Coach k, p.3
Coach K, page 3
Krzyzewski was dating Larry Kusch’s next-door neighbor, Betty Smietana. Mick never lacked for female attention, much to the dismay of his father William, who didn’t want his boy distracted. “I don’t want my son dating any girls,” he told friends. Mick impressed the girls anyway with his athleticism and an appealing sense of humor that he inherited from his mother, the family’s answer to Lucille Ball. “Every Columbo girl in my group had a crush on him at some point,” said Linda Wolczyz, who did not date Krzyzewski. “He just knew what to say and how to say it.”
Mike was a class officer for three years, a member of the National Honor Society and French Club for two, and the Sock Hop Committee for one. If something troubled Krzyzewski in his personal life, he would turn to his geometry teacher, Father Francis Rog. They would talk in the cafeteria about life and about faith. “He explained things in a way which made me feel less guilty about just being human,” Krzyzewski explained. He later told Moe that during his time at Weber he thought of becoming a priest. “Father Rog and he would talk about that,” Mlynski said. “Mick always wanted to be a teacher, and to help people, and he thought maybe that was a way.”
Krzyzewski knew he wanted to impact others the way Father Rog and Coach O had impacted him. While he tried to figure out his precise calling, Krzyzewski tore up the Catholic League, to the delight of packed and chaotic Weber crowds of about 1,500, sometimes up to 2,000, in the same gym that held Friday assemblies and Mass and sock hops. The Red Horde was always one of the best-conditioned teams around. More disciplinarian and motivator than master strategist, Ostrowski made Krzyzewski and his teammates run laps around the court, upstairs to the second level, across the bleachers, and back down again when they didn’t listen to his instructions, which wasn’t often.
Krzyzewski, Kleinschmidt, and Len Koplitz led the Red Horde to a 13-2 record in its nonleague (“exhibition”) season before rolling through the North Section of the Catholic League, a rough-and-tumble league shaped by Big Ten physicality and an unwritten code that called for hard fouls on ball handlers who ventured into the paint. Krzyzewski routinely delivered more than 20 points per night as he chased a second consecutive Catholic League scoring title. He scored 27 in a convincing victory over St. Philip, avenging Weber’s only league defeat, and was chiefly responsible for the eight-game winning streak Weber carried into its second game with Loyola.
On that Friday night, February 26, 1965, Krzyzewski put on a show at the best possible time in front of a crowd at Loyola that, the Weber News reported, included more Red Horde fans than Ramblers fans. Loyola was up 12 in the third quarter before Weber cut it to 5 for the start of the fourth. As was his habit in these situations, Krzyzewski took control of the game, scoring 18 of his 33 points in the final quarter to give Weber a 69–58 victory and, of greater consequence, the North Section championship.
“This may be the last time Mike Krzyzewski will play against us,” Loyola coach Gene Sullivan said afterward, “but from what I’ve seen tonight, I’ve seen enough of him to last me the rest of my life.”
Krzyzewski had worked so long and so hard for this moment. Sometimes when practicing by himself, Mike bounced the ball against the Weber gym wall to simulate a teammate throwing him a pass, and then counted down the seconds in his head before taking and making a shot to win the North Section title. He now owned that title. He now had scored more than 1,000 points in his varsity career. The school paper described him as “poetry in motion,” and “the best basketball player in the history of Weber High School.” Coach O praised his point guard’s leadership and wondered if people understood “the excellence of Mike as a person.” He said that Krzyzewski had a chance someday to play pro ball.
The Catholic League playoffs called for the top seeds from the North and South Sections to cross over and play the second-place teams from the opposite section, meaning Weber would be paired against Mount Carmel, an opponent it had already beaten twice in the exhibition season. The Weber boys felt good about their prospects as they entered DePaul University’s Alumni Hall on Saturday, March 13, excited to compete in a big-time college environment. But on this night Krzyzewski would learn for the first time the unforgiving reality of sudden-death March basketball.
