A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  This time, Krzyzewski felt better. Tech had played a superb game and the Blue Devils had been about two plays away from winning anyway. But King was concerned. The opposition had scored 180 points in two games and that was too many. “I think we were worrying so much about our offense that we had gotten out of sync with our defense,” he said. “Plus, we had gotten to feeling kind of sorry for ourselves, like we somehow deserved better because we’d worked so hard all season. I don’t think a lot of the guys, especially the younger ones, really understood what working hard meant.”

  All of this preyed on King’s mind as Duke bussed down to Clemson. He was concerned about this game. Clemson was always the toughest trip of the season because it involved a tedious five-hour bus ride. What’s more, Duke had beaten the Tigers so easily in February—101–63—that taking them lightly would be a natural thing to do. King was right on all counts. Duke played its worst game of the season and let a mediocre team think it had a chance to pull a stunning upset. The crowd got behind the Tigers, the Blue Devils got flustered, and Clemson won the game 79–77.

  This was rock bottom. Krzyzewski had not lost a game to Clemson since 1984 and had never lost in four years to Coach Cliff Ellis. In fact, no one on the team had ever lost to Clemson before. Now, with the important part of the season just beginning, Duke was floundering.

  On the quiet bus trip home, Krzyzewski came back to talk to the players. As they gathered around him, he asked them, quietly, “What do you guys think is wrong?”

  One by one, they answered. Some of it was standard stuff: We aren’t executing; we aren’t being patient; we aren’t working hard enough on defense. King was only half listening. He and Strickland, as the captains, would be the last two people to talk. In his mind, King was reconstructing a speech David Henderson, a senior on the 1986 Final Four team, had given to the team just before the start of the ACC Tournament that year. When it came his turn to talk, King, playing the role of Joe Biden, plagiarized a lot of the Henderson speech.

  “It’s March,” he said. “We’ve worked since October for all the games that are ahead of us. We know how good we can be. We know what our potential is. But do we know about making sacrifices? I’m not talking about coming to practice every day and things like that. I’m talking about little things. Not going to the party you want to go to because you need the rest. Not having a beer or two when you would like one.

  “It’s easy to rationalize, to say it’s not a big deal and why shouldn’t I do it. Next month there’ll be plenty of time to party, to have a good time, to think about things besides basketball. But right now everything we do should be basketball because if it’s not, we may look back at this month and say, ‘If only …’ That’s the one thing we don’t want to do. We want to know that we’ve done everything we possibly could to win.”

  It wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone speech and it wasn’t exactly like the one Henderson had made. But King sensed that his teammates listened. He knew they wanted to get things right just as much as he did. “The only difference,” he said later, “is that they all had another chance. They could say, ‘Well, next year,’ if things didn’t work out this year. Kevin and I couldn’t say that.”

  The next day in practice Krzyzewski went back to basics. He wanted each player to understand his role, no matter how simple that might be. Danny Ferry and Kevin Strickland were shooters. Billy King and Robert Brickey were screeners. Quin Snyder was the point guard. On offense he was in charge. On defense, King was in charge. The players knew all of this—they had been practicing for almost five months. But Krzyzewski felt they had lacked focus during the three-game losing streak and needed to reinforce things that should have been automatic. Perhaps things had become so automatic that the players had become sloppy about it.

  The Carolina game did not have the meaning it would have had it been for the regular season title, but it was still vital on three levels: First, Duke needed a victory to finish third. That would mean a first-round game in the ACC Tournament against a struggling Virginia team as opposed to an opener against an inconsistent but very talented Maryland team. Second, the bleeding had to be stopped after three straight losses. To finish the season on a four-game losing streak, the last one at home, would be devastating for the team’s confidence.

  And last, but certainly not least, it was King and Strickland’s last home game. As he pulled himself out of bed on that Sunday morning, King thought to himself, “I’m going to remember this day one way or the other. I can’t let it be a bad one.” He repeated this thought to Strickland as they got ready to leave for the game.

