Getting to Us Read online

  It was March 30, 1991, when the Duke Blue Devils pulled off what was considered one of the greatest upsets in NCAA Tournament history by knocking off unbeaten and top-ranked UNLV in the Final Four, 79–77. When the game ended, the Duke players celebrated deliriously. But when CBS showed Krzyzewski on the sideline, he was standing there with that trademark pissed-off look on his face. His arms were extended, his hands were out, his palms were down. He motioned up and down as if to tell his guys to knock it off.

  It came across as a spontaneous gesture, but Krzyzewski told me it was actually premeditated. That was the fifth time he had taken his team to the Final Four, and in each of the previous trips the Blue Devils had fallen short of the championship—including the year before, when that same UNLV team had embarrassed Duke by 30 points in the final. While that didn’t eat away at him the way many assumed, he did puzzle on why his teams hadn’t won. He arrived at a single word: rationalization. “I thought maybe, not consciously, I was rationalizing that getting there was enough,” he said. So before the game began, Krzyzewski decided that if Duke pulled off the win, he would not show any signs of celebration and insist his players do the same.

  It is hard to imagine almost any other coach reacting to that moment in that way. It resulted from some hard-earned knowledge, and it revealed Krzyzewski’s persistence and authenticity. As for his empathy, well, let’s go back a little further to an off-camera moment I witnessed up close. It occurred during my freshman year at Duke. I was standing in the student section of Cameron Indoor Stadium a few rows behind the home team’s bench. It was early in the season, and Krzyzewski saw something he didn’t like from his prized 6´10˝ freshman forward, Christian Laettner. So he yanked Laettner from the game, knelt in front of him on the Duke bench, and delivered a blistering, profane message just inches from his face.

  I was taken aback by the force of Krzyzewski’s anger. I sure was glad it wasn’t being directed at me. Though we’ve since come to know Laettner as a supremely arrogant athlete, at the time he was just a callow freshman. As Krzyzewski took his own seat at the head of the bench, Laettner dropped his head.

  “Christian!” Krzyzewski yelled. “Keep your head up! Learn from your mistakes!”

  That is how Krzyzewski coaches his guys—from the inside out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like a lot of great basketball coaches, Krzyzewski was naturally gifted at math when he was a boy. Words, however, did not come easy. His first language was the argot of the inner city, with a lot of yo’s and head nods and a healthy dose of curse words. But really it came down to how his mind worked—or rather, how it didn’t work. He strongly suspects that if he had been tested as a child, he would have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. “I had ants in my pants all the time. Still do,” he says. When he did his homework, he needed distractions around him—the radio, for example, or a television tuned to a Cubs game. To this day, Krzyzewski is not much of a reader. “For me, reading is not a joy,” he says. “I’d rather listen to a book on tape.”

  His parents were not helpful in this department. His dad didn’t say much to begin with. He worked, he came home, he smoked his cigarettes, he fell asleep in his chair . . . and that was pretty much it. When I asked Krzyzewski to tell me what his father was like, he replied, “I wish I could tell you about him. I didn’t really know my dad, not because he was bad to me or anything. He just worked all the time. He was very supportive of me, but he wasn’t like, ‘Let’s sit down and have father-son talks.’”

  It fell to his mother, Emily, to give him his empathetic foundation. She was an avatar of feminine strength. He remembers how meticulously she took care of their home, how even though she had only two dresses in her closet, they were always clean and ironed and hung with care. When she baked cookies, she put exactly three chips in each one. If they didn’t turn out right, she threw away the entire batch. “I’m like a lot of kids in the inner city growing up in ethnic families,” Krzyzewski says. “You got to know your mother better because she was home.”

  His older brother, Bill, was bigger and stronger, but Mike was the superior athlete, especially at basketball. He attended two all-boys Catholic schools, St. Helen for elementary and Weber for high school. During his junior and senior years at Weber, he led Chicago’s Catholic League in scoring and drew interest from a few Division I colleges. Creighton and Wisconsin offered him scholarships, and Mike figured they were good options. But his exploits as a student and a player caught the attention of an assistant coach at Army named Bob Knight. When Knight visited Mike’s home in December of 1965, the coach was twenty-five years old and just four years removed from being a reserve on the 1960 NCAA champs at Ohio State.

