How Duke’s Coach K Was Almost Fired in 1983

On this episode of Our American Stories, John Feinstein is a sportswriter of 42 books, 23 of them New York Times bestsellers. He is also the friend of Duke University’s legendary basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski (also known as “Coach K”). John tells the story of how Coach K’s five national titles at Duke almost never happened.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. John
Feinstein is a sportswriter of forty two books, twenty three
of them New York Times bestsellers. His first book, about

(00:33):
Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, A Season on the Brink,
is the best selling sports book of all time. He's
also the friend of Duke University's legendary basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski,
otherwise known as Coach K, who won five national titles
at Duke and three consecutive gold medals as the head

(00:54):
coach of the US men's Olympic basketball team. John's here
to tell the story of how that all almost didn't happen.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
I actually first met Mike Skrzyzewski and Jim Valvano on
the same day when I was a senior in college.
Duke was playing Connecticut in New York City at Madison
Square Garden. Duke was bad. In those days. People refused
to believe that Duke was ever bad in basketball, but
they were bad. In fact, that Duke Yukon game was
the first game of the Garden double header. The feature

(01:24):
game was Fordham and Rutgers. That's how different times were.
And I flew into New York, which was my hometown,
with Bill Foster, who was then Duke's coach, Tom Mikkel,
who was Duke's sports information director, and Tate Armstrong who
was the star of the team who had played on
the nineteen seventy six Olympic team for Dean Smith. And
there was a media lunch every Tuesday in those days

(01:46):
in New York for the New York basketball coaches, and
Jim Valvano was coaching at Iona and Mike Skrzyzewski was
coaching at Army, his alma mater where he had played
for Bob Knight. And when the lunch was over, valvan
came over to see Bill Foster because he played for
him at Rutgers, and he brought along with him Shryzhevski

(02:07):
and Tom Penders, who was then the coach at Columbia
who would go on to win six hundred and forty
eight games in his career. And as we were talking,
I mentioned to Shizhevski that I had seen his greatest
game in the nineteen sixty nine n when I was
a kid in New York, when Army had upset South
Carolina and he had guarded John Roach, South Carolina's All

(02:29):
American the whole game and held him to eleven points.
So that sort of got us off to a good start,
although we did vehemently disagree on the subject of the
Cubs and Mets. He's a Chicago kid Cubs fan. I
obviously New York kid Mets fan. But after I got
to the Washington Post a year later, I kept in
touch with both Shayzewski and Dolfano. So I knew them

(02:50):
both when they were hired, respectively at Duke and at
North Carolina State in nineteen eighty and by then I
was covering acc basketball for the Washington Post, and so
I dealt with them a lot, and I think it's
fair to say I became close to both of them
later years and years later, I wrote a book called
The Legends Club, which was about Kashawski, Valvano, and Dean Smith,

(03:14):
all of whom I was fortunate enough to deal with
quite a bit in the nineteen eighties when they were
coaching against each other in the Research Triangle in North Carolina,
and Valvano, of course, was a rocket. His team won
the national championship in nineteen eighty three, the famous Survive
and Advanced team the championship ending with Lorenzo Charles dunk

(03:34):
Off of what Derek Wittenberg still insists was a pass.
And so Valvano, because of his personality, because of his success,
was a huge star. Shizshowski not so much. He used
to joke about how he had to follow Valvano at
ACC media days. Jim would get up, do twenty minutes
a stand up, leave everybody on the floor, and then
Mike would follow and talk about the battle for the

(03:56):
center position between Mike Tissaw and Alan Williams, which didn't
exactly rock the room. So Shizshowski's first recruiting class was
the bust. They finished second for a bunch of very
good players, the most notable being Chris Mullen who went
to Saint John's. But then the second year they had
a better recruiting class, a very good recruiting class in fact,

(04:16):
but that in Mike's third season nineteen eighty three, the
team was divided seniors and freshmen, resenting one another. They
lost a game early in the season to Wagner at home,
and the drum beats were getting louder that the alumni
thought that Shizshowsky was a bad hire and you had
to go back. The two real heroes of this story

(04:39):
other than Mike are Tom Butters, the athletic director, and
Steve Visendak, who was the number two guy in the
athletic department, who had been a star at Duke in
the nineteen sixties under Vic Boobis played on final four
teams there, and it was Vissendak who first brought Shazshawsky
to Butter's attention. Butterers knew that Bill Foster was going
to leave for South Carolina end of the nineteen eighty season,

