The Last Basketball Dynasty

There's the pass to Laettner... puts it up...

YESSSSSSS!

Fifteen years later, that's what we remember. The most famous play, in the most famous game, played by what is likely the last true dynasty college basketball will ever see. But it's more than that. In its own way, The Shot is a microcosm of the season, or maybe of the seasons. Back-to-back National Championships. Four Final Fours. A team that knew it was the best, knew it was going to win and proved it every night out. So you've got to start with The Shot. And when you're talking about The Shot, you've got to talk about Christian Laettner

But before you talk about The Shot, you've got to talk about another shot. With 2.1 seconds to play, Sean Woods had won the 1992 East Region Final for Kentucky. His floater over Laettner's outstretched fingertips went high off the glass-as high as a shot can go and still go in-and somehow, miraculously, went in.

"I think we all, except for maybe Coach K, were probably a little bit in shock," says Tommy Amaker an assistant coach on that team. "I thought we felt like, 'Are you kidding me? Are we going to lose this opportunity based on that play or that situation?'"

But watch the video closer. When the ball goes through the net, the clock keeps running-that was the rule back then. Duke guard Bobby Hurley had been knocked to the floor by a crushing pick, but as soon as the ball fell through, he got up and called timeout. Laettner also immediately made the signal.

"That allowed us to have whatever time was left to try to do what we could do to try to win the basketball game," Amaker says. "I thought that was critical. They were brilliant, and well-schooled, and well-taught to do that and they did it instinctively."

Still, it didn't really seem to matter. Duke was down and out, defeated, the dream of a second championship fading fast. But Laettner, the star of the team all season, walked over to the bench with his head held high.

Together, the two of them were the heart, soul, ass and elbows of both National Championship teams. For two years, they set the tone and their teammates followed. Of course, they got a little bit of help from Coach K.

Right after the team finished celebrating the first championship, in 1991, Krzyzewski sat the whole team down and explained to them that they wouldn't be defending their crown. They earned that, he said, and no one could take it from them. Krzyzewski even forbid all official Duke Basketball publicity-the media guide, the PA announcers-from using the words "defending National Champions." The team would pursue and attack a new title.

That was their challenge. They had reached the top of the mountain, now they would start at the bottom and climb again-this time with a big old bull's-eye on their backs.

But Coach K-isms can only go so far- Laettner and Davis set the tone with their confidence. "We knew we were going to win," Davis says. "We had our whole team back. We believed that Christian was the best player in the country. We thought Grant [Hill] would be the next best player in the country. We thought Thomas [Hill] was the second-best scorer in the country. We thought Bobby [Hurley] was the best point guard. We thought I was the best defensive player."

Not only were they going to win, but they were going to be perfect. They set a goal: Play an entire game without Krzyzewski yelling once. Anyone that's ever seen a Blue Devil basketball game knows that the coach demands perfection, but that team damn near reached it a couple times.

Coach K says more than anything else, they were cocky.

They loved playing on the road, strutting into other teams' buildings and leaving with a win. For a whole year, they were the greatest show in the country, the team everyone wanted a piece of but just about no one could beat. They relished walking into a gym and seeing the fear in the other team's eyes, the feeling that they would have to play their best game to beat Duke.

Laettner was college basketball's biggest villain, and he loved it. Duke scheduled a game against Canisius, up in Buffalo near where Laettner grew up. It was a Homecoming game of sorts for the big man, but he refused to take a shot in the first half. Krzyzewski asked him what was wrong, but Laettner just said the people from his hometown knew how good he was. He wanted them to know how good his teammates were.

"He loved being the big target," says Marty Clark, a back-up guard on both national title teams. "None of the other guys would really get a lot of guff, students wouldn't really go after them. But [Laettner] could handle it, he didn't care, so he was sort of the big shield for everybody else. And I think it was pretty effective, there were certainly guys you could go after-Bobby and Grant, those types of guys-but he sort of took on the identity."

He could handle it because he was a senior who had been through the fire of Final Fours, who had hit game-winning shots, who had heard everything a fan or opponent could say. So even when the game seemed hopeless, 2.1 seconds to go 94 feet and score, Laettner could handle it.

And if Laettner could handle it, so could the rest of them.

Krzyzewski repeated Laettner's promise-"We're going to win," he said-then he set about making sure they would.

The starters sat on the bench: Laettner, Davis, Hurley, Grant Hill, Tony Lang. Krzyzewski went down the line, squatting in front of each player and talking to him, breaking down the immense play into tiny, doable segments. "Can you throw a pass to Christian at the foul line?" he must have asked Hill. "Can you cut to midcourt and be ready to receive a pass if Christian's not open?" he might've said to Hurley. "Can you catch a pass, turn around and make a jump shot from the free-throw line?" he probably said to Laettner.

