Tinsel Town or Tobacco Road?
This is the question men’s basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski will be contemplating this weekend, as he attempts to decide whether to remain in Durham or to venture to the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers. In his 24 seasons at Duke, Krzyzewski has served as one of college basketball’s most vociferous advocates, although he has grown increasingly frustrated with the NCAA and the trend that continues to send the nation’s best young talent to the professional ranks prematurely.
“What he loves the most—it’s not beating people—it’s taking an 18-year old kid and producing a 22-year old man,” Senior Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy said. “The Shane Battier, the Johnny Dawkins—to have these polished, accomplished, admirable individuals come out of our program—that’s what he’s seen as his central mission. Now it’s sort of leaking away.”
This drain could be one of the primary reasons Krzyzewski is so strongly considering a deal that would send him to the Los Angeles Lakers. The money, sources claim, is a secondary factor—despite the $40 million dollar contract the Lakers have reportedly offered.
“What bothers [Krzyzewski] more than anything else is the way things have gotten so out of kilter,” Kennedy said.
Prior to the 1998-99 season, Krzyzewski’s Duke teams had never lost a player leaving to NBA before his senior year of college. Since then, however, a total of eight have sacrificed their amateur status for the pros, including Shaun Livingston, who was Duke’s first player to commit but never even set foot on campus as a student.
“For the last five, six, seven years, there’s been a real shift in college basketball [away] from four years. For years you were operating from a stable platform, and your basic recruiting platform was to replace your current juniors,” Kennedy said. “You had a platform. And that’s all exploded.”
Indeed, Krzyzewski, 57, has built a program as powerful and consistent as the NCAA has seen in the past several decades, as his squads have won three national championships and been ranked No. 1 in each of the past seven seasons.
When Krzyzewski took control of Duke’s program, however, winning was much harder to come by.
“It was a great time to be there, to be there during the building process,” said Tom Mickle, who worked in the Duke athletic department throughout the 1980s. “He came in and didn’t have a whole lot of talent left from the previous team. There were a lot of critics at that point in time. Mainly Coach K took the brunt of it.”
Mickle recalled sitting in a Denny’s restaurant the night of one the worst losses in Krzyzewski’s career, a 109-66 loss to Virginia in the first round of the ACC Tournament at the conclusion of the 1982-83 campaign, Krzyzewski’s third. It was the painful culmination of Duke’s second consecutive losing season.
“Coach K always had a vision for where he wanted the program to go and he was very focused and he stayed with it,” Mickle said. “I remember everybody being in a panic except for Coach K. And he said, ‘No, we’re staying with the plan.’ He had this faith and it carried him through.... There’s nothing greater than coming from the bottom to the top.”
Essential to the Blue Devils’ rise was Krzyzewski’s emphasis on the importance of team-play, as demonstrated by his famed “fist” metaphor, in which five players come together as one on the court. But would Krzyzewski be able to produce the same results from coaching in the NBA, where player and team development are often an afterthought?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Kennedy said. “Maybe he decides, ‘The other challenge isn’t there anymore, I’m going to opt for an alternate challenge.’”
Kennedy said he believes the challenges Krzyzewski faces as a college coach have changed significantly since 1990, when the Boston Celtics were clamoring for his services. At the time, he was yet to bring home a national title.
“I think that at the time he thought he had a lot left to do in college basketball,” Kennedy said. “I think now, he’s done things that he’d love to accomplish [again], but they’d be repetitious in a way.”
NCAA politics and the league’s plethora of rules and restrictions may also be weighing on Krzyzewski’s mind.
“As I look at being a Division I basketball coach these days, I think those are things that after a while would begin to get old,” Kennedy said.
Regardless, Athletic Director Joe Alleva made it clear at a press conference Thursday that the University will do whatever it takes to keep Krzyzewski at Duke. In terms of his salary, however, Duke simply cannot compete with the resources of the Lakers.
“We cannot match financially what the Lakers are going to offer—we just can’t do it,” Kennedy said. “And it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to do it. We’re talking about University resources that need to be distributed across a wide range of programs for some very important things. But Mike understands that, too.”
And though Krzyzewski has been awarded what amounts to a lifetime contract, an appointment as special assistant to the President and a faculty position in the Fuqua School of Business, Kennedy said there is plenty Duke can still offer its most famous coach. The package could include a brand-new practice facility that would complement the Schwartz-Butters building, completed in 1999, that houses locker rooms, basketball offices and Duke basketball’s Hall of Fame.
“There are some things that the University can do that he would like,” Kennedy noted. “This practice facility has actually been in the works for a while. But there may be other things. It comes down to him deciding, ‘Is this a different direction I want to take in my life?’ regardless of who offers what. He’s never been a guy that’s been motivated by money.”
Currently, the Blue Devils hold their practices in Cameron Indoor Stadium and in the adjacent Card Gymnasium. Kennedy was quick to point out, however, that Krzyzewksi is not the only one interested in supplementing Duke’s athletic facilities with another basketball court.
“To have a facility that gets the basketball team out of Card Gym altogether, and opens Cameron to volleyball and wrestling and all of those things, would be helpful to us all,” Kennedy said. “The architect has done drawings, and they’ve looked at locations all around campus. This has been going on for a while.”
But despite Duke’s willingness to persuade Krzyzewski to remain in Durham, Kennedy would not be surprised if the Hall of Famer headed to Los Angeles.
“My heart tells me that he’ll stay, but evaluating everything that’s been going on, and everything the Lakers can offer him, and his own kind of thirst—he’s a very, very competitive guy,” Kennedy speculated. “And I think that maybe in the back of his mind for a long time he’s thought, ‘I could compete with Phil Jackson or Red Auerbach or whoever you think of as a great NBA coach’... But from time to time, he’s had to have wondered how he would do on that stage.”
Krzyzewski’s passion for competition is perhaps only rivaled by his love for his family and his reputably magnetic personality. Former Athletic Director Tom Butters, who hired the then-unknown coach from West Point in 1980, lauded Krzyzewski for much more than his ability to win on the court.
“He is a remarkable man and he is an outstanding talent as a coach,” Butters said. “And one of the things is that he’ll be as good a coach as he is a person.”
It is not surprising, then, that Krzyzewski’s ultimate decision may hinge on the feelings of his wife, Mickie.
“I know that Mickie and Mike are a team,” Kennedy said. “And Mike places a lot of stock, and rightly so, on what Mickie thinks.... If Mike comes to her and says, ‘We have a great life here and a great home and people love us and we’re secure, but this is something we have to do,’ then Mickie’s going to say, ‘Follow me, I’m going to lead us out there.’”
Kelly Rohrs contributed to this story.
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