  As far as Mike was concerned, Knight was wasting his time. If he went to West Point, he would have to serve in the U.S. Army for five full years after he was through playing. Mike had no interest in that. Besides, in his mind there was something traitorous about going that far from home to attend such an elite school. He worried his buddies in the neighborhood would think he was putting on airs.

  His parents were flabbergasted. They had two years of high school between them. His father had changed his name just to get some menial jobs and provide a living for his family. He had even served in the Army under his anglicized name. What little money they made was spent to send their boys to private schools. Now here was Uncle Sam himself, in their living room, offering their son a first-class education and a place in the American tapestry . . . and Mike was turning it down? It was inconceivable.

  William and Emily were not the type to express their disapproval to Mike, so they chose to express it near him. They sat in their kitchen and talked about how dumb he was to pass this up. They talked and talked until they finally wore him down. It was a lesson in persuasion that he would carry into his career as a coach. “I believe in ethnic pressure,” Mike says. “They believed in me, and they believed in opportunity. They invested in my education. I trusted them because I loved them. Turning down West Point was the best decision I never made.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sitting in Krzyzewski’s office at Duke more than fifty years later, I asked him if there was ever a point during his time at Army when he wanted to quit. He sat up and looked at me incredulously. “Point?” he said. “There were hundreds of points. But I couldn’t quit, because I couldn’t let my parents down.”

  Playing for the tyrannical Knight was the least of Mike’s problems. His days as a first-year plebe started early, ended late, and were filled with orders to do things he couldn’t. Each time he failed, he was berated by an upperclass cadet. One of the first things they made him do was jump into a swimming pool. He was a city kid who had no idea how to swim. Krzyzewski struggled, but he didn’t drown. It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t fair.

  “I was a golden boy in my neighborhood. I only did things I was good at,” he told me. “Then all of a sudden I’m at West Point and there are a lot of really good people and you have to do new things. And you look like crap. I found out two things. These are rock solid in my foundation. Failure is not a destination, and you’re never going to do it alone.”

  As challenging as the environment was, it also served as a cocoon that sealed Krzyzewski off from the tumult that was engulfing the country in the late 1960s. The Vietnam War was raging, and though Krzyzewski knew a few older students who were killed, he had little inkling of the extent to which the war was tearing the country apart. “We were kind of isolated,” he recalls. “We didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. It would be pretty hard to be in that environment if you did.” His only window into what was happening occurred during weekend visits to New York City. He and his fellow cadets felt out of place but not necessarily uncomfortable. “Here we had skin heads, and everyone else has long hair and they’re smoking pot and burning incense. It was two extremes,” he says. “I didn’t feel like we hated those
people, but it was like, Man, they’re weird.”

  Krzyzewski knew he had to give the Army five years after he graduated, but he didn’t put much thought into what that would entail. He was too focused on basketball. He worked hard to please his coach, mostly by heeding his instructions to shoot the ball only when he absolutely had to. He and Knight had their battles, but Krzyzewski’s hard-nosed defense, resilience, and natural leadership skills made him the ideal Bob Knight point guard. Knight named him captain at the start of his senior year, but when the team lost five consecutive games in December and January, Krzyzewski could sense everything coming apart. Yet he persisted, leading the team to a 14–8 record and a berth in the postseason National Invitation Tournament, where he led Army to the semifinals in Madison Square Garden. The Black Knights lost to Boston College that night, but Krzyzewski never forgot how intoxicating it was to play a basketball game on such a grand stage.

