DURHAM, N.C. — There are moments, still, when Mike Krzyzewski walks into his top-floor office that overlooks part of Duke's campus and wonders, as he put it one day last summer, "How the hell did this happen?"
"No, really," he said.
He was surrounded by reminders of his life's work, in a building that didn't exist when he arrived in Durham 42 years ago. Now there was a Duke basketball museum on the first floor and here, five stories up, a museum of a different kind, one Krzyzewski personally curated.
Five large photographs of his teams celebrating five national championships hung high behind his desk. Old game balls and magazine covers lined the walls, along with honors from West Point and snapshots of his wife and daughters and grandchildren.
All around were odes to his most cherished people and moments, the things he loved, and for almost two hours he'd been reflecting upon some of them while attempting to keep a distance. The season was then months away and Krzyzewski insisted that once it began he'd stay in the present. There'd be no talk of the last of this or the last of that, he said. Even then, in mid-August, without a game to worry about or a practice to plan, he said he'd rather not look back.
Then he felt the pull of history.
"One more thing from me," Krzyzewski said, just as a long conversation wound down, and it was as if he had a secret to share. Perhaps he just wanted people to know that things could change, that he could change — that an old rival or nemesis could become something much more meaningful. His tone changed, too, as if he was even surprised at what he was about to say.
"Being in this area, with North Carolina State, but especially North Carolina, and our rivalry, relationship or whatever ... The friendship I eventually developed with Dean was kind of nuts."
It was an unprompted addendum to a long interview, and soon Krzyzewski was on his feet, walking to the other side of his office. He didn't fight the past now, memories of when he was much younger and attempting to build something in the shadow of what Dean Smith had built at North Carolina. Theirs was not an especially warm relationship in the beginning. Smith's UNC teams beat Duke again and again during Krzyzewski's early years. Sometimes Krzyzewski bristled.
"I needed to go through all that," he said, and he made his way to a wall where he'd hung photos of himself with some of his closest friends — one with Jim Boeheim; another of Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano, both young, in the prime of their lives. That was a long time ago now. And then above, in the middle — "let me show you," Krzyzewski said, "this is a cool picture" — was one of Smith and Krzyzewski in Smith's later years.
They were sitting beside each other, suit jackets and ties, at a function at the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. They appeared to be sharing a laugh, or maybe only a smile. The scars of their old battles had faded away; one of the fiercest coaching rivalries in ACC history had become something more tender, something Krzyzewski still had difficulty articulating, years later.
In the photo, Smith and Krzyzewski looked like old friends. They'd become that, Krzyzewski said.
"And to me, that's like one of the hidden things in the history of our league," Krzyzewski said of his relationship with Smith, one that evolved into something meaningful, for both men, before Smith died in 2015. "Is how the hell could that happen?"
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Krzyzewski will coach his final home game on Saturday. For 42 years he has made the short walk from the Duke locker room to the home bench on the opposite side of Cameron Indoor Stadium. It has become one of the most reliable constants in American sport, Krzyzewski's presence, and no one born after March 17, 1980, has known a world without Krzyzewski as the head coach at Duke.
The game Saturday will not only be the last one he coaches at Cameron Indoor Stadium, but also the last one he coaches in North Carolina, which hosts neither the ACC tournament nor an NCAA Tournament site. And it might be the last one he coaches against North Carolina, the school, the one Krzyzewski has most often been measured against over the past four decades.
The UNC-Duke basketball rivalry has long needed no explanation. It simply exists, a product of the schools' shared history and tradition and often successful pursuit of the same things; a product of their proximity and the whole "separated by eight miles of pine trees and two shades of blue" dynamic that ESPN dramatized in the old promos leading into the broadcasts.
The rivalry has been what it is for so long that it's difficult to consider a time when it wasn't that way, though that time existed, too. When Krzyzewski arrived in Durham in 1980, Duke hadn't defeated UNC in Chapel Hill since 1966. The Blue Devils had experienced national success — they'd been to three consecutive NCAA Tournaments, including a regional final — during the previous three seasons under Bill Foster, but not sustained national success.
