Coach k, p.23
Coach K, page 23
So Krzyzewski jumped all over his players in the locker room. “I don’t like your body language,” he shouted. “I don’t like your attitude. You guys think you’ve won something, and you haven’t won anything. And you won’t win tomorrow night.”
Ten minutes after storming out of that meeting, Krzyzewski found his players gathered at center court, quietly waiting for him. They were standing close together, standing as one. He was moved by their sudden change in disposition. Krzyzewski thought to himself, We’re going to win it. We’re going to win the national championship.
Grant Hill made him a prophet on Duke’s second basket of the game. Laettner had run down a rebound and thrown an outlet pass to Hurley, who took one dribble across midcourt and launched a high lob to the streaking freshman. Somehow, in full flight, Hill caught the ball with his outstretched right hand near the top of the backboard box and slammed it home as his head grazed the bottom of the board. His father, Calvin, missed the remarkable slam because he was busy talking to Krzyzewski’s youngest daughter, Jamie. Calvin heard the crowd explode and turned to his wife and asked, “What happened?”
“Grant scored,” Janet said.
He sure as hell did.
“Grant jumped higher than I’ve seen anyone ever jump to get that pass,” Williams would say. Hill pointed at Hurley to acknowledge the assist, because that’s what Duke basketball players did.
Williams was already seriously concerned about his team after the Jayhawks won the opening tip, only to commit a backcourt violation. Oh my God, he thought to himself, if we’re that nervous, this could be a long night.
His worst fears were confirmed. “It was the kind of game where I never felt like we had a chance,” Williams said. “We were just hanging on and hoping something miraculous was going to happen.”
Duke took an eight-point lead into halftime, and in the middle of the second half Hurley pushed the lead to 14 with two free throws. A physically drained Laettner was walking up the floor at this point, crawling to the finish line. It had been an endless thirty-nine-game season for him: battling (and completely outplaying) Shaquille O’Neal despite giving away two inches and 60 pounds; getting his head slammed into the court twice by UConn’s Rod Sellers, who was responding to a Laettner elbow, in the middle of a scramble for the ball in their Sweet 16 matchup; and dueling (and completely outplaying) Larry Johnson in the semis.
Laettner and Hurley had each played the full forty minutes against Vegas. Only Hurley would do the same against Kansas.
The Jayhawks cut the lead to five with 34.5 seconds left, but a Brian Davis dunk sealed it. With 8.1 seconds left and Duke about to inbound the ball, Billy Packer said on CBS, “And there it is. The first time I’ve seen Mike Krzyzewski smile. He knows he has that monkey off his back.”
Grant Hill grabbed the final rebound at the final horn, with Duke’s 72–65 victory frozen forever in lights, and Krzyzewski lost himself in a group hug with his assistants. On the night of April Fool’s Day, April 1, 1991, Duke University won its first national title. Krzyzewski headed down to console Williams the way others had once consoled him. “I’m very sick for my team,” the Kansas coach said, “but I’m very truthfully happy for you.”
“You’re going to get yours one of these days,” Krzyzewski responded.
Hurley and Hill were among the exhausted Duke players practically passed out on the floor. Krzyzewski accepted a hug from Davis, who shouted in his ear, “We got it for you, baby,” and he embraced and kissed his wife and three daughters. Though he conceded that “it feels really good to finally win a game in April,” Coach K tried to tell anyone who would listen that this night wasn’t about him — it was about the Duke students he’d ordered to play for themselves. “It’s never been a monkey on my back,” he claimed. “I always tried to keep all that in perspective. Did you see my players, the look on their faces? Did you see my three girls crying?”
This was about everyone in the Duke universe. Trainer Max Crowder, a Duke institution, who had been 0-for-8 at the Final Four. Coach K assistants Tommy Amaker and Jay Bilas, heartbroken members of the 1986 team. Clay Buckley, the senior co-captain and bench player who came out of a family desperately seeking a ring — his father Jay had been a Duke star who lost in two Final Fours in the 1960s. Koubek, the other senior co-captain, who scored the Blue Devils’ first five points in the national title game three months after nearly quitting over playing time. McCaffrey, the sophomore guard overshadowed by Hurley who outscored the entire Kansas bench, 16–14, in his last game at Duke. (McCaffrey would transfer to Vanderbilt.) Laettner, who sank all 12 of his foul shots and finished with 18 points and 10 rebounds and one Most Outstanding Player Award. Tom Butters, who made it all possible by taking a big chance on a 9-17 coach from Army.
