The Legends Club Read online

  Nonfiction by John Feinstein

  Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball

  One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game

  The Classic Palmer

  Moment of Glory: The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf

  Are You Kidding Me?

  Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember

  Tales from Q School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major

  Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four

  Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL

  Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game

  Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story

  Open: Inside the Ropes at Bethpage Black

  The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever

  A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour

  The Last Amateurs: Playing for Glory and Honor in Division I College Basketball

  The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf’s Holy Grail

  The First Coming: Tiger Woods: Master or Martyr?

  A March to Madness

  A Civil War: Army vs. Navy

  Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball

  Hard Courts: Real Life on the Professional Tennis Tours

  Forever’s Team

  A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball

  A Season on the Brink

  Copyright © 2016 by John Feinstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover photograph © Aksonov / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Feinstein, John.

  Title: The legends club Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an epic college basketball rivalry / John Feinstein.

  Description: First edition. New York : Doubleday, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015029890 ISBN 9780385539418 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385539425 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Basketball coaches—United States—Biography. Basketball teams—North Carolina—History. Sports rivalries—North Carolina—History. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Basketball—History. Duke University—Basketball—History. North Carolina State University—Basketball—History.

  Classification: LCC GV884.A1 F45 2016 DDC 796.3230922—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015029890

  eBook ISBN 9780385539425

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Nonfiction by John Feinstein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  This is for Ken Denlinger, who taught me about college hoops, journalism, and life.

  INTRODUCTION

  In a very real sense, this book was born on February 28, 1976—Dean Smith’s forty-fifth birthday.

  It was on that afternoon that a very nervous reporter from Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, timidly introduced himself to the great man in a corner of the North Carolina locker room in Carmichael Auditorium. North Carolina had just finished beating Duke, 91–71, dropping Duke’s record to 13–13.

  The outcome wasn’t a surprise. Carolina was ranked fourth in the country and had run away with the ACC regular season title, finishing 11–1. The Tar Heels were 24–2 and had four players on their roster who would be on the U.S. Olympic team—coached by Dean Smith—that summer: Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis, Tommy LaGarde, and the great Phil Ford.

  Duke had Tate Armstrong.

  Who was my excuse to talk to Dean Smith.

  Armstrong had been lighting up ACC gyms all winter, a one-man show on a struggling team. Duke coach Bill Foster was in his second season, trying to rebuild the fallen Duke program. Armstrong had just finished his freshman season when Foster arrived and was now a junior. Armstrong did have some help from a superb freshman named Jim Spanarkel, but the Blue Devils were overmatched in the ACC—as their 3–9 conference record proved.

  For the season, Armstrong was averaging 24.2 points per game—making an astounding 52 percent of his shots. That was with no three-point shot and no shot clock, and with other teams gearing their defenses to stop him. He was a slender six foot two and spent as much time on the floor after being knocked down as he did in his shooting motion. He had scored 29 points that day against Carolina. I was going to write a column making the case that if ever a player from a team that finished seventh in a seven-team conference deserved consideration for player of the year, it was Armstrong. I might have been just a tad biased.

  Smith was talking to another writer when I walked up. When he finished the conversation he’d been having, he looked at me as if to say, “And?” Finding my voice somewhere, I said, “Coach Smith, my name is John Feinstein and I work for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper…”

  I had my hand out as I spoke and Smith shook it, stopping me before I could go further by saying, “I know who you are. I read the column you wrote last month saying that Bill [Foster] should copy some of what we do here to rebuild over at Duke. I thought you were very fair to us…for someone from Duke.”

  I had been more than fair. I had been gushy. But that wasn’t the point. I was standing in front of Dean Smith and he was telling me he had read something I had written.

  I was, to put it mildly, stunned. As I’ve written often in the past, it was later that I learned that the North Carolina basketball office subscribed to every newspaper in North Carolina—the major national papers and all the student newspapers in the ACC. An assistant coach was assigned to comb through the papers and clip anything relevant to Carolina for Smith to read. He would put the clips in his briefcase and read them on airplanes.

  Still stunned, I somehow got my question out about Armstrong. I’m not sure he ever answered it. Instead, he talked about how proud he was of Ford and Davis, but especially John Kuester, for the defensive job they’d done that day on Armstrong—even if he had scored almost half of Duke’s points. Somewhere in the middle of the answer he asked me where I’d grown up. I said New York.

