On the day after Thanksgiving, 1983, I sat in the second row
behind the bench of the college basketball team of a struggling
program that had won just 38 of 85 games in the coach’s first
three years at the program’s helm. It was the team’s opening game
of the season, a season the experts did not expect to be special.
Because of the holiday, the arena wasn’t entirely packed. And I
was just a visitor — the sports editor of the Georgetown HOYA
newspaper, at the beginning of a season where my Hoyas would win
the national championship, visiting a friend who played on this
other college’s golf team. With my standards high because of the
talent of my Patrick Ewing-led Hoyas, and fully prepared to be
underwhelmed by the team in front of me that evening, I settled
into my seat expecting to see nothing more than a ho-hum game
played by two merely fair-to-middling teams.
Instead, what I saw was the start of a dynasty. This young
coach with a West Point background, an undistinguished record,
and the unpronounceable name of Krzyzewski had a young team that
played with hustle and muscle, uncommon grit, fierce discipline,
and a blue-collar work ethic. A forward named Danny Meagher was a
bruising junior, while a freshman point guard named Tommy Amaker
dished the ball to a hard-working Jay Bilas, a smooth Mark
Alarie, swingman David Henderson off the bench, and especially a
dazzling fellow guard named Johnny Dawkins whom my golfing friend
told me played a strong game of Stratego. The arena, the
now-famed Cameron Indoor, was intimate and delightfully raucous.
During the timeouts, I could hear Coach K-whathisname’s raspy
voice, full of intensity, exhorting his team to hustle, pass, and
think. The game was a barn-burning nail-biter (sorry for the
clichés), with Dawkins scoring from all over the court en route
to (if I remember correctly) 28 points. And Duke’s Blue Devils
finally burned opponent Vanderbilt in overtime, 78-74. The game
would start an eight-game win streak (and 14 out of 15) to open a
season that would see Krzyzewski make it to the NCAA tourney for
the first time in his life as either a player or coach.
And I came away a fan for life of Duke basketball (behind
of course my Hoyas and my hometown Tulane Green Wave), impressed
by their technical soundness, their work ethic, and their coach
who had served as an Army officer and who, I would learn,
insisted (as did the Hoyas’ John Thompson) that his players
actually go to class and earn degrees.
Two seasons years later, that same group of players (with
Danny Ferry replacing the graduated Meagher) led the Blue Devils
to an epic championship game battle with (and gut-wrenching loss
to) the Louisville Cardinals of “Never Nervous” Pervis Ellison,
in Coach K’s first Final Four. I was actually on Duke’s campus
again for my only other visit, on spring break, at a campus event
featuring Otis Day and the Knights (of Animal House
fame) singing “Shout” just as midnight ushered in my birthday,
when Alarie and a couple of the other players entered the concert
hall to a heroes’ welcome after having just returned to campus
from their successful game earlier in the day to reach the Sweet
Sixteen. But the way I remember it, Alarie and company didn’t act
like typical BMOCs who thought the adulation was their
birthright, but instead sort of waved sheepishly to the applause
as they walked in before trying (unsuccessfully) to disappear
into the crowd.
Good guys, those. Amaker, Dawkins, and Henderson, among
others, went on to college head coaching careers (as did later
point guard Quin Snyder, whose first name alone clearly is a mark
of distinction!) Bilas is a classy and astute presence on ESPN
hoops broadcasts. A number of later players (Christian Laettner
notwithstanding), especially Grant Hill, were the epitome of
sportsmanship. And Duke did the world the favor of upending the
heavily favored, utterly renegade UNLV squad of Jerry Tarkanian
in the Final Four en route to Coach K’s first-ever national
championship in 1991.
All of which leads me to wonder: Why is Duke basketball so
widely hated? What is there not to like? They beat bad guys like
UNLV. Their players really are students. Their program isn’t
corrupt. They play ball the right way, with sound fundamentals.
They work, they are disciplined, they hustle. They earn their
stripes. They stress excellence. Most of their graduates become
solid citizens. (Take Bilas, for example. In addition to
broadcasting, he is a practicing lawyer of the right sort; he
leads several major charitable endeavors, and he had the gumption
early on to buck the Duke administration by offering strong,
unambiguous support for the falsely accused Duke lacrosse
players.)
Their coach does all sorts of good works. He is an Army
man. He’s a patriot. He credits his opponents. He has a wonderful
family. And he almost always votes Republican.
Now he has won the fourth national title of his tenure,
along with four runner-up finishes and three other Final Four
appearances. Sure, his team did it by beating a admirable group
of overachieving underdogs, a Butler squad that plays the most
technically sound and effective defense I have ever seen (and
that includes all the great Hoya defenses under the elder John
Thompson). Sure (as Wilt Chamberlain said), it’s easy to hate
Goliath, and Duke has become a Goliath of sorts of college
basketball. But none of that should detract from the sheer
impressiveness not just of the Duke/Coach K record, nor from the
integrity with which they have achieved it.
These are conservative cultural values, these values of
successful hard work, that Duke epitomizes. We should admire
Butler, certainly, but we should celebrate Duke’s program and its
victory. Coach K did not inherit a great program; he built it
from scratch. He started as the comparatively poor-boy made good,
up by his bootstraps, beating a Vanderbilt. It’s the American
way. And it’s very, very much a way to admire and to like.
