Coach k, p.45
Coach K, page 45
Smith was in the room when Krzyzewski gave his speech. “It wasn’t a script,” the assistant said. “It was almost like he wanted to talk to me. He wanted to talk to someone. He just talked.”
Looking straight into the camera, Krzyzewski talked on the video for two minutes and forty-seven seconds. And this is what the most successful and recognizable figure in the history of college basketball said:
Black lives matter. Say it. Can’t you say it? Black lives matter. We should be saying it every day. It’s not political, this is not a political statement. It’s a human rights statement. It’s a fairness statement. Over the last couple of months, I have had an opportunity to see more, to listen more, to think more, and to understand at a deeper level. So have you. Yeah, so have you. And do we not see the problem, the disease, the plague, that has been with our country for four centuries? Do we not see systemic racism and social injustice? Come on, we all see that, it’s manifested in so many ways. Criminal justice, the killings that we have seen and that we haven’t seen. And the denial of economic opportunities for our Black community. Educational opportunities, health care, it’s manifested in so many ways, and has been there for four centuries. You know, we see that, and what do we do when we see it? We talk, all right, but we turn the other way. We don’t solve the problem. The problem will not be solved. And no problem is solved unless you acknowledge the problem. Acknowledge it. If you acknowledge it, you have the duty to solve it. We as a country have the duty to solve this problem. When I was a cadet at West Point — and the prayer is still there — there’s a cadet prayer. In the cadet prayer, one of the segments of the prayer says, “Lord, help me choose the harder right. Help me choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.” We as a country have chosen the easier wrong for four centuries. It is time to choose the harder right. It is time to end systemic racism and social injustice. It’s time. Black lives matter.
When the taping was done, Krzyzewski turned to Smith and asked, “How was that?” The assistant told him it was perfect. “I just wanted to talk to the camera,” Coach K said. “I wanted to talk to America.” The video was circulated on June 26, and Smith started receiving texts not just from his fellow former Duke players but also from young men who had competed for North Carolina, Georgetown, you name it.
“We knew Coach felt that way,” Nate James said, “and a lot of people who believe what he felt and what he said, they don’t always get the opportunity to express it. But he did it. He actually let the world know how he felt . . . and that showed anyone who ever put on a uniform for him, that he had our backs. It is different out here for Black men, and for people who you look up to like Coach K, when they have our back and let us know he’s with us, it just solidified what we already knew. We were just very proud of him for doing that.”
FAMILY. MIKE KRZYZEWSKI was always talking about family. On his final Zoom conference call with reporters of the 2020–2021 season, Krzyzewski interrupted a question from columnist Jim Sumner to express his condolences over the recent passing of the writer’s ninety-three-year-old father Ernest, an Army veteran and a Yankees fan born the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. He asked Sumner how he was holding up.
“God bless your family,” Coach K said. “I hope you comfort one another . . . I forgot your question. I was concerned about you, and I’m seventy-four. So, what game did we just play?”
Duke had just beaten a solid Louisville team by 14 points to advance to the ACC Tournament quarterfinals in a Greensboro Coliseum left empty by the Covid-19 pandemic. It had been a miserable season on all fronts; the victory gave the Blue Devils a 13-11 record and kept them barely alive for an NCAA Tournament berth. As the tenth seed, its lowest ACC Tournament seed ever, Duke would have to upset Florida State and then perhaps win the semifinal to secure an at-large berth and avoid missing the NCAAs for the first time since 1995.
Assuming the Blue Devils’ Covid-19 tests kept coming back negative.
On the Zoom call, the camera appeared to be six inches from his face. Krzyzewski looked like a disembodied head. He sounded like a coach who felt that his team had finally figured it out in the nick of time. He talked about using the defense he called “Eleven” against Louisville, a switching man-to-man he’d used with past teams, and he seemed pleased and a bit surprised that it actually worked with this one.
But as he got up to leave his Zoom holding cell and exit the call, Krzyzewski moved the conversation back to family. “Again, Jim, our thoughts and prayers are with you, okay?” he said.
