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Full-Court Press in North Carolina
After Duke beat UNC for the first time during Krzyzewski’s tenure, the coach celebrated with his wife. A daughter was born nine months later.
By WILL BLYTHE / Wall Street Journal
March 16, 2016
I had reasons to be dubious of John Feinstein’s “The Legends Club,” a chronicle of the scalding rivalry between the college basketball coaches Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano, whose desperate battles with one another in the 1980s and 1990s turned North Carolina’s Research Triangle into the athletic equivalent of a war zone. After all, Mr. Feinstein graduated from Duke, while I was raised on Tobacco Road by a North Carolinian who felt about Duke the way a member of the IRA would have about the Brits.
More to the point, Mr. Feinstein has become in recent years a one-man sports-industrial complex, commentating and churning out books like the Detroit assembly lines once spat out cars; at times, his efforts have felt similarly mass-produced. By the end of “The Legends Club,” however, I was cheering the writer from my couch. The book is one of his best, a beguilingly personal, sometimes heartbreaking look at the psychic cost of doing battle in America’s most brutally, nakedly competitive (and actual) arenas. It makes a fitting bookend to the author’s first, “A Season on the Brink” (1986), his hair-raising exposé of Indiana coach Bobby Knight, expletives included.
The narrative takes off in the spring of 1980, when Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano arrive at Duke and North Carolina State, respectively, to take over venerable basketball programs. Neither is prepared for the statewide cult of Dean Smith, the longtime North Carolina coach who would win two national titles before retiring in 1997. “If Jimmy and I had landed in a spaceship from Mars instead of on airplanes from New York,” Mr. Krzyzewski says, “we couldn’t possibly have had less understanding of what an icon Dean was.”
THE LEGENDS CLUB
By John Feinstein
Doubleday, 404 pages, $27.95
The author’s depiction of Smith, while respectful, even affectionate, is more opaque than the other two portraits, not surprisingly given the nearly phobic aversion to publicity of Smith (who died last year at 83). We do get an unobstructed view, however, of a lion of a competitor, whose knack for gaining even the tiniest of edges during games, at press conferences and at coaching conventions drives his opponents past the brink of sanity. At half time during one game at Chapel Hill, for instance, Maryland coach Lefty Driesell is discovered by an assistant coach in the visiting team’s bathroom, standing on top of the toilet, probing the ceiling for microphones. “I’m sure Dean’s got this place bugged,” he mutters.
It takes only months for Smith and Mr. Krzyzewski to run afoul of each other in the winter of 1980, when the new Duke coach refuses to let go of Smith’s hand during the traditional postgame handshake after an argument has broken out over whether any time remains. (North Carolina won by two.) Mr. Kryzyzewski holds his grip tight and pulls Smith closer, asking him to acknowledge that “it was a hell of a game.” Smith refuses, saying only “I’ll remember this” as the two men glare at each other. “We got the right guy,” a colleague tells athletic director Tom Butters, who is watching from the stands.
Jim Valvano comes across as less single-minded than his rivals. The New York City native is a wisecracking paisano in Dixie, a voracious reader who impresses Mr. Krzyzewski with the breadth of his knowledge and a seeker who sometimes grows bored with basketball. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” he asks Mr. Feinstein during a 3 a.m. chat as he lies on his sofa like a patient being analyzed. He considers working as a stand-up comic. Mr. Krzyzewski is convinced Valvano would have become another Jay Leno. His widow says he was determined to do more than just coach basketball—which, it turned out, he had no choice but to do. Despite having won a national championship in 1983, he was forced out of NC State in 1990 after a series of accusations, including the poor academic record of some of his players. Valvano died not long afterward of bone cancer and, perhaps appropriately, is now remembered as much for the rousing speech he gave on ESPN about his illness as for his coaching.
Though Mr. Krzyzewski’s feistiness is hardly news, Mr. Feinstein’s portrayal of the Duke coach is the most revelatory in the book and goes a long way toward humanizing the man known by Tar Heels as the Rat, among the printable epithets. Mr. Feinstein interviews the wives of the three coaches, and each is forthright, with Mickie Krzyzewski coming across as her husband’s id, salty and ferocious, insistent at one point that she would leave him if he refuses treatment for his deteriorating health in the woebegone winter of 1995. She gets all revved up by victory, confiding that on Feb. 28, 1981, after Duke beat UNC for the first time during Mr. Krzyzewski’s tenure, the couple celebrated that night by conceiving their third daughter, Jamie. After the same game, Smith’s wife, Linnea, who has just given birth to their daughter Kelly, declares: “That’s it. My daughter’s life is ruined.” She endures a silent ride home from the hospital with her husband.
Given that Mr. Krzyzewski is the only living member of the trio, the book tilts toward his point of view. When he was a younger coach, he told friends that “if I ever start acting like Dean, just shoot me.” Years later, he poor-mouths Duke’s chances against an inferior opponent. Shortly after, the phone rings. “We’re rounding up the guns,” a friend says. One of the book’s ironies is that, as he has built his program, winning five national championships, Mr. Krzyzewski has come to see himself in Dean Smith. “When he retired and I became the target, I finally understood what it was like to be him when all of us were trying to beat him—trying, really, to be him.”
The book winds down without the same vigor with which it begins. How could it not? One of its principals is long dead, another suffering from dementia, then dead himself. There is a scene, however, which caps “The Legends Club” in poignant fashion. Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski run into Dean Smith’s family at the beach. They ask to call on the old coaching foe, who sits blankly in a wheelchair until the end of the visit, when Mr. Krzyzewski whispers: “Coach, I love you.” Smith lays his hand atop that of his former antagonist, squeezes it and smiles. Nearly 33 years after that first bitter handshake, the two rivals say their last goodbye.
Mr. Blythe is the author of “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever,” among other books.