(05:01):
and he put the Sendak in charge of the coaching
search because the Sendek was a basketball player and there
were a bunch of names that were out there. Bob
Weltlick was at Mississippi. Bob Knight was pushing him hard.
Weltlock had played coached under under Knight, as had Skrzyzewski.
Of course, Bob Wenzel was Bill Foster's number one assistant
and helped build the program. People forget that the year

(05:22):
Foster left Duke Gloston the Elite eight. They were good,
but most of their key players graduated off that team,
not all, but most. And there was a guy named
Paul Webb who had had great success at All Dominion.
In fact, the day that Duke hired its new coach,
that Durham Morning Herald had a story saying that the
new Duke coach's last name would start with a w Wenzel,

(05:43):
Webb or Weltlick, but with Sendak had met Skrzyzewski when
Shishewsky was coaching an army he was living in Annapolis,
went and spent some time with him as he was
preparing for a Navy game Army Navy game, and was
blown away by him. He was very young, but very
much in command of his team and was clearly, in
Steve's opinion, a great defensive coach. So he brought Skrzyshewsky's

(06:07):
name to Butters. Butters had never heard of him, literally,
had never heard of him. And he said, okay, what
was his record in army this year? And the Sendek
went nine and seventeen, And but I can't hire a
coach at Duke who was just ninety seventeen an Army,
but Sendek convinced him to meet Krzyzewski, and he did
twice and was blown away by him and said to

(06:29):
the Sendek at one point, I think this is the
next great coach. And Steve said, good hire him. I
can't hire a coach from Army with a nine and
seventeen record, And that.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Is indeed true. Nine and seventeen at Army isn't exactly
what you want to bring to a ACC program that
had just gotten to the Elite A. True, they were
losing many of those star players who got him to
the Elite eight. But my goodness, nine and seventeen from
Army no powerhouse when it comes to NCAA basketball, that's

(07:01):
for sure. When we come back, more of this remarkable
story of how coach Kay's career almost didn't come to
be here on our American Stories. Here are our American Stories.

(07:32):
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith
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(07:53):
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
our American Stories. We last left off learning that Duke

(08:14):
Athletic director Tom Butters saw coach K as the next
great basketball coach. Talk about some vision, but he couldn't
bring himself to pull the trigger. And a coach from
Army with a nine and seventeen record, Let's return to
a friend of coach K's and sportswriter of twenty three
New York Times bestsellers, including the one he wrote about

(08:36):
Coach K, The Legends Club. Here's John Feinstein.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Butters did hire Skrzyzewski, and in fact he shocked the
basketball world. It was completely unexpected. As I said, he'd
been nine and seventeen at Army, and Night interestingly was
pushing Weltlick for the job. Butters had spoken to Knight
about who we should hire, and Knight had told him Weltlick,
and Butter said, well, what about Mike Krzhevsky because Steve

(09:04):
Sendek had brought him up. And Knight said, well, I
don't think this is the time for Mike, but he's
got all of my good qualities and none of my bad,
which was a very accurate statement as it turned out.
But the other thing is that when Shizhevski got the job,
he literally had to spell his name for the media
at his opening press conference, and he said that one

(09:26):
of his goals as a coach was for his players
to be able to spell his name by the time
they graduated. Of course, this is in the days when
players did actually graduate. The next day, the student newspaper
at Duke the Chronicle, which is where I started my career,
had a headline that said not a typo Shozhevski, and
most people had not heard of the guy. I mean,

(09:48):
basketball junkies like me had heard of him and knew him,
but nobody in the acc had any idea who he was.
And again, he took a lot of guts for Tom
Butters to hire him at that moment, and in fact,
after Shrzewski's third year, when Butters didn't fire him, he
got death threats literally from boosters. And in fact I

(10:09):
met with him Tom Butters when I was working on
my book The Legends Club on Shrzyzewski. Jim Elvano and
Dean Smith, and he brought with him a box, and
in the box were letters, and one stack of the
letters were from boosters in nineteen eighty written in nineteen
eighty three nineteen eighty four, saying fire him or I
will never give another dollar to do. In the second

(10:32):
stack of the letters were letters sent in nineteen ninety,
after Duke had turned it around and Shrzyzewski had become
a star, and he was offered the Boston Celtics job
by none other than Read Hourback, and the letters were
from essentially the same group who had written in nineteen
eighty three eighty four saying get rid of this guy,
saying whatever you have to do, whatever you have to
pay him, do not let him leave. And fortunately for Duke,