  Tip-off was at 1 P.M. because of the NBC telecast. More than one hundred of the students had been waiting in line to get choice seating since Tuesday. This kind of loyalty touched a chord in Krzyzewski. He spent the last three days before the game letting the students inside whenever he could, ordering pizza for them and bringing them blankets. “It’s kids like this that make Duke special,” he said later.

  By noon, the place was jammed. Some of the players had been concerned that, with spring break beginning Friday and the team playing poorly, the students might not stay until Sunday. They had stayed.

  The pregame ceremony for the seniors was brief, very different from Arizona’s. The ovation was as deafening but the nature of the game that was to come made it different. “I wanted to enjoy it, to stand there and think about the last four years,” King said. “But I couldn’t. My mind was on the game. I wanted to get back in the locker room and get ready.”

  Krzyzewski’s pregame talk was nothing out of the ordinary. Until the end when he called King and Strickland up front with him. “Our seniors,” he said, “don’t lose their last home game. Now let’s go.”

  Outside, the students were ready, as they always are when Carolina is in town. They serenaded Dean Smith with a “Dean can’t drive” chant, a reminder of his run-in with the Duke bus in the fall. Even Smith, who has been disdainful of the Duke students’ antics over the years, laughed at that one.

  Technically, this game meant nothing to Carolina. The Tar Heels had clinched first place by beating Georgia Tech on Wednesday. But no game with Duke—especially at Duke—is meaningless to Smith. In 1982, moments before the national championship game, someone asked Smith how many cigarettes he had smoked in the last hour. He pulled out the pack he was working on, looked at it and said, “Less than before the Duke game.”

  Duke was 10–17 that year.

  Duke is not only Carolina’s arch-rival, it is the one school in the ACC that when it does beat Carolina, is always doing so with a roster made up entirely of players who are academically superior—usually by a wide margin—at Carolina.

  What’s more, the irreverence of the Duke students is completely the opposite of the orderly, polite, do-everything-by-the-numbers crowd at Carolina. Smith is not a man who is comfortable with irreverence and he is not comfortable at Duke. The only way to deal with something you are uncomfortable with is to beat it, which, more often than not, Smith has done. In Cameron, he was 13–13 going into this game—but eleven of those victories had come during the last fifteen years.

  Today, the Tar Heels begin as if they fully intend to win here again. They lead 12–6 by the first TV time-out. Duke is clearly tight. Sensing this, Krzyzewski tries something new. Instead of substituting a player or two at a time, he sends in five reserves at once. This is an old Smith tactic. Send in five fresh bodies who will go full-bore for a minute or two and then send your starters back in feeling rested.

  The tactic works. The second team plays two minutes to a 2–2 tie. When the starters come back, they promptly go on a 7–0 run that puts Duke up 23–20. From there, they seesaw until halftime when it is 36–36.

  This is exactly the kind of game everyone expected. King is concerned. Although the Blue Devils escaped with a victory in Chapel Hill in a Piss Factor situation in January, he doesn’t want this game to come down to that. At the end of halftime, just before it is time to go back out, he says t
o his teammates, “If you can’t play for twenty minutes, don’t come back out.”

  They come back out and they play. During the first six minutes, the Blue Devils put on a basketball clinic, the kind that Carolina is used to putting on for other people. After being zero-for-seven on three-point shots in the first half, they catch fire: Snyder hits one. Then Strickland. Then Snyder again. Snyder makes a steal and feeds Strickland for a dunk. Another steal, another Snyder feed and Brickey dunks. Smith’s superstar, J. R. Reid, swings an elbow in frustration and is called for an offensive foul. Snyder drives inside.

  The place is going bananas by now. Snyder leads another fast break, finds King on the wing, and he dunks. Then, King steals the inbounds pass and feeds Ferry for a jumper. Incredibly Duke has scored 26 points in six minutes and the lead is 62–45. All of a sudden, the struggling team has become a dominant one.

