A Season Inside (52 page)

The only drawback to the whole affair was the scheduling of the basketball game. When Washington Coach Andy Russo arrived at the arena and was told that both teams were supposed to clear the floor fifteen minutes prior to tip-off, he was furious. “Is this a basketball game,” he said, “or an awards banquet?”

Russo wasn’t being unreasonable. It was bad enough, coming in as fodder for the Wildcats on a night like this, without being told you couldn’t even warm up properly. As it turned out, though, it was
Arizona that wasn’t ready to play when the game started. The Wildcats still had their minds on the ceremony. Sean Elliott began the game by missing two free throws, Arizona missed six of its first eight shots, and at halftime the lead was only 34–33, this against a team it had beaten 110–71 on the road.

Halftime solved the problem. Olson reminded the players how embarrassing it would be if they should manage to lose this game after all the accolades and cheers and the Wildcats responded by scoring the first 11 points of the second half. It was a romp from there. Olson took Kerr out with 3:35 left and the score 80–62.

Each senior got one more huge cheer. The final was 89–71.

The only negative part of the evening for Kerr was the onset of a migraine headache. Occasionally he gets migraines and, just as a TV cameraman switched on his light, Kerr started to feel dizzy. His vision blurred. He managed to make it through the interviews, then had to sit down to collect himself.

“This is about the third one this season,” he said. “The only time I mind is when I get them during a game. Then they affect my shooting.” He smiled. “Against some of the teams we play, it wouldn’t matter. But now we’re getting to the point where
everything
matters.”

True enough. In one sense, this night had been an ending for Kerr. But in another, it was a beginning. Arizona was 28–2. Now, the season the players had been waiting for since December was about to begin.

Normally, Billy King has no trouble sleeping on the morning of a basketball game. He stays up late, either talking with friends or watching a movie, so that when he goes to sleep he will be tired and sleep soundly.

But this morning, he was up early, lying awake in bed, his mind too full to allow him to go back to sleep. For King, it was hard to believe that in a few hours he would hear himself introduced in Cameron Indoor Stadium for the last time. “I could still remember the first time so vividly,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘Can it really be four years already?’ ”

Not only was it four years, but the senior season that King had wanted to be so special had turned sour. After bouncing back from the
N.C. State loss at home with five straight victories, the last one an impressive come-from-behind overtime win at Kansas, the Blue Devils had lost three straight.

Their record was 20–6 and today they were faced with the task of beating North Carolina in the regular season finale just to ensure themselves of third place in the ACC. This last game was supposed to have decided the regular season title. But Carolina had already wrapped that up and State had clinched second.

Once more, King reviewed the events of the last two weeks in his mind. What baffled him was the way the streak had started. After the Kansas game the Blue Devils had been on a high. They were 20–3 and even though they knew they had three road games coming up, they didn’t think anything could be tougher than winning at Allen Field House against Danny Manning.

More important, the Kansas game had been a turning point for Quin Snyder. He had stepped forward and asserted himself as
the
point guard on this team, scoring 21 points and handing out 5 assists. “If we win at N.C. State,” King remembered, “then it’s a two-team race for the conference championship—us and Carolina.”

But the Blue Devils didn’t win at State. Once again, they were done in by the spell of the Wolfpack. They led by 11 points in the first half and still led with five minutes left. But State took the lead at 75–74 and the minute that happened, everyone panicked. Hurried three-point shots began going up from everywhere. The offense broke down completely. State outscored them 16–4 in the closing minutes and the final was an embarrassing 89–78—Duke’s worst loss of the year.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski was genuinely angry, not so much with the loss but with the lack of poise. Duke teams are not supposed to fall apart in the face of a rally or a tough crowd. But this was a delicate team, one whose offense could disappear at any time. It had done just that
twice
against State. For the next two days in practice, Krzyzewski challenged his team to prove that it was tough; he dared them to bounce back and win at Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets were still on the same roll that had victimized N.C. State. And this game, on national TV, was the last home game for Tech’s seniors.

