Getting to Us Read online

  As the losses piled up, so too did the talk that Krzyzewski was on his way out. Bilas was friendly with a female student whose father was a prominent member of the program’s booster club, the Iron Dukes. One day she showed him a petition of signatures calling for both Krzyzewski and the football coach to be fired. “I don’t know what was going on in the administration building at the time, but we definitely talked about how worried we were,” Bilas says. “It was like, ‘What are we going to do?’ The only reason I came to Duke was because of the coach.”

  If the treatment from Duke’s own fans was this bad, imagine what opposing fans were saying. Duke is a small private school (the enrollment is under 5,000) that draws much of its student population from outside the state. It sits between two large state institutions that play in the ACC, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State. Krzyzewski and his family learned early on that they had alighted behind enemy lines. “Our girls took a beating at school,” Mickie says. “It was pretty brutal.”

  The season ended in ignominious fashion, with a 109–66 annihilation by a Ralph Sampson–led Virginia team in the first round of the 1982 ACC Tournament. After the game, Mickie walked into the Duke hospitality room at the team hotel and stumbled upon a group of Iron Dukes—at that point they were calling themselves the Concerned Iron Dukes—talking about how they could persuade Butters to fire her husband. Later that night, Krzyzewski went to dinner with a couple of Duke staffers as well as a young Washington Post reporter named John Feinstein. When one of the staffers raised a glass of water and toasted to “forgetting about tonight,” Krzyzewski raised his own and said, “Here’s to never forgetting about tonight.”

  The comment sounded like a reference to the game, but Krzyzewski was really talking about the larger forces that were conspiring against him, challenging his ethnic pride. “It was just, ‘Excuse me, fuck you, man. We’re gonna do this,’” he says. “I got angry at the people who wanted to get rid of me. I used that anger properly. There are still people that I have nothing to do with, who now want to cuddle up and say, ‘We believed in you.’ No you didn’t.”

  He was wounded, but he would persist. When Alarie, Bilas, Dawkins, and Henderson took the floor for the first day of practice the following October, they looked up at the scoreboard. The numbers 109–66 were on display, just in case they had forgotten.

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  • • •

  By the time the 1983–84 season got under way, Mike and Mickie had added two more girls to their home roster. Lindy came along in April 1977; Jamie was born four years later. Krzyzewski’s home environment provided quite the contrast with his work one. Raising three girls broadened his empathy. “He had to learn to communicate in a softer way,” Mickie says. “He was constantly surprised when he said the wrong thing. It made him think, Why was that wrong? Why did she accept that in that way?”

  Unlike many coaches in high-pressure situations, Krzyzewski did not rigidly separate his work and family lives. Mickie had roles in the program that played to her creativity, such as producing the official team poster and season-ending video tributes to the seniors. Staff meetings and film sessions were held at his house. His wife and girls hung around the offices and rode the team bus. The players came to refer to Jamie as “Mo Minutes” because they deduced that if they let her sit on their lap, they would get more playing time. “We never felt that basketball was taking him away from us,” Jamie said. “This wasn’t his thing. It was our thing.”

  Unfortunately, growing up Krzyzewski meant being subjected to a lot of cruel taunts. This was especially difficult after North Carolina won the NCAA championship in 1982, delivering a first title for its longtime legendary coach, Dean Smith. The specter of Smith and North Carolina presented Krzyzewski with an enormous challenge. The campuses were just eight miles apart. He didn’t want his players to make their games against UNC more important than any others, yet denying that was literally like asking them not to notice the color of the sky. His frustrations boiled over in January 1984, when, with four minutes to play during a taut game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, Smith tried to get the referees’ attention so he could make a substitution. When that failed, he walked to the scorer’s table and attempted to sound the horn. Instead, he accidentally added 20 points to North Carolina’s tally on the scoreboard. It took a few minutes to fix the score, and play resumed. Amazingly, Smith was never assessed a technical foul. After the game, which Duke lost, 78–73, Krzyzewski went into his postgame press conference and complained about what he called the “double standard” in the ACC that unfairly benefited Smith.