(10:56):
it wasn't about the money. Mike felt that he hadn't
won a national championship yet, and so even though he'd
grown up as a Celtics fan and worshiped Red hour Back,
he said, the job's not done yet and turned it down,
and of course won his first national title the next year.
And that's how much it turned around. When Mike was
offered the Lakers' job in two thousand and four, he
was offered forty million dollars for five years, and he

(11:18):
wasn't going to take it, but he had to give
it some thought. Given them money, and it was the Lakers,
and he called Butters and he said, what do you think, Tom?
And he said, I think you should give me a
ten percent finders fee if you take the job. And
Mike said, okay, I'll send you four thousand dollars because
his first year salary was forty thousand dollars. And so
they flailed for three years, and in nineteen eighty three,

(11:42):
Mike's third year, they lost their last game of the
season one hundred and nine to sixty six to Virginia
in the ACC Tournament. Ralph Sampson, if you walk up
to Mike Shesky right now and say what was the
score of the game against Virginia in the ACC Tournament
nineteen eighty three, he can tell tell you what it
was in an instant. He's never forgotten. And the fourth

(12:05):
game that night, first night of the ACC Tournament was
Georgia Tech and Maryland. And I was the Maryland beat
writer for the Post. And Bobby Dwyer, who was Mike's
number one assistant at the time, who'd come with him
from Army, came into the Omni, the old arena there
which is now long gone, and found me and Keith Drumm,

(12:26):
who was the sports editor of Durham Morning Herald at
the time and was probably the only member of the
North Carolina media who hadn't attacked Shayzewski and hadn't called
for him to be fired. North Carolina media then as now,
is made up largely of North Carolina graduates. School has
a great journalism school, and many, if not most, stay

(12:47):
in the state. Keith had also gone to North Carolina,
but he liked Shazhevski, liked and respect to Dean Smith too,
but he liked Shazhevsky and thought he was going to
be a great coach someday. Keith ended up being an
NBA scout, so his level of understanding of basketball was
different than most sports writers. So Dwyer came to the

(13:08):
press table where Keith and I were sitting and said,
when this game is over, you both need to come
with me back to our hotel. And we said why,
and he said, because Mickey Mike's wife is in the
room crying because she's convinced they're going to get fired.
All the alumni and boosters have Tom Butters backed up
against the wall in the lobby demanding that he fires

(13:30):
Krzyzewski immediately, and Mike is pacing around trying to figure
out who to kill first because he's so angry with everybody.
And so when the game was over, Keith and I
it was after midnight by then, got in the car
with Bobby and we drove to the perimeter of Atlanta
where Duke was staying and went to the hotel and

(13:51):
it was pouring down rain and we drove to a
Denny's nearby. It was Mike, it was Bobby, Keith, me,
Tom Mikel, the sports and information director, Keith's wife, Barbie,
and Johnny Moore, who was Tom Michael's assistant, and we
walked into the Denny's. We sat down and they gave
us water, and by now it's two in the morning,

(14:12):
and Tom Mikel held up his glass and said, here's
too forgetting tonight, and Shizhoewski held up his glass and said,
here's to never blanking forgetting tonight. Blanking's one of his
favorite words, for the record, and so we all we
didn't laugh because he was dead serious. And then the

(14:34):
discussion went on and Dwyer mentioned that Tom Sheehy, who
had verbally committed to Virginia very good player, might be
thinking twice about that commitment and maybe they could get
back involved and try to recruit Sheehy, and Shoshowsky shook
his head and said, no, no, First of all, we
don't do that. Second of all, if we can't win

(14:55):
next year with these four freshmen allery Billis Dawkins and
David Henderson and Tommy Amaker who is coming in as
the point guard, then we should get fired. And in
many ways that statement to me, having known Mike for
as long as I have, that's who Mike Sizshewsky is.
It's never someone else's fault. Mike Krzyzewski has always taken

(15:19):
the approach what did I do wrong? How do I
get better now? Some of that is his West Point training,
because when you're a pleeve at West Point and an
upperclassman speaks to you, you're allowed three answers, yes sir,
no sir, no excuse sir. And Shizshewski's life has been
built on no excuse, sir. I never met a coach
who uses failure to his advantage more than Shoishchevsky, and

(15:44):
that night was a perfect example. So the next year,
of course, with those five guys I mentioned, they went
twenty four and ten. They beat North Carolina with Michael
Jordan in the ACC Tournament, and that was the turnaround.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
And you've been listen seeing to John Feinstein tell a
heck of a story about how Coach K's career at
Duke almost didn't happen. After year three, still not winning.
At the heart of Tobacco Road, the heart of ACC
basketball country, Coach K loses to the University of Virginia
and Ralph Sampson's team by an epic, epic blowout one

(16:23):
nine to sixty six. It does not get worse than that.
And losing it in of all places in the ACC Tournament,
everyone was sure that was it. The boosters were coming
after Coach K. Everyone was. The wife was crying, and
he was just mad. And who was he mad at?
He was mad at Coach K in the end, and
he was taking responsibility and ownership for that loss as

(16:47):
he was taught to do at West Point. Three answers
to a question at West Point by an older person,
and that is an older student folks, when you're a freshman,
a senior has to be addressed as yes, sir, no sir,
or no excuse sir. And as John Feinstein said, no
excuse sir, those were the words that Coach K lived by.