Tech blew to a 21–8 lead on the Blue Devils, but this time Krzyzewski’s team didn’t panic. They came back to trail at halftime 44–42, and the game went right to the wire. But in the last two minutes, Tech got
an unlikely basket from Edmund Sherrod while Danny Ferry missed a three-pointer. Tech won 91–87.

This time, Krzyzewski felt better. Tech had played a superb game and the Blue Devils had been about two plays away from winning anyway. But King was concerned. The opposition had scored 180 points in two games and that was too many. “I think we were worrying so much about our offense that we had gotten out of sync with our defense,” he said. “Plus, we had gotten to feeling kind of sorry for ourselves, like we somehow deserved better because we’d worked so hard all season. I don’t think a lot of the guys, especially the younger ones, really understood what working hard meant.”

All of this preyed on King’s mind as Duke bussed down to Clemson. He was concerned about this game. Clemson was always the toughest trip of the season because it involved a tedious five-hour bus ride. What’s more, Duke had beaten the Tigers so easily in February—101–63—that taking them lightly would be a natural thing to do. King was right on all counts. Duke played its worst game of the season and let a mediocre team think it had a chance to pull a stunning upset. The crowd got behind the Tigers, the Blue Devils got flustered, and Clemson won the game 79–77.

This was rock bottom. Krzyzewski had not lost a game to Clemson since 1984 and had never lost in four years to Coach Cliff Ellis. In fact, no one on the team had ever lost to Clemson before. Now, with the important part of the season just beginning, Duke was floundering.

On the quiet bus trip home, Krzyzewski came back to talk to the players. As they gathered around him, he asked them, quietly, “What do you guys think is wrong?”

One by one, they answered. Some of it was standard stuff: We aren’t executing; we aren’t being patient; we aren’t working hard enough on defense. King was only half listening. He and Strickland, as the captains, would be the last two people to talk. In his mind, King was reconstructing a speech David Henderson, a senior on the 1986 Final Four team, had given to the team just before the start of the ACC Tournament that year. When it came his turn to talk, King, playing the role of Joe Biden, plagiarized a lot of the Henderson speech.

“It’s March,” he said. “We’ve worked since October for all the games that are ahead of us. We know how good we can be. We know what our potential is. But do we know about making sacrifices? I’m not talking about coming to practice every day and things like that. I’m
talking about little things. Not going to the party you want to go to because you need the rest. Not having a beer or two when you would like one.

“It’s easy to rationalize, to say it’s not a big deal and why shouldn’t I do it. Next month there’ll be plenty of time to party, to have a good time, to think about things besides basketball. But right now everything we do should be basketball because if it’s not, we may look back at this month and say, ‘If only …’ That’s the one thing we don’t want to do. We want to know that we’ve done everything we possibly could to win.”

It wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone speech and it wasn’t exactly like the one Henderson had made. But King sensed that his teammates listened. He knew they wanted to get things right just as much as he did. “The only difference,” he said later, “is that they all had another chance. They could say, ‘Well,
next
year,’ if things didn’t work out this year. Kevin and I couldn’t say that.”

The next day in practice Krzyzewski went back to basics. He wanted each player to understand his role, no matter how simple that might be. Danny Ferry and Kevin Strickland were shooters. Billy King and Robert Brickey were screeners. Quin Snyder was the point guard. On offense he was in charge. On defense, King was in charge. The players knew all of this—they had been practicing for almost five months. But Krzyzewski felt they had lacked focus during the three-game losing streak and needed to reinforce things that should have been automatic. Perhaps things had become so automatic that the players had become sloppy about it.

The Carolina game did not have the meaning it would have had it been for the regular season title, but it was still vital on three levels: First, Duke needed a victory to finish third. That would mean a first-round game in the ACC Tournament against a struggling Virginia team as opposed to an opener against an inconsistent but very talented Maryland team. Second, the bleeding had to be stopped after three straight losses. To finish the season on a four-game losing streak, the last one at home, would be devastating for the team’s confidence.