  Naturally, there is a letdown. The Tar Heels, rattled briefly, regroup after Smith calls a very rare time-out. Usually Smith hoards time-outs for the last couple of minutes (he hoards to the extent that some people believe Smith thinks that he gets some kind of extra credit in heaven for saving time-outs). Today, he has to call one. Carolina rallies back to within five at 76–71 but Snyder, growing up it seems with each possession, nails another three-pointer and then, after King steals the ball from Reid, Strickland hits another. It is 82–71 and Carolina is done.

  The final is 96–81 and with fourteen seconds left, King gets the farewell he has dreamed about. Krzyzewski takes him out to a roaring ovation and hugs him as he comes to the bench. King goes down the bench, hugging everyone, wanting to hold on to the feeling he has for as long as he can. Seconds later, Strickland comes out too, and the two old friends savor their last ticks in Cameron with a warm embrace. It is the right ending, the kind that King and Strickland deserve.

  When it is over, the students stampede the court and cut the nets down in celebration. Watching them, North Carolina Assistant SID Dave Lohse shakes his head. “Don’t these people realize,” he says, “that they just finished third?”

  Lohse doesn’t understand. Days like this have nothing to do with where you finish. They are about the way you finish.

  March 7 … Hampton, Virginia

  Rick Barnes stared at the television set blankly. He was trying to go through one last tape before it was time to leave the hotel but he was too wired to concentrate. Barnes’s first season as a basketball coach was now down to one game—just as he had hoped it would be—and all he could think about was tip-off, which was now four hours away.

  “I hate the waiting,” he said. “I liked it the last two days when we played at two o’clock and got it over with. This eight o’clock stuff is for the birds.”

  The last two days had produced the victories George Mason had to have to get its shot at Richmond in the CAA final. The Patriots had been shaky in the opening round against James Madison, playing not to lose rather than to win. But they had survived, and that was no small thing. American, the other favorite in their bracket, had not. The Eagles had blown a 16-point lead and had lost to seventh-seeded William and Mary. That was a break for George Mason. Barnes had all the respect in the world for Chuck Swenson, like him a rookie coach, but Swenson’s team just wasn’t as dangerous as American.

  The semifinal turned out to be a breeze. William and Mary had used up all its energy upsetting American and the Patriots led by 20 throughout the second half. It was Richmond that had to struggle, the Spiders coming from behind to beat North Carolina—Wilmington by just 3 points. So the final Barnes had hoped for was set: George Mason—Richmond.

  In many ways, Barnes should have been relaxed for this game. His team now had twenty victories, no small accomplishment for a first-year coach. If it lost to Richmond that was no disgrace. There might still be an NIT bid in the offing.

  But Barnes didn’t see it that way. He had primed his team for this since November and he wanted them to play their best game of the season. If they did, he felt they would win. They would make history if they did that. George Mason had never won a conference title and had never been in the NCAA Tournament. Barnes took a long walk along the waterfront that afternoon to try to calm his jangled nerves.

  He returned to his room to find a good luck telegram sent by Joe Harrington, the man who had hired him as an assistant at George Mason in 1980. Harrington’s departure to Long Beach State had opened the job for Barnes.

  “I remember when we first started and the program had nothing,” Barnes said. “We’d get down and we’d feel like we were never going to get it going. And Joe would just say, ‘Rick, we’re going to get it done. Just keep on working.’ Sure enough, we did. Actually, he did. We’re here tonight because of Joe.”

  Barnes was in a reflective, almost nostalgic mood, if that is possible for someone who is thirty-two years old with twenty-nine games’ experience as a head coach. “I’ve been thinking all day about what these kids went through back in October and November,” he said. “They really went through hell every single day. But they stuck with it, they really did. All I want tonight is for them to go out there and really get after it.”

  Jack Kvancz, the athletic director and Barnes’s confidant, came in to give Barnes his daily calm-down talk. “There’s no pressure on you, Rick,” he said. “If we win, it’s worth $232,000 to the school. Don’t think that’s pressure. It’s only money.”

