NEW ORLEANS — It was late Saturday night now, almost midnight local time, when Mike Krzyzewski emerged from the Duke locker room for the final time as the Blue Devils' head coach. He'd held that job for 42 years and 16 days and until recently, and the start of his last NCAA tournament, he could always take comfort that there'd be another walk like this, another game.
Now it was over. His players had cleared out and their tears had told Krzyzewski that he'd done his job with this team, no matter the 81-77 defeat Duke suffered against North Carolina in an unforgettable national semifinal at the Superdome. Most of his assistants had left, too, by the time Krzyzewski walked out, slowly and painfully, just a few steps behind his wife, Mickie.
For weeks now they'd endured this final March, and early April, it turned out, together. It became a familiar scene: the Duke bus pulling up hours before tipoff in Brooklyn or Greenville, S.C. or San Francisco and the Krzyzewskis stepping off together, Mike and Mickie, and walking hand-in-hand into another arena before another game.
For weeks they'd walked out the same way, holding hands, and triumphantly. Each NCAA tournament victory — against Cal State Fullerton and Michigan State in Greenville; against Texas Tech and Arkansas last week in the West Regional — moved Krzyzewski one game closer to his sixth national championship and the ultimate storybook ending in his final season.
Saturday brought an ending, but not that ending; not the one of dreams or fairytales or the one that little by little began to look ever more realistic the longer Duke's postseason journey lasted. By the end of it, Krzyzewski wore the look of a man who had expended all of his energy. He sounded hoarse when he met with reporters. His eyes suggested he might've shed some tears, too.
It was fitting, perhaps, that his final game came against North Carolina, the old nemesis from just down the road and one that somehow, as a No. 8 seed, found its way to New Orleans and the Final Four. In his earliest years at Duke, Krzyzewski built his program in the shadow of what Dean Smith had long established at UNC; and then the two schools spent more than 30 years going back and forth and back again, both playing their part in what arguably became sport's greatest rivalry.
The Tar Heels and Blue Devils played each other for the 258th time on Saturday night, and none of the previous 257 had come in an NCAA tournament game, much less one in the Final Four. The 40 minutes of game time they shared in the Superdome became a microcosm of the rivalry: One team taking control only for the other to take it back; big shots on one end met with big shots on the other; the margin so thin, the outcome was in doubt until the end.
By then, in the final minute, there was little for Krzyzewski to do other than watch from his seat atop a little stool in front of his team's bench. The stool sat atop the raised court inside the Superdome, giving Krzyzewski the appearance of a king on a throne, only now the fate of his coaching career was largely out of his hands and belonged to his players. For about two weeks, he'd gushed about how far his youngest team had come, how quickly it had grown up, but the sort of magic that Duke found late in victories against Michigan State and Texas Tech now became elusive.
Krzyzewski watched from the stool, waiting and hoping for the kind of moment that never arrived. At times he sat upright, arms folded and staring ahead. In other moments he leaned forward, his arms on his knees. Throughout his final season, he'd resisted the constant overtures to look back into the past, to contextualize his 42 seasons at Duke, or look too far into the future and to consider what the ending might be like and what retirement would bring.
He was focused on the now, he'd say. Sometimes he'd reference the training he'd received back at West Point, more than 50 years ago now, when he was a cadet in the U.S. Military Academy. He learned there to block out anything else but the mission. But now, in the final moments of Saturday night, focusing on the now meant focusing on the fact that it was all ending. This game. This long chapter of his life.
He turned his eyes upward, toward the clock, and watched the seconds of his coaching career run out. When he rose from the stool it looked as though he'd also played for 40 minutes, like UNC starters Caleb Love and Leaky Black, and indeed after most timeouts Saturday night a manager handed Krzyzewski a small cup of water that he'd quickly sip until it was time for another.
The ending brought pandemonium, for Carolina. The Tar Heels celebrated on the court, their players and coaches and some of their family members dancing and jumping and elating in this moment in front of the UNC cheering section on one end of the Superdome. UNC was onto the national championship game for the first time since 2017, and it'd been expected back then, when the Tar Heels were on a season-long mission to avenge the at-the-buzzer defeat they'd suffered in the 2016 championship game, against Villanova.
