SAN FRANCISCO — The Army’s old Post Gymnasium at the Presidio is still there long after the Army is gone, concrete arches and cinderblock walls, the epitome of Vietnam-era military architecture. It’s a YMCA now, filled on a Friday afternoon with people of all ages and races and genders working out. A lone man wearing headphones and a hoodie lazily took shots at one of the baskets in the main gym, the thump of the ball echoing off the walls.
In the six-decade journey of Mike Krzyzewski from Chicago’s West Side to the verge of a 13th and final Final Four on Saturday, the chances that it would ever circle back to this place, in a city hosting its first NCAA Tournament games since 1939, where perhaps the least heralded — but as formative as any — part of Krzyzewski’s basketball career took place.
Step outside of that gym, and there’s a majestic view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the parking lot, the top of the bridge shrouded in low-lying clouds, as beautiful a spot as there is in the continental United States. Step back inside, and there’s nothing to mark why or when it was built, no plaque or historical marker, but the answers to both say a lot about Krzyzewski.
As a newly commissioned artillery officer in the Army after his graduation from West Point, Krzyzewski was summoned to San Francisco to try out for the All-Army basketball team, which at the time, in a different era of club and amateur basketball, was a Very Big Deal. Soldiers would come from all over the world to try out for the team, because making it meant weeks if not months away from their billets and on the basketball court — which, even in the final years of the Vietnam War, could skew the odds between life and death.
“I spent, in ‘71 and ‘72, a lot of time here when I was in the Army,” Krzyzewski said Wednesday. “I was able to try out and make the All-Army teams. We lived in barracks at the Presidio. Hal Fischer, one of the great coaches, coached the team. I was out here at least four different times for six-week periods, and then we would go and play in the World Military Olympics either in Iran, Syria. I know this area well.”
The Presidio, then and now
Other than Gibraltar, there may not be a better piece of land for a military base than the Presidio, a promontory west of the city that commands gazillion-dollar views of both the Pacific and the Bay. The Golden Gate Bridge extends from the middle of it like a limb.
Now, it’s a public amenity held in trust, administered by the National Park Service. People live and work there, run and bike on its trails, enjoy the view. The cream-colored Army buildings with their red roofs are all still there, repurposed into offices and museums and schools. The site of the former hospital is now a Lucasfilm special-effects complex.
But at the time Krzyzewski was there, tens of thousands of soldiers were stationed on the base. It was the headquarters not only of the Sixth Army, but also a major training command. It was also the home of Letterman Army Medical Center, a massive hospital that served as a rehabilitation center for soldiers wounded in Vietnam. If the players needed a reminder of how lucky they were, they never had to look very far.
“We were in this oasis, because the war in Vietnam was raging at the time, even if it probably wasn’t at its peak,” said future Penn and Temple coach Fran Dunphy, who made the team after being drafted. “But it was still going on and some of us almost had the task of going over there. So it was this unbelievable opportunity that came with some guilt, to be honest with you. We were lucky enough to be doing what we were doing while some of our other friends had to go and fight the war.
“That was the backdrop and we were able to play a game that we all loved and play it together and have this great team to hang out with every single day. Mike was such a big part of that. It was just a special time in our lives that we really appreciated.”
Fischer, the coach of the All-Army team, was the Presidio’s recreation director, a prominent job in its own right. He had served in World War II before playing basketball at Nevada and, briefly, in the pros in the Bay Area. He built his own fiefdom at the Presidio, and by 1971, that included his own brand-new gym for his teams to gather and practice. Later on, he’d join Red Fitzsimmons’ staff on the Knicks. When he got a look at Krzyzewski, he snapped him up for temporary basketball duty in 1971 and 1972.
The players remember Fischer — a GS-14, a civilian service rank roughly equivalent to a colonel in the Army — building his office with a window overlooking the gym so he could watch them shoot jump shots for hours, every day, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There’s no sign of that in the main gym now, no visible remnants of a bricked-up opening, but there is a balcony overlooking a smaller area that was later converted to racquetball courts and is now used for storage.