  First-round losers in the NCAA Tournament receive $232,000. Kvancz could find about a hundred things to do with such a windfall. But he was only kidding Barnes to try and loosen him up. It wasn’t going to work. Not today.

  The team arrived at the grimy Hampton Coliseum about two hours before tip-off. This is a building badly in need of major renovations. In the tiny visitor’s locker room, the Patriots could look up and see a hole in the wall, the one area of the room where the paint wasn’t peeling.

  The CAA insists on playing its tournament here because it is a neutral site. If it played at the Patriot Center at George Mason or the Robins Center at Richmond, attendance would be much better and the atmosphere 1,000 percent improved. But the league schools don’t want to give anyone a homecourt advantage. So, each year everyone treks down here to play in a building that has all the charm of the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour.

  While Richmond Coach Dick Tarrant sat calmly out in the arena, doing a TV interview here, a radio interview there, Barnes stayed in the bowels of the arena and paced. “I wonder how many miles I’ve walked today pacing,” he said. He turned to Assistant Coach Wayne Breeden. “I need an Advil. I’ve got my pregame headache.”

  Breeden pulled one out of his pocket. “I’ve got an extra. I already took one myself.”

  Barnes kept talking aloud. He was worried about the officials. His old friends Hank Armstrong and Donnie Vaden were working the game, along with Rusty (Luv2Ref) Herring. “I’ve got to remember not to get on Hank tonight,” he said. “He may be tight, too.”

  Finally, it was time to talk to the players. “Think back to where we started,” Barnes says. “Think back on all the work we’ve done because that’s what’s gotten you here tonight. Everything we’ve done has been because you guys have worked so hard.

  “Tonight, though, we’ve got to go beyond hard work. Tonight, you have to be willing to die for this team. Every loose ball has to be ours. Every one! You may have heard Dick Tarrant say that we have nothing to lose in this game because we’re not supposed to win. Well, you know and I know that’s bull. We didn’t go through all of this not to win. You thirteen guys deserve this.

  “When you walk back out there now I want you to look up at that CAA banner. When we come back in here tonight, that banner’s ours. Now go get it.”

  Barnes was certainly right when he told his team that it should ignore Tarrant’s comment. But in a sense, the point was well taken. Richmond was 23–6, it was the regular season champion, and it had a string of impressive victories. Mason wanted to win. Richmond felt it had to win. That kind of pressure cou
ld work either way.

  Tonight, for a half, it worked in Richmond’s favor. The Spiders came out hot, breaking to an early 9–2 lead. Mason got even at 16–16 on a Brian Miller three-pointer but then Richmond went on another binge, opening a 34–24 lead. The Patriots’ advantage was their quickness, Richmond’s was its strength. The Spiders were forcing a halfcourt tempo and dominating the inside. When Mason collapsed on their big men, they kicked the ball out to Rodney Rice, who made three three-pointers and had 16 points by halftime.

  A Robert Dykes basket inside cut the Richmond lead to 34–26 with 5:40 left. Then, after a missed free throw by Richmond’s Steve Kratzer, Kenny Sanders had a chance to cut the lead to six. He missed inside, Richmond rebounded and started downcourt. As Sanders missed the shot, Mason part-time Assistant Coach Mike Yohe, easily the most mild-mannered person on the GMU bench, jumped up, thinking he had seen a foul. Yohe never said anything but when he came to his feet, Armstrong, running past, stopped and nailed him with a technical foul.

  This was an extraordinary call to make. Technically, an official can call a technical on anyone on the bench other than the head coach any time they stand up. But no one ever does. As long as the bench doesn’t become abusive or start making gestures, referees ignore them. If the behavior of the bench does start to get out of hand, most officials will warn the head coach as in, “Coach, I don’t want your assistants jumping up off the bench or yelling at us.”

  Once a coach has been warned, then a technical is his fault if it is called. Barnes had been given no warning and, especially in a game with so much at stake, one would have thought Armstrong would have been giving both teams the benefit of the doubt. If there was ever a game where the old Joe Forte adage—just manage the game, don’t dominate it—should have been in play, this was that game.