The ACC was much smaller then, more regionally confined and perhaps more contentious, every coach fighting for the limited opportunity to break through the grind of the regular season and reach the NCAA Tournament. Terry Holland had built something lasting at Virginia. So had Lefty Driesell at Maryland. Dean Smith was already a beloved figure in this state, even if he had yet to lead UNC to a national championship.
Smith was 49, and a refined and accomplished presence when Krzyzewski entered the league. Krzyzewski then was 33, and he looked a little nervous at his introductory press conference, smiling sheepishly and spelling his name for the reporters who didn't yet have a chance to know how to pronounce it. They coached against each other for the first time on Dec. 5, 1980, in the last year of the old Big Four tournament in Greensboro.
"I'm worried about Duke," Smith told reporters before the game. "They've got a great young coach."
Perhaps he was just being kind. Perhaps he really saw greatness in Krzyzewski, who arrived from Army relatively unknown. Either way, Smith led UNC to a close two-point victory in the Greensboro Coliseum, and Krzyzewski was 0-1 against Smith.
The teams met again about a month and a half later in Chapel Hill. Unlike their first game that season, this one counted in the conference standings.
These days, ESPN builds its college basketball television inventory around the two annual UNC-Duke games. They're always among the most watched of the season. But back then, in early 1981, Krzyzewski's first ACC regular-season game against UNC was not televised live. Locally, it aired on tape delay on WTVD at 10 p.m. The Tar Heels won by 15, and the headline in The News & Observer the next morning said: "Heels crush Blue Devils."
Krzyzewski was 0-2 against Smith, but not for long. He guided the Blue Devils to a 66-65 overtime victory against UNC about a month later, in Krzyzewski's first game against UNC in Cameron Indoor Stadium. Down two near the end of regulation, with two seconds remaining, Krzyzewski drew up a play to get the ball to mid-court and then, after another timeout with one second left, he set up the play that sent it into overtime.
"Hectic, feverish, spine-tingling, nail-biting," went The N&O game story the next day.
It was considered then one of the great finishes in the history of the series.
Krzyzewski was 1-2 against Smith. And then: 1-3, and 1-4, and 1-5, and 1-6, and 1-7, and 1-8.
More than three years passed before Krzyzewski beat Smith and the Tar Heels again.
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During that span, Smith won his first national championship in 1982. Valvano, who arrived at N.C. State the same year that Krzyzewski did at Duke, led the Wolfpack to that improbable national championship in 1983. That same March, meanwhile, some wondered whether Krzyzewski might be fired after an 11-17 finish.
Even amid the losing, Krzyzewski developed little taste for deferring to anybody, least of all Smith. Roy Williams, then a young assistant coach under Smith, sensed that from the beginning.
"Mike came in, and the first couple years were tough," he said recently. "And Mike needed to stand up to anybody and everybody. ... He had to make sure that people didn't think he was going to give in to anybody. And so he was very competitive. And Coach Smith was very competitive.
"And, you know, some of the things that people thought about or people saw or people heard, made it feel like it was a very adversarial relationship."
It was intense from the start. More than 40 years later, Williams can still see the final seconds of UNC's victory against Duke in the 1980 Big Four tournament, in Krzyzewski's first game against the Tar Heels. Smith began walking toward Krzyzewski to shake his hand, Williams said, "but there were still a couple of seconds left."
Krzyzewski, as Williams remembers it, offered a terse response:
"The game's not over yet."
"And that irritated some people, too," Williams said. "But again, it's in competition. So it was something that made me realize that guy really is a competitive guy. And that was OK."
Williams became UNC's head coach in 2003 and spent 18 seasons going head-to-head against Krzyzewski, himself, until Williams retired last April. Their relationship was different because they were more peers, men of roughly the same ages and ones who established themselves throughout the 1980s and 90s.
Once in the early 1980s, Williams said, he took the junior varsity team he coached at UNC to Durham to play against Duke's JV team. Krzyzewski, fighting to build something in those years, had just wrapped up the varsity practice. Williams walked onto the court at Cameron Indoor Stadium and met Krzyzewski and the two shared a conversation in the quiet of an empty arena.
"They only had a (JV) team for a couple of years, but Mike and I are sitting there talking for 20 or 30 minutes while my guys are getting dressed," Williams said, "So we had some opportunities to do those kinds of things that Coach Smith and Mike did not have."