On the other end of the court, meanwhile, Duke's managers cleared the Blue Devils' bench. Krzyzewski lingered only briefly, to shake hands with UNC's players after he'd done the same with the Tar Heels' coaching staff, and then he disappeared into a long tunnel in one corner of the arena and made a right toward the locker room. He remained inside for a long time and later he said that he appreciated what he saw, for what he saw was proof that his team had wanted this as badly as he did.
"I've said my entire career — or when I knew what the hell I was doing — that I wanted my seasons to end where my team was either crying tears of joy or tears of sorrow because then you knew that they gave everything," Krzyzewski said. "And I had a locker room filled with guys who were crying. And it's a beautiful sight. It's not the sight that I would want. I'd want the other. But it's a sight that I really respect and makes me understand just how good this group was."
Krzyzewski was speaking then during his final press conference, and the room was full. Down in front of him, photographers jockeyed for position to document the moment while reporters tried to get him to describe his own emotions at the ending — "It's not about me, especially right now," he said once, before offering versions of the same in other moments — while members of his family filled a large section of seats to Krzyzewski's far left.
There was Mickie, resting her head on the shoulder of one of her grandsons. And there were Krzyzewski's daughters, their eyes watery. And there were all the grandchildren, ranging from small kids to young adults. For their entire lives, they'd known nothing other than a world in which their grandfather coached at Duke, just as anyone alive 41 or younger had known the same. And now it was over, two nights earlier than Krzyzewski and his family and his players had envisioned.
Try as he might to resist the overtures for broader perspective as it related to his thoughts and emotions, Krzyzewski soon enough found himself referencing Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech. Perhaps it was something he'd learned at West Point a long time ago or maybe he'd picked it up somewhere along the way but now it fit, the reference to a 112-year-old speech about the power of competition, itself, regardless of the outcome.
"I'll be fine," Krzyzewski said then. "I've been blessed to be in the arena. And when you're in the arena, you're either going to come out feeling great or you're going to feel agony, but you always will feel great about being in the arena.
"And I'm sure that that's the thing, when I'll look back, that I'll miss. I won't be in the arena anymore. But, damn, I was in the arena for a long time. And these kids made my last time in the arena an amazing one."
Krzyzewski's ride into a superimposed sunset
When his press conference ended, Krzyzewski lingered for a while with his family, out of sight, in a holding area beyond the view of reporters or anyone else. On the other side of a curtain, more than a dozen photographers surrounded the golf cart that waited to give Krzyzewski and his wife a ride back to the locker room on the other side of the Superdome. His arrival, at last, was met with a chorus of shutter clicks, and after Krzyzewski led Mickie onto the back of the cart and sat down next to her he smiled and thought of a bit of dry humor:
"Maybe you all can superimpose a sunset," he said under the yellow glow of old industrial lighting, as he began to ride off, and he offered a short wave. Moments later, he thanked those who'd gathered to document the moment.
To understand this moment, though, and Krzyzewski's career ending, was to understand how it all began. He became Duke's head coach on March 18, 1980, during the Jimmy Carter administration. He was relatively unknown in the profession, so much so that he spent part of his introductory press conference pronouncing and spelling his name for the local media. He was young then, 33, and looked a little nervous to be on that stage, taking over an ACC program.
He entered a neighborhood, among UNC and N.C. State, in which Duke was the least-accomplished of its rivals. Both the Tar Heels and Wolfpack had won national championships; Duke had not. In those days, it was the UNC-State rivalry that gripped North Carolina, and while Duke was not an afterthought, it was a long way from becoming what it became.
When Krzyzewski got the job, he and Mickie bought a modest home north of downtown Durham and that in itself was a small miracle, Krzyzewski said before the season began, because "we had no money." It was 1980 and the economy was faltering and after living in Army housing while he coached there, Krzyzewski had no house to sell, no equity to help him get his start in North Carolina. He could still remember the interest rate for his first mortgage in Durham: 18 percent, he said, and as he looked back in time — a rare moment of deeper reflection amid all the others in which he has attempted to avoid it — Krzyzewski began to become thankful.
"Crazy," he said. "It's just — I've been so damn lucky. I mean, something's good happening."