Coach K had spent a lifetime turning his basketball program into a family operation, honoring a bygone promise he had made to Mickie when taking the West Point job in 1975. His oldest daughter, Debbie, had been a fundraiser since 2002 and was now an assistant director of athletics and director of the Legacy Fund. Lindy, who had earned her master’s in clinical psychology at Pepperdine, was working as a team counselor. Jamie, the youngest, was an author who served on the board of directors of the Emily K Center and had written two books with her father.
Mickie was not as involved in the program as she used to be, but she was still a chief advisor — and a concerned fan when it came to a certain Blue Devil at the bottom of the roster, Debbie’s son Michael Savarino. “The first time a grandmother has given me a hard time about playing time,” Krzyzewski said.
Mickie hadn’t only influenced many of her husband’s basketball decisions over the years; she had moved him a bit to the left of his long-standing Republican views, a shift also inspired by his antipathy toward President Trump, whom he described as “the only person in our country who’s not accountable to anybody.” An angry Krzyzewski later called for the prosecution of everyone involved in the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “People say that’s not who we are — that is who we are right now,” he said. “It is who we are. We need to change who we are. We need to get back to the basic principles that have founded this country.”
Krzyzewski made that call after returning from a quarantine that forced him to miss Duke’s victory over Boston College; his daughter Debbie and seventeen-year-old granddaughter Emmie had tested positive for the Covid-19 virus and had taken ill. “It’s not going away,” Krzyzewski said after coaching the Blue Devils to a victory over Wake Forest. “They are doing okay but not great. My heart goes out to everyone out there who has a family member or they are fighting this. It’s serious. We’ve had 16,000 people die the last four days. I’m just happy that we have such a good medical center and medical people to take care of us.”
Coach K had continued to test negative for the virus through the morning of the Wake Forest game, when staff from Duke’s testing partner, Mako Medical, arrived at his home at 5:45 a.m. to collect a sample that came back negative after 8:30 a.m. and liberated him to coach that night.
The pandemic took a heavy personal and professional toll on Coach K. In December, after suffering uncharacteristic home losses to nonconference opponents Michigan State and Illinois, Krzyzewski questioned the wisdom of playing on through a pandemic that was still killing and hospitalizing Americans at a terrifying rate. Concerned about the safety and the mental and physical health of players and staff, he felt it was time “to assess where we’re at. We’re just plowing through this.
“People are saying the next six weeks are going to be the worst. To me, it’s already pretty bad. On the other side of it, there are these vaccines that are coming out. By the end of the month, 20 million vaccine shots will be given. By the end of January or in February, another 100 million. Should we not reassess that? See just what would be best?”
The entire season was an unholy mess for Krzyzewski, who endured three separate three-game losing streaks in the conference. The Blue Devils suddenly looked like all the ACC teams they used to beat. They were undisciplined and unable to execute in the closing minutes of tight games. An increasingly frustrated Krzyzewski watched the whole thing devolve while wearing his mask, about the only thing that could keep his profane temper in check.
The season was best captured by an off-the-court exchange on January 23, following a road loss to Louisville. A student reporter from The Chronicle asked the coach how the team planned to move forward after its third straight loss.
“Why don’t we just evaluate the game,” Krzyzewski sniped. “I’m not into what our next step forward is right now. We just finished a hard-fought game. I don’t know when . . . What’s your major?”
Coach K waited a moment for a response from the student reporter, Jake Piazza, before asking again.
“What’s your major at Duke?”
Awkward silence again.
“What’s your hardest class?”
“Econ,” Piazza said.
“Okay,” Krzyzewski continued. “So say you just had the toughest econ test in the world, and when you walked out, somebody asked you, ‘What’s your next step?’ You see what I mean? Does that . . . you have some empathy. Just give us time to evaluate this game and then we’ll figure out just like we always try to do, what the next step will be. The next step is obviously to prepare for Georgia Tech. How we prepare for them, that’s what we’re going to have to figure out.”
