John Biever/Sports Illustrated
No More Mr. Nice Guys
Saying nothing, he said everything. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski stepped into a timeout huddle with 38 seconds left in the first half of a Feb. 6 game at Georgia Tech, then abruptly retreated and sat down without saying a word. None of his players had experienced this before. Coach K had implored his players for two days not to let down against the inferior Yellow Jackets, and still the Blue Devils looked like a bunch of zombies, trailing Tech 40–33. Krzyzewski decided to coach by not coaching. This was no longer Duke playing Tech but Duke playing Duke, and the bad Duke was winning.
In the locker room at halftime Krzyzewski checked his watch, an odd gesture in basketball, where the only clock that matters is on the scoreboard, but he was hoping to inject a hint of reality. The coach scribbled "2:15-3:00" on the blackboard and then wrote "45 minutes" and circled it. "Time will run out," he said. "In 45 minutes you're dead. You're going to heaven or hell. Where do you want to be?"
Suddenly there was a pulse in the room. Duke came back to win a laborious game 87–79, but Krzyzewski employed one final touch. Breaking from protocol on the bus ride from the airport to
campus, he walked back to where his players sat and spoke throughout the 30-minute trip about the late Emily Krzyzewski. "My mother only went to school to the eighth grade," he said. "She had two dresses her whole life. She had no money. Why the hell was she so happy? Because she was part of a family, a part
of something bigger than herself. A shared experience is the most rewarding. Don't you get it? You guys are all part of something bigger than yourselves."
Recalling the speech five days later, Duke associate head coach Quin Snyder said, "It definitely felt like one of those moments when championship teams are forged."
That was one day. But it provided a window on the hundreds of days that have brought Duke to a 25–1 record through Sunday, a No. 1 ranking and the favorite's role in the race for the national championship. If the Blue Devils are to win that title, Krzyzewski insists they will need more than Trajan Langdon's jumpers and Elton Brand's rebounding and Shane Battier's defense. They'll need attitude. Guts. The toughness Krzyzewski fostered in the 1991 and '92 NCAA title teams that featured Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner. "There's a perception of Duke that you have some highly publicized Caucasian athletes who are soft," Hill says. "When I was there, it was quite the contrary. We had a nasty streak. There was a feeling of complete confidence, complete arrogance and total disrespect for whoever we played."
Indeed, Laettner left the indelible stamp of that attitude on Aminu Timberlake's chest when he stomped the Kentucky forward in the 1992 NCAA East Regional final. It has been Krzyzewski's task to try to restore a measure of that swagger and give the Blue Devils the kind of edge they used to enjoy before they even took the court. To fully understand the difficulty of this undertaking, look back four years to a time when the mighty Blue Devils lost everything, including Krzyzewski.
Given a program that competed in 11 straight NCAA tournaments and seven Final Fours from 1984 to '94, it's easy to forget how thoroughly Duke imploded in '95. The Blue Devils had been NCAA tournament runners-up to Arkansas in '94, but when Krzyzewski left the team the following midseason to recover from back surgery, they endured the most dramatic collapse in ACC history. That 13-18 season was so embarrassing that Duke successfully appealed to the NCAA to have the Blue Devils' 4–15 record after Krzyzewski's departure credited to interim coach Pete Gaudet. "When I came to Duke, I expected to be in four Final Fours, so that season was very humbling," says Langdon, the only Blue Devil remaining from that team. "It was as if Duke ceased being Duke overnight."
"Sir Lancelot doesn't live in Camelot forever," Krzyzewski said at the time. "Eras pass. New Hurleys, Hills and Laettners have to be created."
Duke lost in the first round of the NCAAs in 1996 and advanced to the second round in '97. "Coach raised the bar for us a little each season," says Steve Wojciechowski, who played at Duke from 1994–95 to 1997–98, "but you're also motivated by the Hills and Laettners who come back to play pickup every fall and carry themselves like national champions. They don't say, 'Sit down, son, I'll give you the formula.' It's more like 'Where's your banner?'"