  “City?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess that explains why you understand basketball.”

  Do you think he completely owned me at that
moment?

  I asked one more question. Early in the game, when it was still close, a couple of calls had gone against Carolina. Some of the students had started a profane chant. It didn’t last very long, because Smith walked straight to the scorer’s table, took the PA microphone, pointed in the direction of the students, and said, “Stop. Now. We don’t do that here. We win with class at Carolina.”

  They stopped. Instantly.

  When I asked about the incident, he smiled again. “I was disappointed that happened,” he said. “It won’t happen here again.” Then he added, “We’re not Duke.”

  And, at that moment, Duke was miles and miles from being North Carolina.

  —

  If the book was born on that day in 1976, it began to take form in March of 1980 when, in a nine-day period, Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski to replace Bill Foster as basketball coach and North Carolina State hired Jim Valvano to replace Norman Sloan in the same capacity.

  Sloan and Foster had each had considerable success: Sloan had won a national championship in 1974 and Foster had taken Duke to the national title game in 1978. But the Aura of Dean had driven both men away—Foster to South Carolina, Sloan to Florida. The two men who succeeded them were kids in the coaching profession—Valvano, thirty-four; Krzyzewski thirty-three. They had coached against each other at Iona and Army, both New York–area schools that were about five hundred miles and worlds away from North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Neither had any clue about what the ACC was like or how important Dean Smith was in their new home state.

  “If Jimmy and I had landed in a spaceship from Mars instead of on airplanes from New York, we couldn’t possibly have had less understanding of what an icon Dean was,” Krzyzewski said years later. “We both thought we did. We knew Carolina was very good every year, but we had no clue.” He shook his head. “I mean, no clue.”

  They learned quickly—and, in some ways, painfully. Valvano tried to take Smith on with humor, and to some degree it worked. Winning a national championship in 1983 worked better. Krzyzewski confronted Smith head-on from the beginning, challenging him first by trying to make it clear to the world he wouldn’t back down from him. As with Valvano, he learned that good players and good teams were far more effective.

  Valvano, as it turned out, was the hare—dashing ahead with remarkable speed when he first arrived at N.C. State, not only with the national championship but with his completely unbridled personality. Krzyzewski, watching from twenty-five miles away, could only shake his head watching the Valvano rocket ship take off.

  “Being honest, I didn’t like him at the time,” he said. “Or, at the very least, I didn’t want to be like him.” He smiled. “Of course, being completely honest, I couldn’t have been like him if I had wanted to be. There was no one else like him.”

  Krzyzewski was the tortoise, at least compared to Valvano’s speed-of-light personality, plodding along, working relentlessly, never losing sight of his goal, which was to build a long-term winner at Duke. Slowly but surely he put together one of the great dynasties in college basketball history. He caught—and passed—Valvano. Amazingly, years later, he caught—and passed—Smith.

  And, in 2015, he was still going, having become an icon much the way Smith was an icon. The only real difference I suppose is that a college junior walking around the Duke locker room today isn’t likely to encounter Krzyzewski standing off in a corner. But if he did, and if he happened to ask about Smith or Valvano, there would be a remarkable story to be told.

  —

  Which is why I wanted to write this book.

  I wasn’t born to write it, but I lived it. I was working for The Washington Post when Krzyzewski and Valvano first landed in North Carolina. By then, I knew all three men. I had met Krzyzewski and Valvano at the exact same moment during my senior year, and after arriving at the Post, I had written about Smith every chance I got.

  In December of 1976 Duke was playing Connecticut (an insignificant game between two insignificant teams in those days) at Madison Square Garden, and as a sports editor of The Chronicle I had flown to New York with Bill Foster, Tate Armstrong, and Duke’s sports information director, Tom Mickle.

  Mickle was bringing Foster and Armstrong in a day early to do some media interviews and I tagged along because it was an excuse to go home for a couple of days. We went straight from the airport to the weekly writers’ lunch at Mamma Leone’s, a famous Italian restaurant on the West Side of Manhattan. The restaurant has now been closed for more than twenty years, but in 1976 it was still one of the tourist stops in the city.

  When we walked in, St. John’s coach Lou Carnesecca was talking. The last thing he said was, “I don’t want to go too long because I know you’re all here to listen to Jimmy.”