Mount Carmel’s Tom Kilmartin, a six-foot-three senior, scored his team’s first three baskets and out of nowhere had the game of his young life, sinking shot after shot from the corner as Weber struggled to recover. The Red Horde trailed virtually the entire night, stunning many in the crowd of 4,100, including Moe Mlynski, who watched Mount Carmel’s defenders successfully double-team Krzyzewski. “They just changed their whole defense to stop him,” Moe said. “Weber wasn’t able to adjust.”
As soon as Mike helped cut the deficit to 51–45, Kilmartin, who would finish with 27 points, responded with a few more baskets to build an insurmountable lead. It was a big upset, by a large margin. The 73–56 victory sent Mount Carmel to a Catholic League final it would ultimately win.
“Weber’s Mike Krzyzewski, who paced the Catholic League in scoring, had another good night, with 22 points,” read one newspaper account. “But he didn’t get enough help from his teammates.”
Ostrowski and his players were gutted by the shocking end to their season. Krzyzewski had tears in his eyes when he walked out of the arena with Mlynski, who had never seen his friend more upset over a loss. “He was so distraught,” Moe said. It was a tough way for a decorated player to go out.
Krzyzewski still hoped to find a major college interested in an average-size point guard with a jump shot, a willingness to play defense, and an ability to work around his lack of superior foot speed. At the same time, a twenty-four-year-old rookie head coach at Army needed to find athletes willing to be pushed beyond their physical and emotional limits while forming a team that could beat far more talented opponents.
Robert Montgomery Knight was talking to the Loyola coach, Sullivan, who identified the Weber star as the Catholic League’s finest player, and Knight made an appointment to meet with Krzyzewski in Weber’s cafeteria. When the sit-down happened, Mike’s teammates couldn’t help but stare.
At six five, Knight had been a large presence as a bit player on Ohio State’s 1960 national championship team. Now the second-youngest major college coach in America, he was only six years older than Krzyzewski, who was already certain of three things in life: (1) He wanted to become a high school coach; (2) he wanted to become a high school teacher; and (3) he wanted absolutely no part of serving in the Army. Mike had no knowledge or understanding of the military academy and preferred to keep it that way.
But Knight was already a developing force of nature, and when he met with William and Emily Krzyzewski as well as Mike that night, he made a compelling case for West Point. Emily and William had labored for so long for the kind of distinguished families that sent their sons to West Point, and now here was the military academy’s representative sitting before them and recruiting one of their own.
Emily and William were very different personalities and played very different roles in Mike’s life. Emily was the one who sat him down before he attended Weber and told him, “I want to make sure you get on the right bus.” Mike assured his mother that he knew the route, including Division to Grand. “Michael,” Emily responded, “that’s not what I’m talking about.” She always called him Michael when she had something profound to say. “Tomorrow you’re going to meet new people,” Emily continued. “You’re going to get on a different journey. The bus that you drive, make sure that it’s the right one. Make sure that you only let good people on it. And if you get on someone else’s bus, make sure it’s with someone who’s good.” It was the best advice young Krzyzewski ever received.
With a smile, Emily would ask her son, “What are you going to do when you grow up and stop playing basketball?” Emily was always there for Mike; she attended his games (sometimes without telling him) and lavished him with praise when he returned home. Her husband was just as proud of Mike, though he was too busy working to go to the games or to spend any quality time with him. “He talked about me a lot,” Mike would say, “but hardly ever to me. I knew my dad loved me. He just let me have my freedom.”
When William was done as an elevator operator, he would open a small restaurant in Chicago’s factory district to serve the city’s laborers, and then a tavern on the South Side; neither venture did much to elevate his family’s financial standing. William worked, and worked, and worked some more, then came home and smoked cigarettes before falling asleep in his favorite chair. He would rise early to start another workday, usually with a very strong cup of coffee. Mike’s teammates and closest Columbos didn’t know anything about his father for a good reason — Mike didn’t know much about him either.