Last season Duke reached the South Regional final before coughing up a 17-point second-half lead and losing to Kentucky. Wojciechowski left the court that day as the first player to spend four years at Duke without reaching a Final Four since Todd Anderson, Jay Bryan and Danny Meagher in 1985. Krzyzewski wasn't devastated after the Kentucky loss because he knew those Blue Devils hadn't possessed what he calls the "expectancy" to win a championship. But as the 1998-99 season began, Duke was No. 1 in many rankings, and Coach K spoke openly about a national title from the first day of practice. He approved a poster with the headline CHAMPIONSHIP VISION and a photo of the Blue Devils gazing skyward. And he built a schedule as brutal as any he had assembled for his title teams, including nonconference road and neutral-site games against Michigan State, Kentucky and St. John's. After the season's sixth game he feared he had made a grave mistake. On Nov. 28 Duke was pushed around in a 77–75 loss to Cincinnati in the finals of the Great Alaska Shootout. The defeat was particularly galling for Langdon, an Alaskan whose role was to be that of the homecoming hero. "With all our accolades, we felt that just because we're Duke we should win," Langdon says. "We were all disgusted and embarrassed. Coach told us, 'This isn't a joyride. If you keep playing like this, you're going to be awful.'"
During the long flight home from Alaska, Krzyzewski recalls telling his staff, "We just don't get it, and I don't know how long it's going to take this team to figure it out. We may have to lose a few more times."
Krzyzewski has carefully chosen his assistants: Former Duke players Snyder, Johnny Dawkins and David Henderson are Coach K- tested role models who help him shape the players' psyches. "I've warned our guys that our opponents expect us to be soft, and we were soft against Cincinnati, and that's unacceptable," Snyder says. "Every player has his own demons, his own fears, and part of our job as coaches is to help them make breakthroughs in their own ways."
Point guard William Avery arrived at Duke last season already forged by a trip he took as a high school junior to meet Krzyzewski, who had bluntly told Avery that with his mediocre grades he would never be a Blue Devil. Avery walked out of the room, turned to his mother and said, "I am going to Duke." After switching from his high school in Augusta, Ga., to Oak Hill Academy in Virginia as a senior, he made the grade and has since launched more fearless game-deciding shots than any other Blue Devil, including a last-second miss in last year's NCAA loss to Kentucky. Brand, a sophomore center, received his wake-up call when he was stripped of his starting job for two games in December and informed that his lack of conditioning was hindering his game. He responded with 10 double doubles in the next 15 games.
Sometimes the players reach their own epiphanies without the coaches. The Duke staff had stewed all season over sophomore forward Battier's reluctance to shoot. Then on Feb. 2 Battier watched a documentary about martial arts on the Discovery Channel featuring China's Shaolin monks, a Buddhist sect that preaches the concept of chi, a person's inner strength. Battier saw a sword slice through a tree stump and then bend in half as it was thrust against a monk's stomach. Against Maryland the following night, inspired by the power of chi, he launched 13 shots and scored 27 points, both career highs, to spark a Blue Devils rout. Predictably, three Cameron Crazies came to last Saturday's home game against Wake Forest dressed as monks and flashing letters that spelled out CHI whenever Battier, who had 19 points, scored.
Corey Maggette, the freshman swingman prodigy, was toughened up by his own teammate when he took exception to junior forward Chris Carrawell's flagrant foul in an early-season scrimmage. The two gunned the basketball back and forth at each other before squaring off and then being separated by Snyder before a punch could be thrown. Says Carrawell, "Things got a little touchy...in a good way."