  His most searing memory of that season, however, came on March 1, 1969. Shortly after leading his team to a win at Navy, Krzyzewski got a phone call from home reporting that his father had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He and Knight rushed to the airport and flew to Chicago, but by the time they landed, William was dead. Knight stayed in Chicago for a few days, holding Emily’s hand and consoling her as they sat at their kitchen table. Knight stood by his point guard as his father was lowered into the ground. Since William was a veteran, his tombstone was paid for by the Army. It displayed the name Kross because that’s what William used when he served. A few years later, Emily purchased a new tombstone and put Krzyzewski on it. It was his name, after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  June 4, 1969, was not just Krzyzewski’s graduation day. It was also his wedding day. Just a few hours after receiving his diploma, he and Mickie Marsh were married in the Catholic chapel at West Point. She was a Baptist from Virginia who was living in Chicago while working as a stewardess for United Airlines when she and Mike met at a mutual friend’s apartment in the summer of 1967. She was, as she puts it, “one hundred percent WASP, plain old nothing,” who never new about ethnic pressure until she met her new boyfriend’s family. “I was a complete outsider,” she says. “His dad was the only one that openly accepted me. He liked that I could talk sports. I had to win my way with everyone else. His mom was the last one to come around.”

  There were two things that attracted her to Mike: his muscular legs and his authenticity. Shortly after Mike returned to West Point, he wrote Mickie a letter inviting her to go to a Chicago Bears game with him during his next visit home. She accepted, and when she expressed her pleasure at being invited, he confessed that he had asked another girl first.

  “So I was your second choice?” Mickie asked.

  “Actually,” Mike replied, “you were my third.”

  A year later, she was transferred to New York City, which gave her the opportunity to spend time with Mike on his weekend visits. One day, he took her to the airport so she could work a Detroit turnaround. She invited him to sneak onto the plane, which would be easy since there were plenty of seats and she was the one taking boarding passes. He declined her offer, saying it wasn’t honorable. Just before the plane took off, Mike walked on board and handed her a ticket he had just purchased.

  Following graduation, Mike trained to be a field artillery officer, first at Fort Sill in Oklahoma for six months, and later at Fort Carson in Colorado for another two years. His name was on a list of potential candidates to be deployed to Vietnam, but his basketball skills, which were good enough that he was considered a possible candidate to play for the U.S. Olympic team, kept him from being sent into combat. Instead, he was deployed to Korea, where he worked in the field liaison office at Camp Pelham and played for the All-Army team, which played against American and international military teams all over the world, from San Francisco to Lebanon to Iraq. “I guess there are people who love being in combat. I would have done it out of duty, but I’m glad I didn’t have to,” he says. “Look, I didn’t want to go to Vietnam—especially then. There’s five minutes to go in the game and you’re not gonna win. We’re getting the hell out of there. I didn’t want to go in the game.”

  Krzyzewski’s stint in Korea was supposed to be a hardship tour, meaning no family was allowed, but Mickie came anyway for the last three months. She stayed a few miles away at a recreation center, where she and their eighteen-month-old daughter, Debbie, slept in a supply room. After his tour was up, Krzyzewski was transferred to work as a basketball coach at a prep school in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He had done a little bit of coaching in the past, but this was the first time he had tried doing it full-time, and he loved it. When his Army commission ended in 1974, Mickie assumed they would live the life of a career officer and his family, which promised long-term financial stability. Her husband, however, surprised her by saying he wanted to take a job as an unpaid graduate assistant at Indiana University, where his former college coach, Bob Knight, had just been hired. Mickie tried to talk him out of it, but when Mike told her it was something he had to do, she knew the battle was lost.

  After just one year in Bloomington, Mike interviewed for the head coaching position at Army, which had fired its coach following a 3–22 season. Mickie was not thrilled that her husband wanted to pursue this profession, but she was especially concerned about returning to the then-all-male world of West Point. Her only request was that he wouldn’t tell her she couldn’t go somewhere (aside from the players’ locker room) because women weren’t allowed. He promised her he never would, and he never did.

  * * *

  • • •

  There are moments when even the most persistent of men feel broken. For Mike Krzyzewski, that moment came after a game on December 12, 1981, when he cried alone in a shower.