  Five days later, Duke lost at home to N.C. State. It was the Blue Devils’ fourth consecutive defeat and dropped them to 1–4 in the conference. The howls from the Concerned Iron Dukes had never been louder. The next morning, Krzyzewski arrived at work and learned that his boss, Tom Butters, wanted to see him. Krzyzewski had every reason to worry he might be getting fired, but Butters instead presented him with a five-year contract extension. As the players boarded the bus to play at Clemson the next day, Krzyzewski let them know about his new deal. His job status was never spoken of again.

  Krzyzewski immediately validated Butters’s move by leading his team on an eight-game win streak. To outsiders, it appeared that the team had made a sudden turnaround, but in fact the streak resulted from all the small but important ways Krzyzewski had applied his PEAK profile over time. Even in the worst moments, the players had faith in their leader’s knowledge. “I always felt we were the most prepared team,” Henderson says. Practice plans were scheduled down to the minute, but they also included notes explaining how each drill would prepare the team for its next opponent. That allowed his players to visualize the big picture. “It was like getting a West Point battle plan every day,” Alarie says. “I played a lot of basketball, including five years in the NBA, and I never had a coach that put one-tenth the elbow grease that Coach K put into every one of those practices.”

  Krzyzewski’s empathy also enabled him to help his players maintain their confidence even as they were losing. He wanted them constantly diving into pools, trusting he would never let them drown. Dawkins, for example, would get easily discouraged if he missed a few shots, but Krzyzewski insisted that he keep shooting. “A miss is not a mistake,” he would say.

  When the breakthrough came, however, Krzyzewski did not handle it authentically. It happened later that March, when he scored his first victory against North Carolina with a two-point win in the ACC Tournament semifinal. Krzyzewski had warned his players beforehand that if they won, they should not celebrate excessively. Yet as soon as the buzzer sounded, he ran onto the court and embraced Dawkins. When Dawkins reminded him of his pregame warning, Krzyzewski screamed “Fuck it!” and continued to hug him. Krzyzewski would regret it the next day when his team, emotionally spent, lost to Maryland in the final.

  After winning 23 games in 1984–85, the Blue Devils embarked on a historic season the following year. With Dawkins and his classmates now seniors, the Blue Devils started the season ranked No. 6 in the country. They won their first 16 contests, claimed the ACC championship, and entered the NCAA Tournament ranked No. 1 with a 32–2 record. Sports Illustrated put them on its cover under the headline DUKE’S THE TEAM TO BEAT. The Blue Devils fulfilled that billing by advancing to the NCAA championship game, where they lost to Louisville, 72–69. It was a painful way to end the season, but it represented a major triumph for the players, the program, and the up-and-coming coach with the hard-to-spell last name.

  * * *

  • • •

  Plenty of college basketball programs have ridden the wave of a single recruiting class, only to sink back into oblivion when those players leave. So in many respects, the real validation came the following year, when Duke won 24 games and reached the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen. In 1987–88, the Blue Devils returned to the Final Four thanks largely to junior forward Danny Ferry, wh
o was Krzyzewski’s most heralded recruit to that point. That was the first of three straight Final Four appearances, but each time the Blue Devils reached the big stage, they found ways to come up short.

  The many near misses elevated Krzyzewski to a rare and short-lived tenure as a lovable loser. He was humble, bright, well-spoken, and very funny. His players were good students as well as excellent athletes. They charmed the national press, which was all too eager to contrast them with teams like UNLV, whose players were mostly African American and were coached by Jerry Tarkanian, an avowed renegade who was always in hot water with the NCAA. Krzyzewski bristled at the blatant racial stereotyping, but it continued nonetheless.