After Duke beat UNC for the first time during Krzyzewski’s tenure, the coach celebrated with his wife. A daughter was born nine months later.
By WILL BLYTHE / Wall Street Journal
March 16, 2016
I had reasons to be dubious of John Feinstein’s “The Legends Club,” a chronicle of the scalding rivalry between the college basketball coaches Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano, whose desperate battles with one another in the 1980s and 1990s turned North Carolina’s Research Triangle into the athletic equivalent of a war zone. After all, Mr. Feinstein graduated from Duke, while I was raised on Tobacco Road by a North Carolinian who felt about Duke the way a member of the IRA would have about the Brits.
More to the point, Mr. Feinstein has become in recent years a one-man sports-industrial complex, commentating and churning out books like the Detroit assembly lines once spat out cars; at times, his efforts have felt similarly mass-produced. By the end of “The Legends Club,” however, I was cheering the writer from my couch. The book is one of his best, a beguilingly personal, sometimes heartbreaking look at the psychic cost of doing battle in America’s most brutally, nakedly competitive (and actual) arenas. It makes a fitting bookend to the author’s first, “A Season on the Brink” (1986), his hair-raising exposé of Indiana coach Bobby Knight, expletives included.
The narrative takes off in the spring of 1980, when Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano arrive at Duke and North Carolina State, respectively, to take over venerable basketball programs. Neither is prepared for the statewide cult of Dean Smith, the longtime North Carolina coach who would win two national titles before retiring in 1997. “If Jimmy and I had landed in a spaceship from Mars instead of on airplanes from New York,” Mr. Krzyzewski says, “we couldn’t possibly have had less understanding of what an icon Dean was.”
THE LEGENDS CLUB
By John Feinstein
Doubleday, 404 pages, $27.95
The author’s depiction of Smith, while respectful, even affectionate, is more opaque than the other two portraits, not surprisingly given the nearly phobic aversion to publicity of Smith (who died last year at 83). We do get an unobstructed view, however, of a lion of a competitor, whose knack for gaining even the tiniest of edges during games, at press conferences and at coaching conventions drives his opponents past the brink of sanity. At half time during one game at Chapel Hill, for instance, Maryland coach Lefty Driesell is discovered by an assistant coach in the visiting team’s bathroom, standing on top of the toilet, probing the ceiling for microphones. “I’m sure Dean’s got this place bugged,” he mutters.
It takes only months for Smith and Mr. Krzyzewski to run afoul of each other in the winter of 1980, when the new Duke coach refuses to let go of Smith’s hand during the traditional postgame handshake after an argument has broken out over whether any time remains. (North Carolina won by two.) Mr. Kryzyzewski holds his grip tight and pulls Smith closer, asking him to acknowledge that “it was a hell of a game.” Smith refuses, saying only “I’ll remember this” as the two men glare at each other. “We got the right guy,” a colleague tells athletic director Tom Butters, who is watching from the stands.
Jim Valvano comes across as less single-minded than his rivals. The New York City native is a wisecracking paisano in Dixie, a voracious reader who impresses Mr. Krzyzewski with the breadth of his knowledge and a seeker who sometimes grows bored with basketball. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” he asks Mr. Feinstein during a 3 a.m. chat as he lies on his sofa like a patient being analyzed. He considers working as a stand-up comic. Mr. Krzyzewski is convinced Valvano would have become another Jay Leno. His widow says he was determined to do more than just coach basketball—which, it turned out, he had no choice but to do. Despite having won a national championship in 1983, he was forced out of NC State in 1990 after a series of accusations, including the poor academic record of some of his players. Valvano died not long afterward of bone cancer and, perhaps appropriately, is now remembered as much for the rousing speech he gave on ESPN about his illness as for his coaching.
Though Mr. Krzyzewski’s feistiness is hardly news, Mr. Feinstein’s portrayal of the Duke coach is the most revelatory in the book and goes a long way toward humanizing the man known by Tar Heels as the Rat, among the printable epithets. Mr. Feinstein interviews the wives of the three coaches, and each is forthright, with Mickie Krzyzewski coming across as her husband’s id, salty and ferocious, insistent at one point that she would leave him if he refuses treatment for his deteriorating health in the woebegone winter of 1995. She gets all revved up by victory, confiding that on Feb. 28, 1981, after Duke beat UNC for the first time during Mr. Krzyzewski’s tenure, the couple celebrated that night by conceiving their third daughter, Jamie. After the same game, Smith’s wife, Linnea, who has just given birth to their daughter Kelly, declares: “That’s it. My daughter’s life is ruined.” She endures a silent ride home from the hospital with her husband.
Given that Mr. Krzyzewski is the only living member of the trio, the book tilts toward his point of view. When he was a younger coach, he told friends that “if I ever start acting like Dean, just shoot me.” Years later, he poor-mouths Duke’s chances against an inferior opponent. Shortly after, the phone rings. “We’re rounding up the guns,” a friend says. One of the book’s ironies is that, as he has built his program, winning five national championships, Mr. Krzyzewski has come to see himself in Dean Smith. “When he retired and I became the target, I finally understood what it was like to be him when all of us were trying to beat him—trying, really, to be him.”
The book winds down without the same vigor with which it begins. How could it not? One of its principals is long dead, another suffering from dementia, then dead himself. There is a scene, however, which caps “The Legends Club” in poignant fashion. Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski run into Dean Smith’s family at the beach. They ask to call on the old coaching foe, who sits blankly in a wheelchair until the end of the visit, when Mr. Krzyzewski whispers: “Coach, I love you.” Smith lays his hand atop that of his former antagonist, squeezes it and smiles. Nearly 33 years after that first bitter handshake, the two rivals say their last goodbye.
Mr. Blythe is the author of “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever,” among other books.