In those years, Smith and Krzyzewski knew each other only as obstacles to what the other wanted. Smith had established himself as one of the nation's great coaches, and his program could not be the best in the country if it was not the best in his own backyard. Krzyzewski, meanwhile, looked at everything Smith had created and spent years trying to build his own version of it.
"I never, like, wanted to copy him," Krzyzewski said, recalling what Vic Bubas told him when he arrived at Duke: "Don't look eight miles away. Respect eight miles away. You develop what you're going to do."
"And that was great advice," Krzyzewski said, though as a lot of good advice it was difficult to implement. How could Krzyzewski not look eight miles southwest, after all? In his early years, his frustration simmered, then erupted after a 78-73 defeat against UNC in Durham on Jan. 21, 1984.
The week before, the Duke student section received national criticism for its heckling of Herman Veal, a Maryland player who'd been accused of sexual assault. Then, during the UNC game, Krzyzewski became angered when Smith approached the scorer's table, twice, "to dispute developments," as a writer for the Durham Herald-Sun described it the next day.
"Both times he lingered and argued," the story went in the paper.
After a close loss, Krzyzewski chided reporters and called out Smith, which to many in North Carolina was something like sacrilege.
"When you come in here and start writing about Duke having no class, you better start getting your heads straight," Krzyzewski said then. "Because our students had class and our team had class."
He continued, taking a direct shot at Smith:
"There was not a person on our bench who was pointing at officials or banging on the scorers' table or having everybody running around on their bench. So let's get some things straight around here and quit the double standard that sometimes exists in this league. All right?"
Almost 40 years later, Krzyzewski recently considered those comments.
"Competitive bulls---," he said, but not without adding that "I needed to go through that," and "if you were me, you would feel the same way," and "there probably was" a double standard, and how now "they probably feel the same way with me" though Smith "probably had a better one than me," Krzyzewski said with a laugh.
"But no," he said. "It wasn't calculated. Spur of the moment. ... Then I got it. I got it.
"And that was really good. I'm so happy that I got it. Actually, we became friends."
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The last time Krzyzewski and Smith coached against one another was 25 years ago Wednesday. It was March 2, 1997. A matchup of top-10 teams in Chapel Hill. Ed Cota dribbled out the clock during the final seconds of the Tar Heels' 91-85 victory. Brent Musburger and Dick Vitale wrapped up their nationally televised broadcast on ABC.
Smith and Krzyzewski shook hands near midcourt. It was a brief exchange. Before it ended, their right hands still touching, Smith leaned in closer and placed his left hand on Krzyzewski's back, almost a half hug. Smith shared a quick word, moving in to speak into Krzyzewski's ear, and then the two men went their separate ways.
It was the last time, as head coaches, that their paths crossed on a basketball court. Nobody could have known then that it was Smith's final game inside the building named after him; that he'd lead the Tar Heels to one more Final Four before retiring about seven months later. And nobody could have known that Krzyzewski, then 50, had 25 more years of coaching in him.
Smith retired having won more games than anyone in the history of the sport. Krzyzewski will do the same whenever Duke's season ends. He has won five national championships. He has won 15 ACC tournament championships. He has won 1,196 games, more than enough for some of those victories to run together.
The losses are much fewer, and so they stand out more. And Krzyzewski lost against no coach more often than he lost against Dean Smith. Krzyzewski will retire with a winning record against UNC — he's 50-46, entering Saturday — but he was 14-24 against Smith, who often seemed so far ahead and out of reach during Krzyzewski's early years.
"When we went to Final Fours, and won, I knew him," Krzyzewski said. "I didn't know him until I did that. And he knew then that I knew him. And then I could appreciate his genius, just how damn good he was. And he recognized that, eventually, in me.
"And I love Dean Smith. And I respect the hell out of him."
In a way, Krzyzewski has become what Smith was, but "I don't want to say it that way," he said, "because nobody can be who he was." He understands the differences. Smith's legacy is clear beyond basketball, most notably as a Civil Rights advocate in the South when it was uncomfortable for a white man of prominence to take the stands that he did. They're different in personality and demeanor, and yet these dissimilar men, once fierce adversaries, eventually formed a bond.
