It's November 1997, and Trajan Langdon and Steve Wojciechowski are the starting backcourt for the men's basketball team, co-captains of a national championship contender. Travel back in time three years and tell that to some Duke fans, and they wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
But just a year ago, the Blue Devils' guard play was considered their biggest question mark, with Langdon coming off a serious knee injury and Wojciechowski coming off two disappointing seasons.
"We both were kind of out of the team picture for a while, because we weren't looked upon as leaders or even contributors to the team's success," said Langdon, a 6-foot-3, 195-pound junior. "But we picked it up last year, and I think both of us had real good seasons in terms of leading the team and... we're where we wanted to be as [upperclassmen] and leaders of the team."
That leadership spurred Duke to a surprising ACC regular season championship in 1996-97. Langdon earned first-team All-Conference honors, averaging a team-high 14.3 points per game after redshirting the 1995-96 season. Wojciechowski paced the Blue Devils on offense and defense, rarely left the floor as a junior and was named to the All-ACC second team.
"It has not been the same [in recent years] as the teams where we had so much stability from the mid-'80s to '94, with older guys teaching the younger guys," coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "We have that now in Wojo especially and Trajan."
The pair arrived at Duke-along with currently academically-ineligible forward Ricky Price-as of one of the top recruiting classes in the nation. The Blue Devils had reached the Final Four in seven out of nine seasons and the Class of 1998 was supposed to continue Duke's winning tradition.
Wojciechowski was destined to be the next great Blue Devil point guard. If you're 5-foot-11 and very white and show up at any other college basketball powerhouse, people will take one
Twelve games into Wojciechowski's Blue Devil career, however, Krzyzewski left the Duke sidelines to rest his ailing back. The Blue Devils would stumble to a 2-14 record in the ACC; Wojciechowski averaged only four points per game that year and 3.4 in 1995-96.
"Coach K, when I go over to the bench, always gives me a certain amount of confidence," he said. "He allows me to really believe in myself. So when he wasn't there, I didn't have that same confidence. I was kind of like a lost puppy on the freeway. I definitely think that had an effect on my play."
But last season, the "lost puppy" had the Cameron Crazies barking whenever he guarded the ball in honor of his bulldog defense.
How much has one year changed perceptions of Wojciechowski? In its 1996-97 college basketball preview issue, Sports Illustrated questioned whether the point guard would earn much playing time; this season, having picked Duke No. 1, SI put him on its cover.
Whereas the cliche about Wojciechowski is that he looks very ordinary, Langdon has never been just another guy. His memorable first name is that of a great Roman emperor. He hails from Alaska, which to most people is just a big, cold state that doesn't fit on the map and doesn't produce college basketball players. Newsweek did a story on him before he finished high school. The San Diego Padres drafted him in the sixth round of the 1994 amateur baseball draft.
Although Langdon's 11.3 points per game as a freshman gave Blue Devil fans hope in the midst of a dismal season, his basketball career was soon put in jeopardy by a stress reaction in his left knee before his sophomore campaign. After undergoing surgery and rehabilitation on his knee, Langdon quickly erased any doubts about his recovery in 1996-97, becoming
But this year, with Duke's new-found strength inside, other teams will have difficulty preventing Langdon from improving on his 43.5 percent career three-point percentage.
If the big men steal the spotlight from Langdon, that's okay, as long as the Blue Devils are still playing in April. The Class of 1985 was the last to enter Duke and not reach an NCAA title game. While Langdon, unlike Wojciechowski, has another season of eligibility remaining, both players realize their careers have not matched their Blue Devil predecessors in one aspect: winning.
"I think sometimes you've got to refocus that mindset, and maybe that's what I've had to do coming into this season," Langdon said. "We've got a lot of talent, and sometimes you just get into talking about minutes: well, we've got the 12 guys, eight of them McDonald's All-Americans, where's all the time going to go? I think you've got to refocus your mind and the goal is to win the ACC, to win the national championship, to have a great year and win a lot of games."
It's November of 1997, and the top recruiting class in the nation plays for Duke. These four freshmen are supposed to once again make the Final Four the Blue Devil Invitational. Still, it's no fluke that the Duke teams which Krzyzewski characterized as having strong veteran leadership reached seven of nine Final Fours. It took three years, but Langdon and Wojciechowski are finally ready to lead the Blue Devils back to the Promised Land.
"We've been through everything together," Wojciechowski said. "We've been through the worst season in recent Duke history, we've won an ACC championship, we've been through everything. As we've gone through those things, we've grown as people, as players, and we've matured."
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