating in the weight room. It was constant. It sucked up a lot of my life, and as a result, on the weekends I chased the usual ways a stressed-out nineteen-year-old college sophomore blows off steam. Without a doubt, I drank more than I should have. Overall, I was stretched too thin. Earlier in the year, in a football game against Northwestern, I had pulled my hamstring. Instead of resting a few games, I played injured for the rest of the season at the suggestion of people I thought I trusted. As a result my production on the football field slowed to a halt for the remainder of the season and the team went on to another winless season. These dubious choices didn’t improve my attitude. It left me clouded and pissed off.
Then, in February 2002, a good friend was celebrating his nineteenth birthday and asked me to join him and some pals at a fraternity party in Chapel Hill. I did, and long story short, I ended up passed out alone on a futon. I had no idea how long I was there, or what happened while I was unconscious.
I would soon find out.
It couldn’t have been more than an hour after I awoke before I had friends emailing me with the subject line “Oh man, Reggie, what have you done?”
There were photographs attached to the emails. Pictures that had been emailed around UNC, Duke, and who knows where else, of me with random drunk dudes pretending to straddle my face. Then the photos hit the Internet. And in the click of a mouse, I was no longer the hardworking, two-sport athlete from Duke. I was the drunk at the frat party being pranked by even drunker guys with precious little shame. I vividly remember how livid Coach K was the day he brought those pictures of my passed-out butt on that green futon into the locker room before practice. I’d seen him empty lockers onto the floor, stacking all the gear in the middle of the room, yelling that we didn’t deserve to wear the Duke uniform, that we weren’t worthy of the equipment or the facility or the fans. I’d seen him so furious that he would say nothing at all. I’d known him too pissed to come to practice, letting the assistants run us for hours. But that day he seemed angrier than all those times combined.
He turned my humiliation into an example for the whole team. “You guys just don’t get it. People see you, and they see the school.” (And by “people,” he meant rival UNC students who lived to punk any Duke player.)
He was holding the pictures of me in his hands, flipping through them, raging. “This is what some people want to do to you because you play Duke basketball.” And then he turned to me and said, “What I’m trying to figure out is how you don’t see just how lucky you are to be on this team.”
It crushed me. I felt like I had let everybody down. Him. My parents. My teammates. I had been given an opportunity most people never get, and it looked like I didn’t cherish the opportunity, that I was ungrateful or unaware of the privileged place I found myself in. I was not protecting the brand. I was tarnishing it. I went into the bathroom and did something I hadn’t done since I was a kid: I broke down and cried.
And then, it got worse.
Over a weekend break, I spent a night in jail. I’d been pulled over late one night in Charlotte and been administered a Breathalyzer test. My old friend and I had been playing Madden NFL at his house, where we’d shared a couple beers each between us. After a couple hours, I left to get some donuts. Krispy Kremes, more precisely. They didn’t have a Krispy Kreme in Durham, and I was craving some. I didn’t think about the beers I’d had because I knew I wasn’t intoxicated.
The Breathalyzer showed I wasn’t over the legal limit. But I was underage, and North Carolina has a zero-tolerance policy for minors drinking, which meant that any blood alcohol level above zero was grounds for arrest. Out came the handcuffs. I couldn’t believe it was happening. They took me in and booked me. It was nerve-wracking. A half hour later, I was in an empty cell, with no one on duty to process me out until the next morning.
It wasn’t my best moment, but I was fairly sanguine about the arrest. After it happened, I didn’t tell anyone. Not because I was afraid to, but because in my mind it really wasn’t that terrible. I wasn’t drunk. I hadn’t wrecked my car or damaged property or injured myself or anybody else. I’d been
caught drinking underage, been punished, paid my fine, and moved on.
But I’d forgotten that DUIs are public record. And after the party photos made the rounds, I discovered just how public.
My parents were clued in when my insurance bill skyrocketed a month later. I explained that it wasn’t worth worrying about. They disagreed. They saw the DUI as a massive deal. They’d been giving me $200 a month in gas money. That promptly stopped. My mom, in particular, was concerned that I was drinking at all. Her father had been a fairly violent drunk. She wanted to know if I had “a problem with alcohol.” She was worried about history repeating itself in the family.
After the UNC photos came out, I became a person of interest. As those shots circulated virally, people started looking at me more closely, and the DUI was unearthed and reported in the local papers. Which is how it came to the attention of the Duke coaching staffs, four months after the fact.
Mostly they were pissed that they had been caught off-guard. I got a call from Ben Reese, the dean of students, who ordered me into his office. Then the football coaches called me in right after that. The dialogue was identical.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Well,” I joked, “there goes my career in politics.”
I was acting like a smart-ass. I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. In my mind, there were much worse offenses I could have been involved in, offenses college athletes are frequently being called on the carpet over. I didn’t fight anybody. I didn’t carry a gun. I wasn’t using dope. I wasn’t cheating on my academics. Never mind. With a DUI combined with my unfortunate impromptu photo shoot, it was determined that I had engaged in “conduct detrimental to the team.” I was not being the Blue Devil steward I was supposed to be.