  Looking back on those years, Krzyzewski laughs at the notion that all those trips to the Final Four without a title were weighing on him. “I used to say to my family and staff, ‘You gotta be shitting me,’” he says. “We won thirty eight games in three years. Now we get to the Final Four and because we don’t win it, someone says I’m a failure? I’ve got a monkey on my back? If I was a zookeeper, I’d want about eight more of those monkeys on my back.”

  All the near misses provided Krzyzewski with the knowledge he would need to coach his players through their upset over UNLV in the 1991 Final Four. He continued to fight off rationalization the next day, when he got all over his guys at practice for acting cocky, even though they really weren’t. His anger forced the players to maintain their edge, which propelled them to a win over Kansas on Monday night, delivering Krzyzewski his first NCAA championship.

  Almost every top player returned the following season. The Blue Devils started off as the consensus No. 1 team in America and never relinquished that ranking, even though they lost two games by a combined six points. That team was a juggernaut, and Christian Laettner was its face. With his movie-star good looks and pissy attitude, Laettner engendered all kinds of vitriol, not only from opposing crowds but also from his own teammates. Many coaches might have tried to smooth out Laettner’s rough edges, but Krzyzewski never did. Friction may be unpleasant, but it is authentic. And it warded off complacency in the locker room.

  The 1991–92 Duke Blue Devils were a team of traveling rock stars, but it looked like the party was going to end on March 28, when they were taken to overtime by a plucky Kentucky squad in the NCAA Tournament’s East Regional final in Philadelphia. After the Wildcats took a one-point lead with 2.1 seconds remaining, Duke called time out. As the players came to the huddle, their coach faced the ultimate PEAK moment. The first thing he said to them was, “We’re going to win.” That showed persistence. He took out his clipboard and designed a play calling for the team’s sophomore forward, Grant Hill, to launch a three-quarters-court pass to Laettner. “Can you throw it?” Krzyzewski asked Hill.

  “Yes,” Hill replied. This demonstrated empathy. Krzyzewski understood that Hill might be nervous, so he redirected his focus. By asking that question, he forced Hill to picture himself making that pass.

  Then Krzyzewski asked Laettner, “Can you make the shot?”

  Laettner replied, “Coach, if Grant gets me the ball, I’ll make the damn shot.”

  Laettner’s confidence was rooted in his certainty that Krzyzewski would not change who he was and what he believed because of the circumstances. It also reflected his trust in Krzyzewski’s knowledge. He knew his coach was drawing up a good play. Sure enough, Hill made a perfect pass, Laettner made the damn shot, and the following weekend the Blue Devils became the first school in nineteen years to win back-to-back NCAA championships. For all the friction in that locker room, for all expectations and the growing sense that the outside world wanted to see them come up short, the Blue Devils tapped into their ethnic pride and staked their claim in America. Krzyzewski had gotten his players to Us, and they stayed there.

  * * *

  • • •

  There would be no more sympathy for the Devils. As his teams continued to dominate the sport—two years later, Duke returned to the NCAA championship game, where it lost to Arkansas—Krzyzewski dealt with a level of celebrity and enmity that he could never have prepared for. That had implications nationally, where his team became the premier brand in college basketball, as well as locally, where he was increasingly devoting time and energy to areas that had nothing to do with basketball. He took on too much, too fast, always encumbered by the soldier’s duty to fulfill his commitments.

  His hard-charging nature took its toll in the fall of 1994, when Krzyzewski started experiencing intense pain in his lower back. For months, he refused to see a doctor, but Mickie finally talked him into going—and insisted she go with him. She was aghast when Mike downplayed the situation, saying only that his back felt “tight.” She was not pleased. “He would use euphemisms for the word pain,” Mickie says. “I finally stopped him and said, ‘Wait a minute, that is not what is happening. Tell him the truth.’”

  Krzyzewski’s doctor ordered an MRI, which revealed that the coach was indeed suffering from a herniated disc. He had surgery on October 22, but instead of heeding his doctor’s advice to take his time recovering, he was back in his office the following week. Practice had already begun, and there was no way he was going to desert his troops.