As the exchange went viral, Krzyzewski was roasted for his lack of grace in defeat, and for taking out his frustrations on a Duke student reporter, though not as loudly and profanely as he’d taken out his frustrations on the Chronicle sports staff more than thirty years earlier. Piazza would write in The Chronicle that Coach K called him with what sounded like a genuine apology, though the reporter noted that the call was short. All these years later, Krzyzewski still had trouble saying he was sorry.
After Krzyzewski received his second Pfizer vaccination shot in early February, he said, he got “knocked back” for six or seven hours the following day, then was good to go the rest of the season. Probably underpaid at a reported $7 million a pop — given what he had meant over the years to Duke fundraising, Duke applications, Duke branding, Duke everything — Krzyzewski really had to earn his money just to keep the Blue Devils afloat. They had played one of their best games of the year against Louisville in the conference tournament and felt good about their chances of upsetting Florida State and possibly earning an NCAA bid.
And then the news: a Duke walk-on had tested positive for Covid-19, and that was that. Contact tracing protocols forced the Blue Devils to withdraw from the ACC Tournament and ended their season.
Krzyzewski put his stamp on it with this statement: “While our season was different than any other that I can remember, I loved the 2020–21 Duke Basketball team and was honored to be their coach. We have not asked more of any team in our history, and they deserve enormous credit for handling everything like the outstanding young men they are . . . As many safeguards as we implemented, no one is immune to this terrible virus.”
The coming off-season would hurt. Krzyzewski would lose his top two players, underclassmen Matthew Hurt and DJ Steward, who declared for the NBA draft, following the in-season departure of Jalen Johnson, who was expected to be a lottery pick. And just like every other major college team, the Blue Devils would also lose some players through the transfer portal. Of greater consequence, seven-foot center Mark Williams, who had 23 points and 19 rebounds against Louisville, decided to return to play with another heralded Krzyzewski recruiting class headlined by six-foot-nine Paolo Banchero of Seattle, rated as the number-two prospect in America.
But the most important Duke returnee was obvious — a veteran point guard who would turn seventy-five years old in February. Krzyzewski was not about to retire after a season from hell. His heart was still very much in the pursuit of a sixth national title, and yet at the same time, after forty-one years at Duke, that heart was telling him that he was actually in alignment with his young players.
Coach K was ready to tell the world he had finally become a one-and-done.
WEARING A MASK, a blue suit, and a Duke button on his left lapel, his hair not quite as black as it used to be, Mike Krzyzewski appeared from behind a dark curtain inside Cameron Indoor Stadium while holding Mickie’s hand.
At his introductory press conference in 1980, when he jokingly thanked the one person who clapped when he approached the podium, the new coach had felt compelled to spell his name for reporters. Now his retirement press conference was being broadcast on national TV and taking place on a basketball court named after him.
Krzyzewski hugged Mickie, stepped up to the podium, and removed his mask while family members in the audience danced to “Everytime We Touch.” Coach K briefly pumped his arms to the music, then clapped along with the non-journalists in the crowd while social media lit up with comments about how bizarre it was that the seventy-four-year-old began his farewell presser with a Cascada dance tune from 2006. Those Twitter users were not familiar with the Cameron Crazies’ pregame tradition of warming up to that song.
Coach K took his seat and nodded and pointed at his daughters, their husbands, and his ten grandchildren. He had been talking with Mickie about this for years, and the two finally agreed on a recent vacation in Las Vegas that he should coach one more season at Duke — his forty-second — and then never coach again. Krzyzewski held a Zoom call with his three daughters in April. “It wasn’t to ask them what they thought,” said one Duke source. “It was telling them, ‘Here’s the plan.’ The decision was already made.”
Not everyone was in favor of an announcement like this one, which would naturally set up Duke’s 2021–2022 season as a running celebration of all things Krzyzewski. Chris Spatola thought a farewell tour, or victory tour, would take a lot out of his father-in-law while he was trying to lead the Blue Devils to another championship. Krzyzewski countered that he couldn’t in good faith keep his decision a secret while he was recruiting the next class of prospects.