  Valvano always went last, even though Carnesecca coached the most popular and important team in the city and Valvano coached at Iona, the Christian Brothers school in Westchester that ranked behind Fordham, Seton Hall, and Rutgers in the college hoops pantheon in the New York area. In fact, Columbia and Army had been higher on the totem pole in the not-too-distant past.

  But when it came to the weekly lunches, Valvano was Sinatra and everyone else was the opening act.

  Valvano spoke for twenty-five minutes. By the time he was finished—as was the case every week—people were literally holding their sides because they were laughing so hard. He made fun of everyone in the room, including Foster—who had coached him at Rutgers.

  When he was finished, Valvano came over to see his old coach—we’d walked in a few minutes late—dragging two of his coaching friends with him: Army’s Mike Krzyzewski and Columbia’s Tom Penders.

  I remembered Krzyzewski as a player because the Bob Knight–coached Army teams he played on were invited to the NIT—which in those days was played entirely in Madison Square Garden—in both 1968 and 1969. In fact, I vividly remembered Krzyzewski shutting down South Carolina’s All-American guard John Roche in a stunning upset in the quarterfinals in 1969.

  After the introductions, I mentioned that game to Krzyzewski. “You were there?” he said, a big smile on his face. “You must have grown up here then, right?”

  That led to a conversation about the differences in growing up in New York compared to Chicago—Krzyzewski’s hometown. I remember Valvano jumping in to talk about being a Yankees fan. I admitted to being a Mets fan, which drew a dirty look from Krzyzewski—a Cubs fan who remembered the 1969 baseball season not as fondly as the 1969 basketball season.

  Valvano was thirty, Krzyzewski was twenty-nine—not that much older than I was. I liked them both instantly. Little did I know how much they would become a part of my life during the next ten years.

  —

  I had always wanted to write a book about Dean Smith—almost from the day I first met him. I found him fascinating: brilliant, driven, generous, manipulative, protective, private, and challenging—always challenging. Dean never gave up anything without a fight.

  I’ve written often in the past about the story I wrote about him for The Washington Post in 1981. It took me two years to convince him to grant me the kind of lengthy interview I needed to write the kind of profile I wanted to write.

  Dean always said no to those requests. He even turned down the great Frank Deford when Deford wanted to profile him for Sports Illustrated. Every time I brought it up, Dean would wave a hand—often with a cigarette in it in those days—and say, “Write about the players.”

  Finally, with the ACC Tournament scheduled to be played in Washington in March of 1981, I decided this was the time to find a way to make Dean talk.

  I was fortunate that Rick Brewer, Carolina’s longtime sports information director, was on my side. Rick’s been a friend of mine since I was in college, and to this day, among the millions who do Dean imitations, Rick probably does the best one. Rick set up a meeting between Dean and me in Dean’s hotel room in Charlottesville on a Friday evening, the day before Carolina played Virginia and Ralph Sampson.

 
; Carolina always stays at the best hotel whenever it travels. When other ACC teams went to College Park to play Maryland, they would stay at the Holiday Inn on Route 1 or the Greenbelt Marriott. Carolina always stayed at the Watergate. In New York, it was the Essex House or the Plaza.

  In Charlottesville, it was the Boar’s Head Inn. Rick and I walked in to find Dean on the phone to the front desk.

  “I need someone to come in here and get the fireplace going,” he said. “I don’t know how to do it.”

  I realized at that moment that Dean and I had something in common: complete incompetence when it came to making things work. A few years later, I was working in the office at the Post on ACC Media Day and needed to track Dean down. I asked my friend Keith Drum if he would give Dean the Post’s 800 number and ask him to call me. When Keith found Dean and handed him the number, Dean didn’t ask him what I wanted to talk to him about, the way most coaches would. Instead he said, “I’m not sure I know how to dial an eight-hundred number.”

  He was serious.

  Dean, Rick, and I sat down while the guy got the fireplace started. I made my pitch. Dean said I should write about the players.

  “I’ve written about the players,” I said. “I want to write about you. I’m going to write about you one way or the other.”

  At that moment Dean looked at me and said, “I hear you do me pretty well.”

  Classic Dean misdirection. Like everyone in the ACC, I imitated Dean.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Rick’s better.”

  Dean looked at Brewer and, in that classic, high-pitched, flat midwestern, nasally tone, said in a very surprised voice: “Rick, do you do me?”