William did teach Mike a valuable lesson when he was a young boy, after Mike sneaked into his parents’ bedroom and pulled some coins out of the pants his dad always draped over the back of a chair. When William asked Mike if he had lifted the money, Mike denied it, but later confessed. William told his son that he had taken and spent a coin that carried sentimental value for him, and that he was very disappointed in him for stealing and lying. Mike long remembered how his father’s disapproval made him feel: “It set me on a path where I knew I never wanted to feel that way again.”
More than anything, William and Emily shared the same fierce devotion to their sons and spent whatever extra money they could save on their Catholic educations. Emily owned only two dresses, and she didn’t see the need to spend money on a third. Those dresses were always spotless and perfectly ironed — West Point style — as they hung in her closet.
As they were finishing up their chat with Knight, William Krzyzewski, who hadn’t said much that night, turned to his son and announced, “Well, Mike, I think West Point is where you ought to go to school.” This was a dream come true for Mike’s parents: William had changed his name to mask his family’s identity and background, and he simply could not believe that the military academy, a symbol of American might, wanted a Krzyzewski.
He also could not believe his son’s response to the offer of a free education at such an elite institution. “I don’t want to be a soldier,” Mike told his parents. He didn’t want to carry a rifle, and he didn’t think Army was the right place to make the transition into a career in teaching and coaching. Mike said no to Coach Knight, hoping to land a scholarship at one of a handful of Division I schools that had shown interest, including Wisconsin of the Big Ten and Creighton, a Jesuit university in Nebraska.
Emily and William were not giving up that easily. “I can’t believe he’s not taking this opportunity,” they repeatedly said to each other. They spent two weeks ripping into their younger son in kitchen-table conversations they conducted in Polish, loud enough for Mike to hear in the living room. Occasionally, just so their boy got the point, they would blurt out in English, “Stupid Mike!”
Stupid Mike leaned on Coach O for guidance. “Mike and his mother came to our home, sat at the kitchen table, uncertain where Mike should go,” Ostrowski said. “And as his coach, I knew Army was the best choice. He reluctantly took my advice.”
It was a turbulent time in the country, a year and a half after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Congress had just passed the Voting Rights Act, designed to end discrimination against African Americans in the voting process. The nation’s involvement in Vietnam was growing; President Lyndon Johnson was about to call for another 50,000 ground troops to be sent there, and he would soon double the number of men to be drafted, up to 35,000 per month.
Some of the Columbos were more concerned than Mick was about the war and his postgrad military commitment. American Marines were only weeks away from engaging in the first major ground battle of the war, Operation Starlite, on the Van Tuong Peninsula, where U.S. forces would win a fierce firefight lasting days. And yet Emily and William were equal parts exhilarated and relieved when their son changed his mind and committed to the military academy. (Coach Knight liked to spin the five-year commitment to active duty as a guarantee of employment after graduation.)
When Mike went to inform his best friend of his choice, the two sat on Moe’s fence near the schoolyard, the same fence where Columbos often hung out late on Friday nights.
Moe had no idea where West Point was located. “Isn’t that where all the presidents go to school?” he’d asked Mike earlier, after Knight first showed interest. When Mike told him that he would be a cadet after all, Moe was taken aback, but excited for his friend. “He was coming out of the neighborhood,” Mlynski said, “and doing something big.”
Whatever Mick ended up doing, he would do it as a Krzyzewski, not a Kross. Some of his cousins had changed their name, just as his father had done. (The English translation of “Krzyz” is “Cross.”) But when he was a kid visiting his Uncle Joe, a Chicago cop, at Christmastime, Joe would greet him at the door and ask, “What’s your name?” Mike would always answer, “Krzyzewski,” and his uncle would respond, “Don’t you forget it. I want you to be proud of who you are, your heritage . . . Don’t change your name.”