Some of Krzyzewski’s most brilliant work was found in his managing of the Laettner-Hurley relationship. He let the two stars work it out on their own, and in the end that Monday night, after Laettner told Jim Nantz that he did feel fatigued in the Kansas game, he said this on national TV: “I think Bobby did a very good job because he has to handle the ball the whole game, and he didn’t sit out once. And he just played a superb game, a lot of assists and not that many turnovers . . . and I’m very happy for Bobby.” The camera caught the point guard smiling over the sweet sound of that.
Hurley’s nine assists fittingly gave him 289 for the season, breaking his own Duke record by one. The faith Butters had put in Krzyzewski mirrored the faith Krzyzewski put in Hurley. On the first Monday night in April, the Blue Devils were the ones climbing ladders and cutting down the nets, while their coach stood in the lane, with his family, looking up like the proudest father as he basked in everyone’s joy.
“It’s a family business,” Krzyzewski would say. “Those expressions mean a lot more to me than a trophy.”
Coach K eventually cut the last available strand, then held the severed net in the air. Emily Krzyzewski had told her son in Denver that he would do better this year, and sure enough, he did. Some of the Columbos from Chicago — Moe Mlynski, Larry “Mondo Twams” Kusch, and Linda Wolczyz Kasprzak and her husband Frank — were in the house, with tears rolling down their cheeks.
They eventually retreated to the Holiday Inn–Airport, where they gathered in Krzyzewski’s appropriately unpretentious suite. Mike’s big brother Bill passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels to the Columbos. They drank and laughed and told neighborhood stories deep into this glorious night.
The Polish kid from 2039 West Cortez had conquered the world at last. There was nothing left for Mike Krzyzewski to do other than go conquer it again.
9
Duke-Kentucky
THE BLUE DEVILS were one and done. Sean Woods of Kentucky had just made a prayer of a bank shot with 2.1 seconds left in overtime of the NCAA Tournament’s East Regional final, and as the Duke players staggered back to their bench, they were thinking about lost opportunities. Their painful trip home. Their next trip to the beach.
They were thinking about everything except a legitimate chance to repeat as national champs.
Mike Krzyzewski saw it in his players’ eyes. They were defeated. They were deflated. They were demoralized.
They were done.
It was an indelible fifteen-round heavyweight fight in Philadelphia, and Kentucky, a Rocky-like underdog, had just thrown the decisive punch. The Wildcats were recovering from heavy NCAA sanctions that included a two-year ban from the tournament, for violations committed under deposed coach Eddie Sutton. The mess left Kentucky with a roster plucked from the island of misfit toys. The school hired the unhappy New York Knicks coach, Rick Pitino, and charged him to return the Wildcats to their former glory. And he did.
Or at least he was about to, in 2.1 seconds, with this victory over a Duke team that was 31-2 and might have been 33-0 had Bobby Hurley not broken his foot during its first loss, at North Carolina, and sat out its second, at Wake Forest. Many old-timers who’d gathered in the Spectrum on the night of March 28, 1992, would call this the best college basketball game they had ever seen. Some thought it was the best game they had seen, period, college or pro.
Now, like the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels the year before, the Duke players realized that they had just blown their opportunity to become the first team to win consecutive titles since John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins won their seventh in a row in 1973. Kentucky’s fifth-leading scorer, the six-foot-two Woods, had just lofted an attempt over the six-foot-11 Laettner that CBS analyst Len Elmore called “a terrible shot.” A terrible shot that happened to bank in off the glass to give Kentucky a one-point lead and land the Wildcats on the doorstep of the Final Four. “When shots go in like that you say, ‘This isn’t meant to be,’” Bobby Hurley said.
Krzyzewski saw that resignation on his players’ faces, and deep down he understood what they were feeling. Duke had to navigate the full length of the court, 94 feet, and score a basket in two seconds against a defense designed by a thirty-nine-year-old coach, Pitino, who had already led Providence on a miracle run to the 1987 Final Four, turned the New York Knicks into 52-game winners two years after inheriting Hubie Brown’s 24-win team, and turned the Kentucky Wildcats into a 29-6 team three years after inheriting Sutton’s scandal-scarred 13-19 team.
