In 1991, when Evelyn Krzyzewski traveled to watch her son Mike win the NCAA championship, Mike’s brother, Bill, brought her to the airport in a limousine. “You shouldn’t have done this,” she told Mike.
“But the next morning, we had breakfast in the hotel dining room,” Mike Krzyzewski said, “and she leaned over and said, ‘You know, Mike, I’m really starting to like this.’ Now if the next time I see her, she has a tan and she is wearing a lot of gold jewelry, I’ll know I made a mistake.”
But Krzyzewski’s mother, who died in 1996, never changed.
Neither did her son, who takes his Duke team into the NCAA Tournament for the last time on Friday against Cal State Fullerton. The man, who has coached for 46 years, won more games than anyone else and captured five NCAA championships, is headed for his last dance.
He is the American Dream at work in the Land of Privilege that is the Duke campus. A son of Chicago’s Near North Side, the product of an ethnic neighborhood where people swept their sidewalks. He remained the same when he left his first coaching job at Army and brought his blue collar and the name nobody in Durham could spell to Duke University, which prided itself on believing that Harvard was simply the Duke of the North.
Evelyn Krzyzewski made sure of that when Bobby Knight sat down at Mrs. K’s kitchen table to recruit him as a player for West Point. She looked at her son and said: “Mike, you got to be dumb not to go. Whoever heard of a kid in this neighborhood getting a chance like this?”
He stayed the same guy later at Duke who looked at the academic schedules his kids keep, who listened to the delightful way each one of them can express himself before a large group and then who makes it a point to say: “If you say you have to cheat to win, you are just looking for an excuse to explain why you don’t.”
In 1980 when he showed up at Duke, people who were for — but not necessarily of — Duke will tell you that the last thing they expected on campus then was a Polish-American Catholic head coach. And the late Jim Valvano, who coached basketball down the road in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle Area at NC State, made no secret after he won the NCAA Tournament in that same general time frame that he had been told no coach whose name ended in a bird could count on job security.
But here came Krzyzewski, who got the job because his old coach at Army Knight, had recommended him and then challenged Duke AD Tom Butters — “What’s the matter, Tom, are you afraid to hire him?” — when he tried to back down.
Army coach Bob Knight (right) and his captain Mike Krzyzewski (left) before the 1968-69 season.West Point athletics
The day Krzyzewski was hired, a local paper had already run the famous headline “Butters hires a big name” and then used the eight consonants and two vowels in his name to fill out the streamer.
Within three years, Krzyzewski was the coach of a stagnant program, in a pit of ACC quick sand. Meanwhile, back in the rest of the Triangle, Valvano at State and Dean Smith at Carolina each won a national title over that stretch.
But that was then and this is now.
Now, as he winds down a spectacular career, there is nobody — but absolutely nobody — anywhere in his basketball-mad state who doesn’t know how to spell his name. Here, where the University of North Carolina is so beloved it is simply known as Carolina, where Wake Forest has its following, as does NC State, and everyone agrees there is no neutral ground when you speak of Duke basketball.
Carolina, with 29,000 students, owns the state. But Duke, with 14,960 students, draws his allegiance from all over the Continental Land Mass.
It didn’t happen by accident. It is the residue of the work ethic, the values and the basketball brain of the coach whose name they finally learned to spell. For him, there never was a duke mystique. For Krzyzewski, it comes down to how he became who he is and his obligation to transmit those values to the kids who play for him. In that transmission, the Duke player and the Duke profile were born.
Once I asked him what he hoped he had brought to the program. He didn’t hesitate:
“(I come from the) blue collar concept my parents gave me back in Chicago, the support the Polish community gave me there, the values and the discipline I learned from the West Point community as a cadet and as a coach,” he said . “So, we try to come out every day with a passion for the work, to give an honest effort, to like what we do, to recruit kids within that framework.”
His voice is a flat, nasally monotone, but the passion of blue-collar Chicago seems to punctuate every word. You can almost hear the rumble of the elevated trains beneath his words, and it is clear that long before he got to West Point, the old world, straight-arrow immigrant values of his parents, as he grew up a mile and a half from Chicago Stadium, shaped what made him who he is.
In sometimes subliminal and often times overt ways, it has shaped almost every player who ever played the game for him. So many of his former stars come back. I remember a day during an NCAA Tournament appearance one of them told me:
“It’s him (Coach K). He creates the Duke mentality and the kids pass it on — fight hard, play hard and respect what you do on and off the court. Yes, there’s a similarity among them, but success flows from success, and Coach K has created a lot of torchbearers and a lot of leaders to whom they can pass the torch.”
In addition to championship teams, Krzyzewski has created the championship prototype. Interview them and hear the way they speak. Players graduate and leave with a self-assurance that goes beyond the basketball court.
Talk to them after they graduate and you get the feeling they believe that Duke will always be Duke, and Duke equals success, always wearing the white hats, always the favorites and, ironically, that makes them the bad guys.
After he put it this way:
“At most places (after his first three wretched seasons), I would have been replaced and talked about on talk shows. But look what I’ve had, a hand in shaping people — not just the All-Americans but so many kids who became leaders in whatever they did after graduation. At the end of the day, you have to be happy with who you are and where you were. And what you did.
“I love Duke.”
And they love to spell his name.
Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus of The Star-Ledger. He can be reached at jizenberg@starledger.com.