  The pain got worse. It kept him from sleeping. As the weeks went on, Mickie could see her husband slowly deteriorate. The worst was a weeklong trip over Thanksgiving to a tournament in Hawaii. Krzyzewski didn’t sleep all week, and the flights were ruinous. After he returned to Durham, things continued to worsen, but Krzyzewski would still not admit he was hurting. Grant Hill had graduated and the team was in a rebuilding season. He knew how badly his guys needed him.

  As the Blue Devils stumbled, Krzyzewski became increasingly frustrated at his inability to stem the tide. One night after he returned home late from a road game, Mickie heard him chewing himself out as he stood in the bathroom. “You compromising son of a bitch,” he barked at the man in the mirror.

  When the Blue Devils started off the ACC season with a rare loss at home to Clemson, Mickie decided the situation was truly dire. As her husband was leaving for work the day before a road game at Georgia Tech, she informed him that she had made an appointment with his doctor, and she wanted him to meet her at his office. When he started to protest, she cut him off. “If you’re not there when I show up,” she said, “don’t come home.” It was not like her to issue such wifely ultimatums—“Our relationship is not one where I am particularly hysterical around him,” she says—and she honestly didn’t know what she would do if Mike refused her. “I drove to the doctor’s office the whole time just praying he would be there,” she says. “When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw his car.”

  That very afternoon, the doctor admitted Krzyzewski to a hospital, where he was treated for pain and exhaustion. At first, the school announced that he was taking a brief leave, but it was soon clear he could not return that season. Krzyzewski, in fact, wondered whether he would ever return. Besides the physical pain, he was racked with guilt at leaving his team, which went into a hellacious tailspin under his assistant, Pete Gaudet, winning just two ACC games and failing to reach the NCAA Tournament for the first time in twelve years. As the weeks went on, Krzyzewski fell into what sounds very much like depression. He underwent daily therapy at his house with Keith Brodie, the recently retired university president who had previously been the chair of the school’s psychiatry department. Knowing that Krzyzewski wasn’t much of a reader, Brodie showed him movies he hoped would deliver a healing message. He also showed Krzyzewski video of him coaching with joy and passion, which only underscored for Krzyzewski how far he had plummeted.

  “It was more than back pain. I lost emotion. I lost feeling,” he told me. “I would watch me coach and then wonder, ‘How the hell would I do that? How the hell was I that passionate from all that?’ That’s why I offered my resignation to Butters. I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything, to be quite frank with you, and I was sick. It
was kind of like the perfect storm. But I didn’t drown, and it wasn’t because of me. It was because of the help I had.”

  The time away, combined with the therapy, allowed Krzyzewski to slowly climb out of the water. At the end of the season he held a press conference and declared himself fit to return. He changed the way he managed his time, made some adjustments to his staff so it would be younger, and dove back into recruiting with his usual energy. It took a few years, but the succession of classes produced yet another dominant season in 1998–99, when the Blue Devils, who featured two sophomore forwards, Elton Brand and Shane Battier, spent most of the season ranked No. 1. A disappointing 77–74 loss to No. 2 Connecticut in the title game did nothing to diminish Krzyzewski’s ethnic pride. “I have a hard time being sad. Sorry,” he said in his postgame press conference. “I don’t coach for winning. I coach for relationships.” Krzyzewski was widely ridiculed for the remark, but he didn’t care. He would rather people mock him than see his pain.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Bobby Hurley was a junior point guard during the 1991–92 season, Krzyzewski invited him into his office to watch some tape. Instead of seeing basketball plays, however, Hurley was treated to a spool of images showing him in various states of whinery—mouth agape, arms raised, eyes rolling, yelling at his teammates, complaining to referees. “Is this how you want your teammates to see you?” Krzyzewski asked. That meeting provided Hurley with a moment of clarity. It made him smarter and tougher, which enabled him to lead the Blue Devils to a second consecutive championship.