As a rising Buffalo high school star, Laettner had attended many of the big basketball camps in the East, and at one of those camps he ran into a guest instructor who made quite an impression. “Christian would rave about Rick Pitino all the time,” Christopher Laettner said. “He would say, ‘You’ve got to see this guy coach.’ I’d never really heard of him, but Rick Pitino was his favorite coach.”
Now Krzyzewski had to persuade his players that they could beat Pitino’s team, that 2.1 seconds was an eternity for a coach with a plan. Taking their seats for what they all expected to be their final huddle of their season — and of Laettner’s remarkable career — the Blue Devils made eye contact with the man who had brought them to this moment. “We are going to win,” Mike Krzyzewski told them. “We are going to win.”
It had been a hell of a two-year ride to this point, with the Blue Devils in the role of America’s most wanted boy band. Krzyzewski told his players that they couldn’t accommodate every autograph request, that it was okay to say no, politely. “If you can’t sign,” he told them, “shake hands while you’re moving along. Be cordial. Apologize. Tell ’em to write you in care of the school. But be persistent about your time.” The crush had already started in 1991, when Hurley had the managers stuff him into an equipment bag in an attempt to avoid a crowd of admirers — mostly young and female — gathered outside the visitors’ locker room at Notre Dame.
The 1991–1992 Blue Devils won the ACC Tournament, drilling the Tar Heels by 20 in the final, before entering the NCAAs as the nation’s number-one team and prohibitive favorite. They beat Campbell and Iowa to advance to a Sweet 16 matchup in Philly against Seton Hall that pitted Hurley against his younger brother Danny, a freshman reserve for the Pirates. The occasion called for nonstop reminiscing about life in Jersey City, about being the sons of high school coaching royalty, Bob Sr., the probation officer who nearly single-handedly kept afloat a tiny Catholic school, St. Anthony, while racking up a dizzying number of state titles.
Seton Hall coach P. J. Carlesimo, who coached Bobby on the U.S. gold-medal winning World University Games team, knew the Hurley backstory about as well as Bob Sr. did, so he put Danny on the floor for eighteen minutes — about six minutes more than he usually played — for the sole purpose, one columnist wrote, “of using Danny as a human can of mace to spray into Bobby’s eyes.” It worked. “I was in a funk,” Bobby said. The Duke point guard ended up with more turnovers (six) than points (four), while Danny, who went scoreless, focused on hounding him. When one official asked the Seton Hall freshman to stop hand-checking his opponent, Danny told the ref, “He’s my brother. I’ll do whatever I want.” Laettner threatened to come to Bobby’s aid and knock Danny into oblivion with a hard screen, at least until bruising Seton Hall forward Jerry Walker intervened.
Duke won by 12 because Duke had better players, better depth, and a better grasp of how to win games like these. It was a bit of a crazy night all around, as Kentucky beat Massachusetts in the earlier regional semi thanks in part to a surreal technical called on UMass coach John Calipari for leaving the coaching box — this after the Minutemen had cut a 21-point deficit to 2. When the smoke cleared, it was Duke-Kentucky, a repeat of the 1978 national championship game.
They called the Wildcats “the Unforgettables” because they were anchored by long-shot kids from small mountain, river, and coal towns in Kentucky who grew up dreaming of playing for UK. Sutton was effectively forced to take them in, if only to keep the locals happy. Seniors Deron Feldhaus (Maysville), John Pelphrey (Paintsville), and Richie Farmer (Manchester) weathered the NCAA storm because they would never leave their old Kentucky home, and also because, Pitino said, “nobody else wanted them. They had no place else to go.” Woods, their classmate from Indianapolis, decided to stay. They would all get their jerseys retired in the arena named after the baron of the bluegrass, Adolph Rupp, in tribute to their loyalty, their resilience, and their ability to carry the Wildcats into this epic struggle of wills with the defending champ.
Duke-Kentucky was made possible by the fact that the Wildcats had an otherworldly six-foot-eight sophomore from New York, Jamal Mashburn, who signed up because he wanted to play for the coach of the Knicks. Mashburn was a Laettner-sized talent, and worthy of mention with all the past Kentucky greats. His NBA-ready moves kept the Wildcats in the game after they went down 5 at halftime, and after they went down 12 on Hurley’s three-pointer with 11:16 to go. Pitino’s famously frenetic full-court pressure defense helped, as did the Wildcats’ aim — they shot 67 percent from the field in the second half.