On April 12, a couple of days after informing his daughters, Coach K informed assistants Jon Scheyer, Chris Carrawell, and Nolan Smith in the conference room outside his sixth-floor office. Carrawell, who was about to be promoted to associate head coach, was not surprised by the news. He was happy for Krzyzewski and glad that the coach had chosen not to end his career with the miserable season just completed.
“We’ve got the next head coach in this room,” Carrawell blurted. Krzyzewski seemed to be caught off guard by the comment, and so did the man Carrawell was talking about — Scheyer. “I shoot from the hip,” Carrawell said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.” It seemed to work this time. Krzyzewski looked at Scheyer and asked, “What do you think about what C-Well just said? Would you want to do that?” Scheyer responded that he would. “I think you’d be terrific,” Coach K said.
Carrawell thought that Scheyer, who is white, would succeed in part “because he’s proven he can recruit African American kids, and maintain relationships with them.” Scheyer had helped Duke win a national title as a player (2010) and as an assistant (2015). Better yet, he was from the Chicago area, and like Krzyzewski when he was hired by Duke, Scheyer was thirty-three years old. Coach K wanted this to happen. He wanted Scheyer to replace him.
Jon Jackson, deputy director of athletics and Krzyzewski’s senior communications aide, ran a search committee that included university officials Chris Kennedy, Troy Austin, and incoming athletic director Nina King. The committee worked in concert with an outside search firm, Collegiate Sports Associates. But as the search unfolded and candidates were interviewed by Zoom, it became clear that the Duke administration, led by President Vincent Price, wanted to hire Harvard coach Tommy Amaker, Krzyzewski’s former player and assistant. Sources maintained that Duke informed Amaker the job was his if he wanted it.
It seemed a no-brainer for the former Michigan and Seton Hall coach who had been about as close to Krzyzewski as any member of the Duke family, and who, after fourteen years in the Ivy League, might not get another crack at the big time. But there was a problem, a big one: Coach K did not want Amaker to get the job.
Krzyzewski embraced the West Point article of faith that identified “continuity of excellence” as an essential part of a succession plan. That continuity was easier to find in Scheyer, who had been on the Blue Devils’ staff since 2014, than in the fifty-five-year-old Amaker, who had left Duke in 1997. Control was everything to Krzyzewski, who planned to remain in his office in retirement as a school ambassador and de facto coach emeritus while two of his daughters continued working in the department. Coach K would have some control through Scheyer, who had never been a head coach and owed his mentor everything, and not so much through Amaker, who had his own way of running a program and had been gone from Durham for a quarter century.
So Krzyzewski arranged a Zoom call with the Harvard coach and had what a source described as “a very difficult conversation” with him. Amaker mistakenly thought he would receive his mentor’s blessing. Coach K explained that if he left Harvard and joined the Duke staff for the 2021–2022 season as the appointed successor-in-waiting, he would force the demotion of another Blue Devils assistant and create an awkward dynamic with Scheyer. “Mike had to explain to Tommy why he couldn’t be the guy,” said one Duke source. “He can be Don Corleone when he needs to be.”
Amaker was heartbroken, according to someone close to him. He had a great situation at Harvard, where he had built the premier Ivy League program and where his wife, Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, worked as an assistant professor at the university’s medical school and as a senior executive at McLean Hospital. But still, this was Duke. This was Amaker’s school. This was the biggest college basketball job in the country. This was succeeding a legend among legends.
Amaker could have said the hell with it and taken the job against Krzyzewski’s wishes, but he ultimately decided that would be a mistake. “How was Tommy going to feel if Coach K was walking into his practice every other day?” asked one source close to the situation. Though Duke had made Nina King only the third African American female athletic director in a Power Five conference, the university missed an opportunity to hire a highly qualified Black candidate for its most visible position, a truth not lost on some former Black players.