A different kind of basketball draft
Because the draft was still active, the Army inadvertently cast a wide net for basketball talent. Besides Krzyzewski, there was his backcourt partner at Army, Jim Oxley, a future emergency physician. Dunphy, an infantry private up the coast at Ford Ord, was desperate to make the team and avoid getting sent overseas. Art Wilmore starred locally for the University of San Francisco. Darnell Hillman won the first NBA dunk contest. Tom Daley played at Penn State. Dan Crenshaw came from Southern Cal and would go on to become a key Nike exec.
It was a powerful team, and the best of the service squads. Army would invariably win the championship, and Fischer would take the All-Armed Forces team overseas with a few players from the Air Force and Navy and Marines. In 1972, that included a former Air Force Academy basketball player named Gregg Popovich, who would one day succeed Krzyzewski as coach of the U.S. Olympic team.
“Arguably the best college coach and best pro coach both played on the same teams,” Oxley said. “Can you imagine?”
The assembled team would head overseas to tour and play in a sort-of military Olympics against other countries. That took Krzyzewski to Syria and Lebanon, Iran and Greece and Italy. The team played in the outdoor amphitheater of the original Olympics in Athens. They ate lunch in the embassy cafeteria in Tehran where the hostages would later be held. They visited the Shah’s palace. They traveled the world but instead of making war, they made layups.
“I can remember the trip very, very vividly, in so many ways,” Dunphy said. “It was just really a special time in our lives. You’re not old enough to really appreciate it at that time. You thought you were lucky and you knew it was something very special, but you didn’t really know how special it was. I look back on those days with great reverence.”
Throughout, the seeds of Krzyzewski’s future were being sown, and not just in his exposure to the international game, with its wider lane and legal goaltending and faster pace, all of which would become second nature during his tenure with Team USA.
A coach’s first steps
Fischer lived on the other side of the bridge, in Santa Rosa, but he would bring the team up to his house — it had a pool — for dinner in an attempt to build camaraderie among a very disparate group, coming from different services and different bases, composed of different ranks, officers and enlisted alike.
“We used to all go swimming,” Oxley said. “It was really quite nice. Just like Mike does now, he tried to make it a family atmosphere. I don’t want to say that’s how Mike got that, but I do know that Hal Fischer used to do that all the time.”
During games, when Krzyzewski wasn’t playing, he’d sit next to Fischer on the bench. He was always in charge of the scouting report. He was never shy to tell his teammates what he thought.
“In many ways, he was just a very regular guy who you enjoyed being with,” Dunphy said, “but my remembrance is while you were playing, and he was sitting on the bench — and in my recollection, not far from Hal Fischer — you would sit down beside him and he would recount a play or two or three he thought could be better made.
“I didn’t think about it that much at the time, but when I look back on it he was working at his craft even then. It was almost as if he said, ‘One of these days, I’m going to be a pretty famous college coach and I can get a great start in the U.S. Army. These are good people use as examples of what I would do if I had this job at West Point or Duke and that’s where I’m going to be.’ ”
Krzyzewski and Oxley, the only officers on the team, occasionally stayed in the Bachelor Officers Quarters — now a boutique inn — and occasionally in the barracks with the rest of the team. Later, when Oxley was doing his medical internship at Letterman, Krzyzewski and his wife, Mickie, and daughter, Debbie, would stay with Oxley and his wife. His ties to the Presidio, and San Francisco, deepened.
This idyllic basketball sanctuary ended when Krzyzewski received orders to deploy to Korea, where he served near the DMZ while coaching a regional Army team. He then spent two years as the head coach of the U.S. Military Academy Prep School before leaving the Army to join Bob Knight at Indiana as a graduate assistant.
Fifty years later, basketball brought him back.
“I love this area,” Krzyzewski said. “It really is part of the foundation of me becoming a coach.”