In that moment he was sitting in his expansive sixth-floor office, atop a basketball tower that Duke built in 1999, seven years after the second of Krzyzewski's five national championships. He was surrounded by all the history of the past 42 years: photographs documenting those titles; moments of jubilation on the court with family members and his players; mementos from one of the greatest coaching careers in American sports history.
And yet amid all of it, Krzyzewski acknowledged there was still a void that would never really be filled. That even after winning more games than anyone in his profession had ever won he still felt a constant need to prove himself, over and over again. Maybe he owed that part of himself to his insistence that he never look too far back, for better or worse, or maybe he owed it to his humble origins in Chicago, where his Polish roots and meager means did not make for an easy childhood.
"I think I've always been trying to prove myself," Krzyzewski said then, before the season, and in a way that was part of what drove him throughout the past several months, the question of whether he could guide his youngest team to the level it eventually reached. The never-ending quest to prove himself has roots, too, in another part of Krzyzewski that is perhaps at odds with all the stay-in-the-moment philosophizing he'd done during much of this season, and especially recently.
"He never forgets anything," Mike Cragg, one of Krzyzewski's closest friends, said recently. Cragg spent more than three decades working in the Duke athletic department and came to know Krzyzewski well before Cragg became the athletic director at St. John's in 2018. Now Cragg could tell no shortage of stories about what motivated Krzyzewski, what stuck with him.
"The thing about Coach K is that nobody's going to outwork him. Nobody's going to, in anything. I'm not just talking about basketball, but just that he is relentless in the pursuit of excellence."
Cragg then was talking specifically about how the tribulations of the early-to-mid-80s shaped Krzyzewski and molded him into what he became. The Blue Devils finished 10-17 in Krzyzewski's second season and 11-17 the next, and that one ended with a blowout defeat against Virginia in the ACC tournament, a loss that had a good number of Duke supporters calling for Krzyzewski to be fired. In a different time, perhaps one more like today, governed by instant gratification and social media takes, Krzyzewski might not have lasted another season. Tom Butters, the Duke athletic director at the time, kept the faith in his hire, though, and rewarded Krzyzewski with a contract extension in 1984, when it became clear he had Duke headed in the right direction.
Even so, it's easy to forget the broader context of that moment. Dean Smith had just led the Tar Heels to a national championship in 1982, and UNC was clearly the dominant program in the neighborhood if not the country. Jim Valvano and N.C. State followed with the 1983 national championship, leaving State and UNC with two national titles apiece and Duke with none.
Krzyzewski's national breakthrough came in 1986 with the first of his 13 Final Fours. It was a team with a core of seniors, including Johnny Dawkins and Mark Alarie, who'd been freshmen during the 11-win humiliation of 1983. Suddenly Duke was off. The Blue Devils reached the Final Four again in 1988 and '89 and '90, only to fall short, before they broke through in '91 with the first of their consecutive national championships.
Three other championships followed, in 2001 and 2010 and 2015, and Krzyzewski became the kind of omnipresent figure, more than four decades in the same job, that might never again exist at his level of college basketball. The game is what he lived, whether it was at Duke or with the U.S. National Team, and it was the pursuit of winning — "of excellence," as Cragg put it — that drove him as much this season, at 75, as it did when he was 33 and in his first year at Duke.
It was a pursuit that could rub people wrong. Like his college coach and one-time mentor, Bob Knight, Krzyzewski became a polarizing figure. He was royalty at Duke, and to the legions of Blue Devils fans throughout the country. To others, he became easy to disdain, in part because of all the winning but also because of how he won, with an intensity that could border on maniacal.
Krzyzewski developed a reputation for berating officials. For showering them with a storm of F-bombs in moments of frustration. J.J. Redick, who left Duke as the ACC's all-time leading scorer, recalled during a recent podcast a moment when he returned to Duke and sat behind the bench for a game. As Redick told it, Krzyzewski gathered his team during a timeout, looked at each one of his players and said:
"I hate your (expletive) faces."
It was the sort of comment meant to motivate, though Krzyzewski's detractors would surely view it differently. To those who loved to hate him, Krzyzewski became the New York Yankees and Darth Vader rolled into one, a man who might as well have entered the arena to the tune of The Imperial March. And yet part of Krzyzewski's legacy, too, is his founding of the Emily K Center, named in honor of his mother, and the smaller moments of human connection that went unnoticed.