(17:09):
And by the way, I love that scene in that Dennis.
It's pouring rain and there's one coach toasting and forgetting
the game. And what does coach K say, reflecting his
true character, his competitive nature and a little bit of
his Irish Catholic well, let us just say fanciful nature.
With some swear words, he says, here's to never blanking

(17:29):
forgetting tonight, never forgetting, And that's what animated coach K.
That loss, that failure drove so much of his life.
When we come back more of this remarkable piece of
storytelling by the great American sportswriter John Feinstein. Here on
our American story and we continue with our American stories

(18:10):
and with John Feinstein. Duke's head basketball coach K was
almost fired in nineteen eighty three, as we learn, but
the following year he went twenty four and ten. This
was the turnaround season for coach K. Let's return to
his friend and sportswriter of twenty three New York Times bestsellers,
including the one he wrote about coach k the Legends Club.

(18:34):
Let's return to John Feinstein.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
From there again. They made the tournament the next year,
and in nineteen eighty six they went thirty seven to three,
went to the national championship game, lost, I will say
on a bad call. Krzewski would never say that, but
I will, and became the college basketball's next great dynasty.
It's my opinion that the only coach who you can

(18:58):
put ahead of Krzyzewska Mount Rushmore is John Wooden. But
five national championships, thirteen final fours, more than wouldn't even
and ACC championships, and I mean he went to twenty
three sweet sixteens. That's just stupid. Twenty three and in
every one of them because in the old days, of course,

(19:19):
you know, before they expanded the tournament, conference champions went
straight to the sweet sixteen. But starting in nineteen eighty five,
you had to win two games to get to the
sweet sixteen and six to win the championships. So twenty
three sweet sixteens? Are you? I mean, Dean Smith, great
coach longevity, all that went to eighteen, which is a

(19:40):
great number. And but the first three he didn't have
to win a game to get there because they once
they won the ACC they were in the sweet sixteen.
So his numbers are just ridiculous. Twelve hundred and five wins.
I mean, the numbers just go on and on. But
to me, the one thing about Kryzewsky that shouldn't be forgotten.
He went to his first Final four in nineteen eighty six.

(20:02):
He went to his last Final four thirty six years later,
in twenty twenty two. And think about how much college
basketball changed during those thirty six years. There was a
forty five second clock for the first year in nineteen
eighty six. There was no three point shot in nineteen
eighty six, there was no one had ever heard the
phrase one and done in nineteen eighty six. And the game,

(20:24):
the way the game was played, has changed so much
since Mike first started coaching, which was at Army in
nineteen seventy six, and he adapted. He kept saying, if
I want to continue to coach, I have to change.
Not I'm going to sit here and say it's terrible
the change has taken place. I'm like that myself, but

(20:45):
twenty twenty two is last year he goes to a
Final four with the youngest team he ever coached. So
I could see that in him very early on. I
really believed if Duke gave him the time, he was
going to become a great coach. That night at Denny's
was sort of a key moment. In fact, so in

(21:06):
nineteen ninety one when they won the national championship for
the first time, I walked on the court after the
game and I walked up to Mike and I put
up my hand and I said, hey, congratulations, I'm so
happy for you. And he pulled me in and he said,
Who've come a long way from the blanking Denny's, haven't we.
And twenty years after that, I was working on a

(21:28):
book called One on One, which was sort of about
my experiences with the people I dealt with in my
first ten books. It was a professional semi memoir and
one of the people, obviously I wanted to talk to
was Mike, and I called him and I said, look,
next week, when you play at UNC Greensboro, you're going
to go past Dean Smith on the all time wins list.