The often overlooked Carrawell is Duke's soul. He grew up in an inner-city neighborhood in north St. Louis. He has never met his father. He rarely played in a gym until high school, instead playing what he calls "ghetto ball" on the cracked asphalt at Fairground Park with chain nets, metal backboards and double rims so rigid that successful shots had to be nothing but chain. Carrawell was honed on physical games against older and larger guys with names like Big Mike and Ron Ron and Slim. By his own estimate seven of the 10 guys on the court at any one time back then are now in jail or dead. At the end of a full day of pickup hoops, Carrawell would sometimes be challenged to a one-on-one "money game" for $100, an offer he could not refuse, and dozens of spectators dropped cash on the cement in support of the guy from their block. Carrawell knew that if he lost, which was
rare, he would be wise to take a circuitous route home—if he went home at all.
Carrawell's story isn't unusual in college basketball; it's just unusual at Duke. "The image of Duke guys is of white picket fences, not barbed-wire fences," Carrawell says, "but I can bring a piece of the playground here, getting guys thinking that when a guy busts you, you've got to bust him back."
Krzyzewski, who grew up in inner-city Chicago, has a binding trust in his streetwise wingman. At halftime of a game against NC State on Jan. 30, in one of the most meaningful moments of the season, Krzyzewski pulled Carrawell aside and anointed him the Blue Devils' leader by saying, "Where you go, we go." Carrawell, whose cheek still bears the scar from a poke in the eye he sustained against Maryland in early January, has carried Duke over much of the last month on shoulders that have endured three operations and until last year limited his ability to raise his arms so much that he couldn't dunk. "I think Chris is our team's backbone, and we feed off his swagger," Battier says. "When all hell breaks loose, we'll huddle up, and Chris will calmly say, 'Let's just hoop.'"
So focused is Krzyzewski on emotions that during practice the day after a 22-point win at Clemson on Jan. 20, he reviewed a game tape with his players that included no action, only their confident and passionate faces. By all accounts Coach K's own zeal has returned to a level not seen since the beginning of the decade. On the eve of the Jan. 27 home game against North Carolina, Krzyzewski spoke inside Cameron Indoor Stadium to the mob of students who had been sleeping outside in tents for the better part of a month to get the choicest seats. "If you're not going to be intense," Coach K said, "then don't f------ show up."
Duke's goal is simple. The Final Four in St. Petersburg or bust. Langdon acknowledges the Blue Devils' expectancy, and he dreams about winning the NCAA title on the same court where the Blue Devils' season ended so miserably a year ago. The near loss to Georgia Tech may prove to have been a crucial motivational boost. Following that game, Duke toyed with Virginia on Feb. 11, getting double doubles from Brand, Maggette and emerging reserve forward Nate James in a 100–54 blowout, the biggest road win in Blue Devils history and the Cavaliers' worst home loss ever. Then last Saturday at Cameron, Duke got those 19 points from Battier to dispatch Wake Forest 102–71 for its 20th straight win. It's now Krzyzewski's challenge to find fault in a team that through Sunday was shooting 51.9% from the floor, holding opponents to 39.5%, averaging 94.0 points, leading the country in victory margin (chart, above) and was three wins away from becoming the first ACC team since North Carolina in 1987 to finish conference play undefeated. "They're as good a team as any I've coached against," Virginia coach Pete Gillen says. "If they stay healthy, they should win the championship."
On two or three late nights this season when he has been the last one left inside Cameron, Krzyzewski has wandered out to the court to rekindle his energy, to reaffirm that he's part of something bigger than himself. It was always pitch black except for the spotlights on the championship banners hanging at one end of the gym and the nine retired jerseys at the other. Krzyzewski says he never looked at the two title banners, envisioning a third. Instead he stared at the numbers, particularly those most recently immortalized during his tenure. He didn't visualize those players but the caliber of their play. "I saw traits that lead to championships," he says. "I saw Hurley's daring, Laettner's competitiveness, Hill's drive to grow from a role player into a star, and I remembered their collective confidence. Sometimes I start to believe this year's team is close to that feeling, and other times I think, Can we ever really capture that again?"