All the old-timers in the community were proud of Mick, proud that he didn’t give an inch to a society that often mocked the Polish and their descendants. They were proud that Mick would represent them at a world-class academy, among the very best young men America had to offer.
Meanwhile, Vivian Przybylo felt badly for Mick’s girlfriend Betty. Krzyzewski was sitting outside Betty’s apartment with her neighbor, Larry Kusch, whose mother had just signed a contract to sell their home. The Kusches were moving to a place 10 miles from their cherished neighborhood, and as the three of them sat there talking, Larry felt the weight of the moment.
“We all had our own angst about it,” he said. The neighborhood was changing, the world was changing, and Krzyzewski was leaving Betty and the Columbos and the rest of his friends to go to a place that seemed a million miles away.
“On that day Mick told us he was going to West Point,” Kusch said, “I thought, ‘This is going to be the end of us.’”
The end of innocence on the North Side of Chicago. And for Mike Krzyzewski, the beginning of a long-term partnership with a volatile genius.
2
Coach Knight
ON JULY 1, 1965, Mike Krzyzewski marched straight into the living hell known as Beast Barracks. This is what they call cadet basic training at West Point, and for the 1,200 entering freshmen, or “plebes,” at the all-male United States Military Academy, the exercise was best described as the opposite of what their high school classmates were doing all summer — chasing girls, playing ball, and drinking cold beer on the nearest beach or bay.
Beast Barracks, or Beast, was designed to turn a boy into a man by breaking him down physically, psychologically, and emotionally, and then building him back up into an officer and warrior who could someday manage any life-or-death crisis he might face in some faraway land. For the better part of two months, the plebes were deprogrammed and forced to embrace a new normal that their bodies and minds begged them to reject. From sunup to sundown, from Reveille at 6 a.m. until Taps at 10 p.m., they were verbally humiliated by superiors and limited to only three acceptable responses: (1) “Yes sir,” (2) “No sir,” and (3) “No excuse, sir.” The plebes were told that one out of every three of them would not make it to graduation day. The freshmen who thought that West Point would be, in the words of one recruit, “an advanced Boy Scout camp” never stood a chance.
As an incoming cadet most interested in playing basketball, Krzyzewski knew right away that he’d had it much better with the punitive priests back at Weber High. Their heads shaved, their uniforms perfectly pressed, the new cadets were required to walk briskly — with erect posture and eyes trained straight ahead — as they robotically squared off every hallway and stairwell they encountered on post. They were also required to have full command of what was called plebe knowledge. The plebes had to memorize a mind-numbing series of trivial facts — the items on a daily menu, the number of gallons in Lusk Reservoir (92.2 million), the number of lights in Cullum Hall (340), the number of days until Army beat the hell out of Navy in football, you name it — and recite those facts to upperclassmen without advance warning.
Rising above the west bank of the Hudson River in all its gray Gothic glory, West Point inspired fear in all plebes. Older cadets were forever shouting spittle directly into the faces of new cadets, barely an inch away from nose-to-nose contact, while correcting the most benign and incidental errors. Plebes were berated if their brass belt buckles weren’t fully polished, or if they had failed to spit-shine their boots and shoes. (The toes and heels received particular scrutiny from the upperclassmen.) The plebes had to practice bracing, or pulling back their chins until they disappeared under their wrinkled gullets, to enhance their posture. They even had to practice bracing while eating, which one cadet described as a fate worse than death.
The plebes were required to collect the older cadets’ laundry and mail, among other things, while enduring day after day of marching, weapon training, tactical drills, and calisthenics. Misconduct could lead to room confinement, or to a one-hour punishment tour spent walking back and forth across the Central Area. Violations of the Honor Code (“A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do”) could result in immediate expulsion. Plebes were not permitted to quit the academy on their own until three weeks had passed, though Krzyzewski, like many of his classmates, thought of quitting as much as he thought about anything.
