After 42 years at Duke, what will Mike Krzyzewski remember most?
The players, the national championships? Coaching against Dean, Jimmy V, Lefty, Roy and outlasting them all? A night at an Atlanta Denny’s in 1983? His last game?
There were the dark days in 1995 when he had to step aside as head coach, done in by the after-effects of back surgery and exhaustion, maybe unsettled by thoughts of how Jim Valvano, the father of three daughters, once had it all as a college coach and won a national championship with N.C. State and was dead of cancer at 47, gone too soon.
Coach K came back. He won three more national titles and finished with more than 1,200 career wins. He and his wife Mickie and their three daughters and 10 grandchildren had a lot to celebrate, including one last ACC regular-season title in 2022 and one last Final Four appearance.
While hard to pick and choose Coach K’s most memorable moments, here are a few:
The introduction of Coach K
Wait a minute, say that again. Was that “Kree-shef-ski”? With two z’s in it?
Tom Butters, the Duke athletic director, was introducing his new basketball coach and that’s the way he said it. That had to be right, most thought, and the new coach even smiled and spelled out his name that day for the media. And about that 9-17 record at Army that season ...
It was March 18, 1980. Bill Foster was gone after coaching the Blue Devils to the 1980 ACC title and the Bob Knight protege was the new guy at Duke. “There is no doubt in my mind that Mike is the brightest young coaching talent in America,” Butters said at the press conference.
Who could have known that when the new guy, then just 33, retired at Duke he would be the old guy. That’s K-R-Z-Y-Z ...
The shot from Christian Laettner
There was bedlam all around the Duke huddle in the Philadelphia Spectrum when Krzyzewski calmly collected his players at the bench during a timeout, looked them in the eyes, and told them they were going to win. Then, showed them how.
Grant Hill would make a long inbounds pass to Christian Laettner. That part of the mission completed, Laettner would catch, turn, shoot and score. Duke would win. That simple.
No one called it The Shot, not then on March 28, 1992. That hype would come later. But Laettner’s shot fell and so did the Kentucky Wildcats in the NCAA tournament. Duke, with the 104-103 overtime win, was on its way to the 1992 Final Four to secure a second straight national championship.
One thing they teach cadets at West Point: poise under pressure. The head coach, West Point ‘69, had it in that moment, which was as important to the Blue Devils in that huddle as Laettner’s shot proved to be.
The game vs. UNLV for a title
No one was going to beat UNLV. That was the prevailing thought before the 1991 Final Four. Duke was there but the Runnin’ Rebels, who rolled into Indianapolis undefeated, had rudely disposed of the Blue Devils in the 1990 title game.
But Duke’s Brian Davis made a prophetic point in the days before the Final Four. In ‘90, he said, the Blue Devils had one day to prepare for UNLV after winning in the semifinals. “Give Coach K a week to get a game plan ready ...” he said, a glint in his eyes, in an N&O interview before leaving for Indy.
“This Duke team works harder and is tougher,” Davis said. “We’re not afraid to put our hearts on the line.”
The Blue Devils were ready and the Runnin’ Rebs crumbled in a close game. Laettner was the Duke star but Davis had a huge three-point play late in the 79-77 victory. Krzyzewski had gotten the better of UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian on the sport’s biggest stage and two nights later Duke had its first national championship.
Eight years after a 109-66 loss to Virginia in the ACC tournament in Atlanta, the cause of a late-night jaunt to Denny’s, the Blue Devils were on top of college basketball, holding up the trophy.
The book about leadership
Donald T. Phillips had authored books on the leadership skills of such figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. But a college basketball coach?
It was April 1999 when Phillips met Krzyzewski for the first time. “There were two things he said to me that first day I’ll never forget,” Phillips told the N&O in 2001. “He said, ‘I’m a teacher and a coach,’ and ‘I think of my mom every day of my life.’ That told me a lot about the man.”
They met for the next six weeks as Coach K talked for hours at a time as he recovered from hip-replacement surgery. The book was “Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies of Basketball, Business, and Life” and the work on it was therapeutic, Mickie Krzyzewski said in a 2001 interview with the N&O.
“Writing the book, thinking of what he stood for, what leadership was all about, only reaffirmed why he was a coach and why he wanted to continue to coach,” she said. “It was reaffirming. It’s as if Mike inspired himself.”
Said Phillips: “The book almost seemed like a process of renewal for him. I remember thinking, ‘Once this man is fully healthy, he’s going to be on fire.’ “
The letter to a lifelong friend
They were so close they might have been the brotherhood before there was the Brotherhood at Duke. The Columbos, as they called themselves, were the neighborhood Polish kids in Chicago. “Mickey,” as they called Krzyzewski, and the others once played and roamed the schoolyard at Christoper Columbus Elementary until their moms called them home.
While living their own lives, they never drifted too far apart, remaining life-long friends as decades passed. They also marveled at how Mickey went to West Point and became one of the nation’s best coaches.
Krzyzewski, in an N&O interview, once told the story of how the Columbos liked to wrestle. Mickey might play the heavy of say, a Killer Kowalski. Larry “Twams” Kusch might be a Buddy Rogers and Dennis “Moe” Mlynski would be Antonino Rocca. They even made championship belts for the winners like the pro wrestlers of the times.
After Duke won its first title, Krzyzewski’s office was flooded with letters. One, in particular, caught his eye, he said. And put a tear in his eye.
It read: “You probably don’t know what your notoriety has meant to the people back home, to the Columbos. Your exploits have served as a focal point to which we all are drawn. It’s a chance to put our nose-to-the-butt lives on hold and to rekindle old friendships while rooting for Mickey. ... So with six seconds left before your first national championship, I turned toward the rest of our group and realized the tears of joy in {their} eyes were mirroring my own. What’s clear is that after all these years, even though we have gone in different directions, we’re all still pulling for one another.”
After reading the letter aloud, Krzyzewski smiled. “It’s signed, ‘Columbos forever,’” he said. “And there’s a P.S.: ‘Porky wants to set a cage match — your trophy against our belts.’
Folding the letter, Mickey said, “Friendships are the best.”
The farewell from the Final Four
No, it is not the way Krzyzewski would have scripted it. Maybe the part about winning 16 ACC games or reaching the Final Four, but not the rest.
He didn’t want to lose his last game at Cameron Indoor Stadium and certainly not to North Carolina. He didn’t want to lose to North Carolina again in the national semifinals, although a close loss in a tough game against a very good team in the Final Four was in no way disgraceful, rivalry or not.
But think about the sendoff: Thirty-two wins, an ACC regular-season title and a Final Four appearance. Would Coach K have settled for that when he first announced that this season would be his last? One has to think he would. He left on his own terms, as college basketball’s biggest winner, his legacy intact.
He also left with a touch of humor, sitting on the back of a golf cart with his wife, Mickie. Once asked years ago if Duke was rightly ranked in the national polls, Krzyzewski replied, “I’m the only Pole that counts.” He has always been sneaky funny and he had a good parting line in New Orleans after the loss to UNC.
Spotting some media, Krzyzewski said, “Maybe you can superimpose a sunset” as the cart started to pull away at the Superdome, Mike and Mickie smiling, holding hands as always, a moment not to be forgotten.