(21:49):
And if you go back to those early days at Duke,
There's no way we would have ever thought about you
and Dean Smith in the same sentence, much less you're
going past Dean Smith. And I'd like to come down
and just hang out with with you and talk to
you about those early days and things like that. And
he said, sure, come on down, meet me in my
office at two thirty. You can ride the bus to
Greensboro with us. We'll talk then, and once we get

(22:11):
there we'll have time in the locker room before the
game starts. Is that okay for you? And I said great.
So I drove down to Durham and met two friends
for lunch. One was Bill Brill, who was also a
Dude graduate, and the other was Mike Craig, who's now
the athletic director at Saint John's, but back then he
was kind of at Shazshewsky's Man Friday. He was his
chief fundraiser, and if you watched Mike walk off a

(22:35):
court after a game, two feet behind him was Mike
Craig at all times. And so we went to lunch
and Mike Craig said, so, when are you going to
talk to Coach K And I said, on the bus
going to Greensboro, and he said, you came all the
way down here just to talk to him on a
cell phone. I said, no, I'm going to talk to
him from the next seat. And he said, no, no, no, no,

(22:57):
you misunderstood something. Nobody who's not part of the team
rides that bus except for Mickey. He said, I don't
even ride that bus, so you misunderstood something. So I
walked him through what Mike had said. I said, what
did I misunderstand? And Mike Craik's shaking his head and
he goes, I don't understand it. Why would he let
you do that? Why would he let you do that?
And I said, because I was in the blank and Denny's.

(23:18):
And to this day, Mike will bring that up to
me when we're just talking about how important that night
was in his life. Mike will tell you. And Dean
Smith said the same thing about his first three years
at North Carolina that in today's world, with with social media,
with the internet, with sports talk radio, with twenty four

(23:40):
hour sports networks, he probably would have been fired by
the end of his third year. That you know, I
got emails and tweets from North Carolina fans during this
past season when North Carolina was sixteen and sixteen and seven,
but they had just lost to Duke by twenty at home, saying,
Kubert Davis can't do this. Hubert Davis is was the
wrong guy. We got to get rid of Hubert Davis. Well,

(24:02):
they ended up in the National Championship Game and beat
twice along the way to get there. So that's the
way the world is today. It's knee jerk reactions. It
wasn't that way. There weren't nearly as many games on
television in those days. Sports talk radio hadn't started yet.
Nineteen eighty seven. WFAN was the first all sports talk
station in New York City. There was no social media,

(24:25):
there was no internet, so Mike was able to fly
pretty much under the radar other than with Duke people
during that time. And even then, it took a lot
of guts for Tom Butters to stand by him throughout
that period. And like I always, I always say this
to people that he's a better guy than he was

(24:46):
a coach. And that's a hell of a statement if
you think about it. But he's still digging out right
now from all the emails and cards and letters that
he's gotten from people. He said he had three thousand
of them after the season, and he wants to answer
every one of them and the things that he's done

(25:06):
for people that nobody knows about. It goes on. The
list goes on and on and on and on. My
brother had cancer twenty one years ago, and he's also
a dude graduate. And I called Mike and I said, listen,
would you mind giving my brother a call, you know,
because it would cheer him up just to hear from
you right now. Mike said sure, so he called him

(25:27):
and they were on the phone for about an hour.
And my brother is a typical fan, you know, he
knows better than the coach. So he said, Coach, can
I give you some advice? And Mike said, yeah, sure, Bobby,
and he said, you need to play Casey Sanders more.
Casey Sanders was the backup center, and Mike said, okay,
I'll give that some thought. Well, in February, Carlos Boozer

(25:49):
got hurt, so Sanders became a starter while Boozer was out,
and then when Boozer came back, because they'd been playing well,
Sanders continued to art, although Boozer still got the bulk
of the minutes, and when they won the national championship
that year, and to this day, my brother takes credit
to that national championship, and every once in a while

(26:11):
he Columbia say Shryshewski should do this, and I'll say,
here's his cell number. You give m a call and
tell him that.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
And a terrific job on the production and the editing
by Greg Hangler, And a special thanks to John Feinstein
for sharing this remarkable story about his friend. And what
a thing to be able to say after years of
writing sports is that these weren't mere subjects you were
writing about, but friends. And that shows the character and
nature of John's work and his commitment to telling the

(26:40):
story of American sports and the people who make it home.
And it's a business, but it's more than a business,
my goodness. We learned that from the passion from the fans,
their knee jerk reactions to losses. It's overwhelming. I listened
to sports talk radio sometimes and I just pity any
head coach of anything. The relentless criticism and the desire
for immediate gratification is almost unrelenting. And how to manage

(27:03):
it in today's environment will kudos to the people who
do And that night at Denny's that's stuck with Coach
K all the way through. He never did forget John Feinstein,
the story of Coach K and how his career almost
didn't happen here on our American Stories