COACH K, THE LIFEBLOOD OF COLLEGE HOOPS, COULDN’T STOP ITS DEMISE
In retrospect, the retiring Mike Krzyzewski should have left Duke to coach Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, because his exhaustive attempts to rescue the college game have fallen on deaf ears
The basketball is round, spinning on a volatile axis, capable of transforming suddenly on a singular week in June 2021 that shakes a sport to its core. Mike Krzyzewski is retiring from the most accomplished career a college coach has known, which is monumental news in its own context until dovetailed with the possible fadeaway of LeBron James as the game’s dominant force.
The NBA will proceed without LeBron, if he indeed is breaking down and fading from peak performance, with Steph Curry and Damian Lillard among the reigning showmen, Luka Doncic and Giannis Antetokounmpo as breathtaking Euro-legends and the Brooklyn Nets as the villainously contrived superteam. The same can’t be said for college hoops without Krzyzewski, who created a four-decade culture machine at Duke and, more than any other figure, drove the popularity of March Madness to billion-dollar heights.
He tried his damndest in recent years to prevent the demise of the college game, warning everyone who listened that the infrastructure was decaying. But what he developed in Durham — a highly desirable fortress where team and academia came first while elite players were prepared for the next level — deteriorated elsewhere into teenaged hero ball and the accompanying sleaze. Dirtbag coaches waged corrupt recruiting wars, enlisting jail-bound assistants to offer everything from illegal payments to sex, and regular seasons were so ragged that they became unwatchable. Even March was diluted, with a sense the magic would be fleeting once the NBA waived its one-and-done rule.
That sad day is coming, soon. Meaning, Coach K’s last stand was his one season with Zion Williamson, one of countless stars to come through rowdy Cameron Indoor Stadium — from Grant Hill to Kyrie Irving to Jayson Tatum to, of course, the reviled Christian Laettner — and leave imprints on the college level. Those days are gone, with top high-school players bypassing programs for the NBA G League (which offers deals as high as $500,000), pro leagues in Europe and Australia or the new Overtime Elite league, backed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Drake.
Last summer, as conferences struggled to plan a full season through a pandemic after the cancellation of the 2020 NCAA tournament, Krzyzewski pleaded once again for the college game to hire a commissioner — and not let the bumbling NCAA president, Mark Emmert, continue his mismanagement. ‘‘We’re the thing that the NCAA is most concerned about, because men’s college basketball produces 90 percent or more of the money for the NCAA, not college football or any other sport,’’ he said. ‘‘So we need to have the tournament, we can’t have it where two years in a row you don’t have the NCAA Tournament. (The NBA) navigated it really well with the (Disney World) Bubble, and they have Adam Silver. And that’s what I’m saying we really need in college basketball.’’
Without central leadership, the sport stumbled through a Bubble-less regular season marred by positive COVID-19 tests and isolated players. True to form, Krzyzewski surveyed the landmines and suggested the games go on pause, which prompted Alabama whipper-snapper Nate Oats to pounce. ‘‘Can I ask you something?’’ he said. ‘‘Do you think if Coach K hadn’t lost the two non-conference games at home, he’d still be saying that?’’ Oats came to his senses and called Krzyzewski to apologize, but reality had set in. No longer was Coach K viewed as a sacred figure, by all, as much as a 74-year-old making excuses. They weren’t listening to him anymore, which was as telling as it was shameful. The new breed didn’t care about what Krzyzewski and other coaching titans had built since the 1970s. They didn’t care about his 41 seasons, five national championships and 1,170 wins.
Good the hell luck without him. Preferring to preserve his wavering health and brighten the bags under his eyes, Coach K will leave after next season as the winningest basketball coach in Division I history. He is exceeded in national titles only by UCLA’s John Wooden, who won his 10 in less complex times when competition wasn’t as formidable.
‘‘Mike's been fantastic for the game of basketball," said Roy Williams, who retired two months ago as Krzyzewski’s nearby nemesis at North Carolina. ‘‘He made everybody bring their A-game for years and years and years. He's just been phenomenal in everything he's done."
Yet he has won only one title, in 2015, since having to adjust his beliefs to the one-and-done crowd the past decade. He has produced 28 NBA lottery picks and 41 first-rounders, but his biggest rival became the one-and-done hustler, Kentucky’s John Calipari. Later, with obvious Duke influences, Villanova and Jay Wright became a state-of-the-art program, followed by Virginia and Tony Bennett and Gonzaga and Mark Few. Last season, when Scott Drew was leading Baylor (Baylor?) to the championship, Duke fell victim to coronavirus issues — Coach K had to quarantine after a family member tested positive — and crashed to 13-11, missing the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1995.
As someone who has covered him forever and wrote about him frequently in his native Chicago — where he still hasn’t been honored with a street or park, but did serve as grand marshal for Polish Constitution Day — I wish Krzyzewski had left Duke for the NBA after his third title in 2001. He said no to overtures from the Celtics and 76ers, but his real mistake came in 2005, when he rejected the Lakers and the chance to coach Kobe Bryant. Phil Jackson was rehired and won two more championships, but having watched Coach K’s three-gold-medal work with NBA superstars in resurrecting the U.S. Olympic team, I’m thinking he would have won title rings, as well.
He carries no regrets. ‘‘I’ve been fortunate,” he said last year in a radio interview. ‘‘If you’re a successful coach or businessperson, you’re going to have opportunities. When professional opportunities occurred … I love Duke, in addition to college basketball. I love working at a university environment. You’re surrounded by great people, not just in sports. … In 2005, when I didn’t accept the (Lakers’) offer, a few months later, Jerry Colangelo offered me the opportunity to coach the national team as the first national team (permanent) coach. I was able to do that for 11 years. I got my NBA fix, so to speak. I’m really happy I got that.’’
His detractors have been loud in a predominantly Black sport, including ESPN analyst and former Michigan Fab Fiver Jalen Rose, who remarked in a documentary, ‘‘I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.’’ Hill rushed to Krzyzewski’s defense, calling the comments ``sad and somewhat pathetic.’’ Coach K reminded Rose that Duke did recruit his Michigan teammate, Chris Webber, but that he passed on Rose because he already had Hill. ‘‘Obviously, it was a poor choice of words and very insulting to everyone at Duke but especially, not just our African-American players, but any African-American students," Krzyzewski told ESPN Radio. ‘‘When you judge within a race, you start judging, like you put categories as to who you are. I think that's just the wrong thing to do."
Whenever and wherever his final buzzer sounds next year — and, naturally, he’ll enter his farewell season with a top recruiting class — he’ll immediately be missed. ‘‘He'll still be important in college athletics. He'll still be important to college basketball,’’ Williams said. We only hope that his appointed Duke successor, Jon Scheyer, has the strength and stamina to deal with a massive, historic burden. Maybe the best tribute to Mike Krzyzewski is that it took me years to type his name without staring at the keyboard, tapping letter after crooked letter.
At some point, the name just wrote itself.
Jay Mariotti, called ‘‘the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes sports and media columns for Barrett Sports Media and appears on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts in production today. He’s an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and radio host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects. Compensation for this column is donated to the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.