Cragg thought about the notebook Krzyzewski always carries with him, the one with the Duke logo on the cover. As always, Krzyzewski carried that notebook everywhere with him throughout his final postseason, from the ACC tournament in Brooklyn to the West Regional in San Francisco to here in New Orleans, where he had it tucked under his arm during the Blue Devils' shootaround on Friday.
"His notebook always has notes and letters and emails, and he's always working, always taking notes," Cragg said, describing the notebook where Krzyzewski keeps correspondence with people who've contacted him for advice or guidance or hope. "And so the world has no idea. No idea how many people he has touched, called, that are coming from just simple letters to him, asking for help, or introducing themselves. You know, 'My child has cancer' — I mean, nobody has any idea.
"And he never did it for any other reason than he cares about people."
A peaceful finish for Krzyzewski
Almost a month ago now, after consecutive Saturdays that ended with defeats against North Carolina, in Krzyzewski's final home game, and Virginia Tech, in the ACC tournament championship game, this sort of run to the Final Four did not seem possible for Duke, or all that likely. Then the Blue Devils underwent a metamorphosis that had them believing in the fairytale ending before it gave way to the tears of defeat late Saturday night.
When Krzyzewski emerged from his team's locker room the first time after his final loss, for his postgame press conference, he walked into a scene of juxtaposition. A few of North Carolina's players were just a few feet away, conducting interviews after their victory. Krzyzewski made his way to the podium where, when he arrived, a few of his own players sat to his left, their pain evident. Each of them described what this ride had been like, being on Krzyzewski's final team and having been a part of final March, and April.
"For me, it's been everything," said Wendell Moore, Jr. "... It was a dream of ours to come here. Coach delivered on every promise he gave us, and even more. ... He does it with his heart. He does everything with his heart. He loves each and every one of us dearly. And we all love him.
"So we can do nothing but thank him for everything he's done for us."
Said Trevor Keels: "Coach K always has been there for me. ... And I think all of us left it out there and played with joy. We had fun out there. We came up short, but we for sure had fun out there."
And Paolo Banchero, who likely will be among the first players selected in the next NBA Draft: "He was so committed to us all year. Never made it about him. And you're just proud that we were able to go out and fight, be in a fight, with Coach every game."
Soon enough the press conference, like the game before it, was over. The final one of Krzyzewski's coaching career. Another moment that'd come and gone, and suddenly there was a final date on the other side of the dash representing the length of Krzyzewski's time at Duke as the Blue Devils' head coach: March 18, 1980 — April 2, 2022.
He'd won 1,202 games, including the 73 victories during his first five seasons at Army. He'd won five national championships and fifteen ACC tournament championships. Now, though, after a lifetime of attempting to prove himself, there was nothing more to prove. At least not on this stage.
He and Mickie rode back to the locker room together and remained inside for 15 or 20 minutes before walking out again, this time for good. It was quieter now, the cameras that had been lurking before were now all gone. A cart waited to give Krzyzewski and his wife a ride back to the bus, which waited on the other side of the Superdome.
Mickie climbed on the back first, covering herself in a Duke blue shawl. Krzyzewski, walking with a limp and as if he was in pain, sat down next to her and moved in close. For a moment she rested her head against his shoulder and chest, and he put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. The locker room grew more distant, little by little, and so did the court.
They rode like that together, comforting each other, and soon the cart rounded a curve in the hall and disappeared toward the bus. Mickie boarded first and then Krzyzewski. And for the first time in more than 50 years, since before his days as a college player, or even in high school, there was no next game to anticipate. The final one had come and gone. Krzyzewski looked tired but strangely content, even after one of the more difficult losses of his career. He appeared ready for the end, as if he'd already made peace with it.
He took his seat near the front of the bus, surrounded by his team but alone with his thoughts. A few minutes before midnight the bus began to pull away. Slowly, the arena itself became more distant behind Krzyzewski, and he rode off not into the sunset but into the dark of night after a draining defeat. Already it was almost a new day, the first of his retirement.