And last, but certainly not least, it was King and Strickland’s last home game. As he pulled himself out of bed on that Sunday morning, King thought to himself, “I’m going to remember this day one way or the other. I can’t let it be a bad one.” He repeated this thought to Strickland as they got ready to leave for the game.

Tip-off was at 1
P.M.
because of the NBC telecast. More than one hundred of the students had been waiting in line to get choice seating since Tuesday. This kind of loyalty touched a chord in Krzyzewski. He spent the last three days before the game letting the students inside whenever he could, ordering pizza for them and bringing them blankets. “It’s kids like this that make Duke special,” he said later.

By noon, the place was jammed. Some of the players had been concerned that, with spring break beginning Friday and the team playing poorly, the students might not stay until Sunday. They had stayed.

The pregame ceremony for the seniors was brief, very different from Arizona’s. The ovation was as deafening but the nature of the game that was to come made it different. “I wanted to enjoy it, to stand there and think about the last four years,” King said. “But I couldn’t. My mind was on the game. I wanted to get back in the locker room and get ready.”

Krzyzewski’s pregame talk was nothing out of the ordinary. Until the end when he called King and Strickland up front with him. “Our seniors,” he said, “don’t lose their last home game. Now let’s go.”

Outside, the students were ready, as they always are when Carolina is in town. They serenaded Dean Smith with a “Dean can’t drive” chant, a reminder of his run-in with the Duke bus in the fall. Even Smith, who has been disdainful of the Duke students’ antics over the years, laughed at that one.

Technically, this game meant nothing to Carolina. The Tar Heels had clinched first place by beating Georgia Tech on Wednesday. But no game with Duke—especially at Duke—is meaningless to Smith. In 1982, moments before the national championship game, someone asked Smith how many cigarettes he had smoked in the last hour. He pulled out the pack he was working on, looked at it and said, “Less than before the Duke game.”

Duke was 10–17 that year.

Duke is not only Carolina’s arch-rival, it is the one school in the ACC that when it does beat Carolina, is always doing so with a roster made up entirely of players who are academically superior—usually by a wide margin—at Carolina.

What’s more, the irreverence of the Duke students is completely the opposite of the orderly, polite, do-everything-by-the-numbers crowd at Carolina. Smith is not a man who is comfortable with irreverence and
he is not comfortable at Duke. The only way to deal with something you are uncomfortable with is to beat it, which, more often than not, Smith has done. In Cameron, he was 13–13 going into this game—but eleven of those victories had come during the last fifteen years.

Today, the Tar Heels begin as if they fully intend to win here again. They lead 12–6 by the first TV time-out. Duke is clearly tight. Sensing this, Krzyzewski tries something new. Instead of substituting a player or two at a time, he sends in five reserves at once. This is an old Smith tactic. Send in five fresh bodies who will go full-bore for a minute or two and then send your starters back in feeling rested.

The tactic works. The second team plays two minutes to a 2–2 tie. When the starters come back, they promptly go on a 7–0 run that puts Duke up 23–20. From there, they seesaw until halftime when it is 36–36.

This is exactly the kind of game everyone expected. King is concerned. Although the Blue Devils escaped with a victory in Chapel Hill in a Piss Factor situation in January, he doesn’t want this game to come down to that. At the end of halftime, just before it is time to go back out, he says to his teammates, “If you can’t
play
for twenty minutes, don’t come back out.”

They come back out and they
play
. During the first six minutes, the Blue Devils put on a basketball clinic, the kind that Carolina is used to putting on for other people. After being zero-for-seven on three-point shots in the first half, they catch fire: Snyder hits one. Then Strickland. Then Snyder again. Snyder makes a steal and feeds Strickland for a dunk. Another steal, another Snyder feed and Brickey dunks. Smith’s superstar, J. R. Reid, swings an elbow in frustration and is called for an offensive foul. Snyder drives inside.

The place is going bananas by now. Snyder leads another fast break, finds King on the wing, and he dunks. Then, King steals the inbounds pass and feeds Ferry for a jumper. Incredibly Duke has scored 26 points in six minutes and the lead is 62–45. All of a sudden, the struggling team has become a dominant one.