"That's why his picture's up there," Krzyzewski said, and he shared a story he'd rarely shared before. It was the story the last time he spent time with Smith, when Smith was suffering from a dementia-like condition that robbed him of his mind and his memories.
"He only got so much," Krzyzewski said. "God bless him — you know, sad.
"But Linnea let us come over, and visit with him."
This was at the beach, on Figure Eight Island. Krzyzewski had rented a house there for his family, and by chance it so happened to be close to a house where the Smiths were staying.
"Serendipity," Linnea Smith, Dean's widow, said during a recent phone interview. She values her privacy and rarely speaks publicly, but she agreed to talk about this, about one final long meeting between two of the greatest coaches in American sports history, who did some of their most memorable work against one another.
Linnea could not remember the year, only that it was toward "the very end" of her husband's illness. Occasionally, she said, the family would take him to the beach. It was difficult, she said, because he was confined to a wheelchair and he had trouble eating and "he couldn't articulate much at all."
"You wondered how much he was processing of what was happening around him," she said. "But he would be in the wheelchair, and we'd take him out on the deck. And I think the beach and the surf was calming."
One day, after a chance encounter between the families, Krzyzewski asked Linnea if he and Mickie, his wife, could come over and spend time with Dean. At first, Linnea wasn't sure, she said, "Because I wasn't sure how helpful that would be." After some thought, Linnea, who'd long been friendly with Mickie and some of the other old coaches' wives, Pam Valvano included, agreed and invited the Krzyzewskis over.
She tried to prepare them for Dean's condition. Mike Krzyzewski wanted to visit him for a couple of reasons, but most of all to tell Dean Smith what Krzyzewski had known all along, even when they did not like each other very much. He wanted to tell him that, "I knew that there wouldn't be anybody ever like him."
"And I wanted to let him know that I knew."
Krzyzewski paused briefly, recounting the moment.
"I can't even put it into words, really," he said. "It's a hell of a thing."
And so the two men met out on the deck, overlooking a beach with the sound of the waves crashing in the distance. Krzyzewski could not be sure that Dean could understand him and Linnea did not know, either. Yet "even in the end stages," she said, she knew that "he could feel the caring."
"Up until the end he could sense that," she said. "And that gave him, I think, comfort, or some peace. So he sensed it. He sensed the caring, and that came across."
Linnea knew what that final meeting between two old rivals meant to her husband, even if he couldn't articulate it. Earlier this week she wondered what it might have meant to Krzyzewski, and she figured she had a good idea from the time he visited her husband that day at the beach, and her experience being by Dean's side through two national championships, hundreds of victories, retirement and then his long goodbye.
"Mike talks about the rivalry and the intensity and the fierceness of the rivalry," she said, "but I think seeing (Dean) so vulnerable would force you to (realize) — no matter how many games you win or what power you perceive you have or how successful you are, that life is finite. That life is fragile.
"Oftentimes we're in denial that you don't have as much time as you thought you did."
It wasn't too long ago, really, that Krzyzewski and Dean Smith were coaching against each other for the final time, or even the first. It wasn't so long ago that Krzyzewski was a young man, trying to prove himself against the old guard; trying, in his own way, to emulate Smith. Now that was all in the past. Krzyzewski, like Smith before him, had come to set a standard.
When Duke's season ends, it'll be the first time since 1960 without Smith or Krzyzewski as a head coach at two schools eight miles apart. For more than 60 years, one or the other remained constants. Back in his office last summer, Krzyzewski again wondered how all of this happened.
His career. The building he was standing in. The peace and friendship he found with Smith toward the end of his life. There was a significance that Krzyzewski's final home game would come against North Carolina, beyond the routine familiarity that every other regular season ends that way, with a home game against the Tar Heels.
"There's a level of security there," he said, "because you're in this penthouse of excellence. But you don't get all of it. You've got to fight like hell for some of it. And then you respect how the others have fought like hell for it."
It took him years of defeats to learn that. It took his earliest Final Fours to earn that kind of respect. Now after all these decades, all these games against UNC that taught him "to fight like hell," he'd reached an endpoint of his own.