  It was early in his second season at Duke. His team had just lost, 72–55, at Princeton. Its record was now 1–4, with an unforgiving ACC schedule on tap. Krzyzewski swears he never doubted his ability, never believed he was in real danger of losing his job, but on that night he was truly daunted by just how far his team had to climb. “Losing to Princeton isn’t good, but you can’t lose like that,” he told me. “You have to have your moments of weakness, but not in front of a group, and not in front of your family. Those building years are very lonely, but out of it, I think, comes toughness.”

  Duke had a respectable program, but it had long been relegated to second-tier status in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The school’s previous coach, Bill Foster, had resigned to accept the head job at South Carolina, even though he was two years from having taken the Blue Devils to the NCAA championship game. Duke’s athletic director, Tom Butters, interviewed Krzyzewski largely on Knight’s recommendation, but given that Krzyzewski was an unknown commodity whose team had just gone 9–17, Butters had a hard time pulling the trigger. After weeks of hemming and hawing, he finally introduced Krzyzewski to the press, which was taken completely off guard.

  In Krzyzewski’s first season at the helm, the Blue Devils went 17–13, but that was with Foster’s players. His real test would come in how he recruited—and he failed spectacularly. Krzyzewski and his staff had scoured the country and come up with a long list of prospects. By the time they got to the end of the recruiting season, they had narrowed it down to five players, including Chris Mullin, a 6´6˝ sharpshooter from Brooklyn. Mullin chose St. John’s, which was not a huge surprise, but one by one, the other recruits spurned Krzyzewski as well. One prospect, Rodney Williams, was supposed to announce his commitment to Duke at his high school team’s postseason banquet. Krzyzewski flew to Florida to speak at the banquet, but when he pulled up to the school, Williams’s coach apologized and informed him that Williams had just signed with Florida—and he wouldn’t even be at the banquet. Krzyzewski spoke anyway. He had promised he would.

  As a result, Krzyzewski altered his recruiting philosophy. Instead of beginning with a long list of candidates, he would
narrow it down right away to just a few choices, and then recruit those players with intensity. It was the professional equivalent of jumping into a pool without knowing how to swim, but Krzyzewski trusted he would make it out alive. That has been his modus operandi ever since. “I think that’s kept us on the cutting edge,” he says. “You kind of back yourself into a corner and say, ‘We gotta get this guy.’”

  By the fall of 1981, Krzyzewski had his targets. The most talented among them was Johnny Dawkins, a wispy 6´2˝ point guard from Washington, D.C. Dawkins had no idea who Krzyzewski was, but he was taken with the coach’s vision. He eventually gave Krzyzewski his commitment.

  Dave Henderson also had no idea who Mike Krzyzewski was—and he lived in North Carolina. Curious as to what this new coach was all about, Henderson attended a game in Cameron Indoor Stadium to watch Duke play Wake Forest. During one exchange, a Duke player was bumped by the Wake Forest coach. It was probably accidental, but Krzyzewski went ballistic on the referees. “I saw that and I thought that this is a guy I could play for,” Henderson says. “I liked how he defended his player.”

  Not only did Jay Bilas not know who Krzyzewski was, he barely knew what Duke was. But he realized how badly Krzyzewski wanted him the day the coach flew across the country just to watch Bilas play in a light practice on a blacktop outside his school in Rolling Hills, California. Bilas soon committed, as did Mark Alarie, a 6´7˝ forward from Phoenix who chose Duke over Stanford. “He was just different from any other coach that was recruiting me,” Alarie says. “While he was talking to me, he would literally have goosebumps on his arms and legs. He was so much more passionate than any other coach who came into my living room and made a pitch.”

  The new arrivals might have been prized freshmen, but they were still freshmen, and as they set out for the 1982–83 season, they often looked like boys playing against grown men. The Blue Devils lost four straight games in early December, and they were later humiliated at home when they lost to Wagner, 84–77, to fall to 5–5. As the players walked off the court, they could hear fans lean over the railings and shout obscenities at their coach.