Three minutes after his teammate Hurley’s shot, and a few seconds after he was fouled underneath by Kentucky backup center Aminu Timberlake, Laettner nearly ended Duke’s season with an egregiously selfish act: stomping his right foot on Timberlake, who was flat on his back on the Spectrum floor. Laettner was assessed only a technical foul for conduct that could have earned his ejection, inspiring postgame commentary on whether his star power, his skin color, and his association with a program often portrayed as pristine kept him in the game.
“That was unbelievably dumb,” Krzyzewski told his center.
Kentucky was not rattled either way. A Feldhaus follow off a Pelphrey miss made it 93–93 with thirty-eight seconds left, and Hurley’s leaning miss over Woods in the final seconds sent the game and the Spectrum crowd tumbling head over heels into overtime, where the expert punching and counterpunching continued. Pelphrey opened the scoring with a three, and Hurley answered with his own three (after missing one five seconds earlier), with Duke’s Brian Davis fouling out in between. Pelphrey hit a tough banker in the lane, and Laettner answered with two free throws while his family watched from the stands; his mother Bonnie wore a white Duke button and shirt carrying her son’s name and number and a heavy-duty neck brace made necessary by fusion surgery.
Inside one minute to go, Krzyzewski was pawing at the hair above his forehead. He knew that he was locked inside a classic, with the stakes growing with each possession. With 37.1 seconds to go and only 5 seconds left on the shot clock, Grant Hill threw an inbounds lob to Laettner in a play that was almost a dress rehearsal of what was to come. The Duke center went high to make the catch with his back to the basket, took one dribble, then turned left toward the goal with Mashburn and Pelphrey on him. Laettner left his feet, double-pumped to create room to shoot, and threw up a banker that nearly spun out before dropping in with thirty-two seconds left to make it 100–98.
“Oh . . . my . . . goodness,” Verne Lundquist cried on the CBS broadcast. “How did he get the shot off?” But if the Blue Devils thought the first one to 100 would win, Mashburn had other ideas. He got loose on the baseline for a basket while drawing a foul on Antonio Lang that was whistled by veteran crew chief Tim Higgins; Mashburn’s three-point play gave Kentucky a one-point lead with 19.6 seconds left.
The officials — Higgins, Charles Range, and Tom Clark — couldn’t hear themselves think. This game was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. If a bad call ended up deciding it, Higgins said, “We would have lived with the infamy of that forever. You work your whole life to get there, and if it blows up in your face it’s your worst nightmare.”
Pitino called time-out and ordered up full-court pressure and a defender, Feldhaus, on the inbounder, Grant Hill. Hurley broke free to receive Hill’s pass in the near corner, then quickly found Laettner downcourt, where a strong drive into the lane was met by a Mashburn foul — his fifth. The Kentucky sophomore had fouled out with 28 points and 10 rebounds and a legion of new admirers, leaving the game in the hands of the Wildcat seniors. The Unforgettables.
Laettner sank both free throws. Duke 102, Kentucky 101. Pitino called time-out with 7.8 seconds left, after his team crossed midcourt. With Mashburn out, the Kentucky coach called on his most productive Unforgettable — Woods, who had 19 points and 9 assists while going toe-to-toe with Hurley (22 points, 10 assists). Farmer inbounded to Woods, who dribbled to his right and watched as Pelphrey obliterated Hurley on a barely legal screen. Liberated from the Duke point guard, Woods attacked Laettner with his dribble near the foul line and then launched himself into the air, one-handing the ball over the center’s outstretched arms and sending Kentucky’s bench and fans into a state of delirium.
Laettner and his teammates immediately signaled for a time-out, wasting not even a tenth of a second; they were coached by a West Point man after all. But the situation was beyond grim. Thomas Hill thought to himself, “Oh man, there’s no way we’re going to win.” Mark Williams, senior team manager, looked down at his classmate and good friend Davis, whose head was sunk low. I can’t believe we’re not going to the Final Four in my senior year, Williams told himself. One of the managers handed Krzyzewski his dry-erase board and a marker.