It was a stroke of genius really. A million little things could go wrong, but Krzyzewski assumed they would all go right. The ball had to travel 94 feet and wind up in the basket within a span of 2.1 seconds. But if each guy did a little thing that he knew he could do, winning the game would take care of itself. Of course, some of the reserves didn't believe the coach.

"I'll be honest, I was looking at these guys like, 'You guys are crazy,'" says Ron Burt, the team's 12th man. "I'd love to see it. I had faith in the team but felt that the odds were kind of stacked against them."

Before the huddle broke, Krzyzewski had one last instruction for Laettner. "The clock won't start until you touch the ball inbounds," he said. "Take your time."

The players jogged onto the court. Laettner went into the corner near the Kentucky basket, Hill to the opposite baseline. The referee handed him the ball and blew his whistle.

When you are in the heat of the moment you're not really thinking, you are just out there playing and competing," Grant Hill says. "I didn't really have time to think or understand how big that moment was. I was just trying to do what I could do to help us try and win.... There was some comfort and confidence knowing that nobody was on the ball, and it was an easy pass in that regard. I was just caught up in the moment."

Of all the players on that 1992 Championship team, Krzyzewski says Hill might have had the most natural talent. Amaker says some people thought that Hill was the best player, not just on the Blue Devils, but in the whole country. At the time, that would have put him in a class with Laettner, Shaquille O'Neal and Alonzo Mourning-and the kid was only a sophomore.

But like a lot of the guys on that team, Hill had more in his life than basketball. When he talks about that 1992 season, you can tell. "It didn't get much better than that. All across the board in terms of school, in the classroom, socially, on the court. It was just the perfect year."

All of the players got to be true student-athletes and could funnel energy into pursuits other than basketball.

Davis, for example, created his own major, in African-American Studies, and worked for Morgan Stanley in the off-season.

Hill, now an accomplished collector of African-American art, was a history major with an intense interest in capturing history through the eyes of the artist. He bought his first piece when he was a junior in college.

"The toughest part about being an athlete is that you don't have another dimension to your life, it has to be all basketball, and that's just too much pressure," Davis says of the current situation in college sports. "You get injured or you fail, and you have nothing because you put too much pressure on yourself."

Maybe that's why Duke's players-the Hills, the Laettners, the Hurleys, the Langs-could handle the end of that East Region Final. They knew they were going places, that this game, this season, hell, even this sport, didn't have to define their lives.

They could afford to live in the moment and not worry about failure.

As Hill's baseball-style pass sailed through the Spectrum, Davis sprinted downcourt from Duke's three-point line. Lang took off down the other side of the floor. Hurley ran from one sideline into the middle of the floor.

Laettner cut toward the foul line. The two Wildcat defenders assigned to cover Laettner, John Pelphrey and Deron Feldhaus, backed off so that they wouldn't foul Duke's superstar. Laettner leaped high in the air and caught the ball with two hands.

At the end of the bench, Burt stood up.

"When I saw Christian catch the ball, I kind of felt like, 'Okay now we do have a chance,'" Burt says. "It's one of those things with a few seconds left, everything's got to work perfectly. Normally what happens is the pass doesn't make it to the guy that you want to have the ball. But the play worked to perfection.

"And once he caught it, I kind of stood up thinking, 'Oh my goodness, we do have a shot to win this game.'"

Less than seven months before the Kentucky game, Ron Burt was just one of 40-some hopefuls that filed into Cameron Indoor Stadium with a chance to earn a spot on the Duke roster. They called the event "One Night in Cameron," and it was an open tryout, the first in more than a decade. One roster spot, 50 guys in attendance, may the best man win.

Actually, "One Night in Cameron" was kind of a misnomer. It was actually two hours in Cameron-an hour of scrimmaging, after which they narrowed the field to a dozen or so, and then an hour of running. Whoever was still standing, Burt half-jokes 15 years later, was going to make the team.

To be fair, Burt cheated a little bit. You see, one of his buddies was a team manager, and he told Burt at the beginning of the summer that there was going to be an open tryout in September. Needless to say, Burt worked his ass off to get ready. He was also friends with Laettner and Davis, which couldn't have hurt.

Right after the tryout, Burt's phone rang, and Amaker was on the other end. "If you're interested," Amaker said, "we've got a spot for you on the team." If he was interested, hah! Burt was ready to do backflips. But he played it cool and told the coach that he'd accept the spot.

Practice humbled him-he was sharing the court with maybe the greatest college team of the modern era-but he knew he had to find his role on the team. "I was terrified every day," he says. "There was never a time when I felt comfortable, like 'Yeah, I'm there now.'"

Maybe he didn't have the talent to hang with Laettner, Hurley and Hill, but he had the drive. He became the team's Rudy Ruettiger, working hard in practice-maybe sometimes a little too hard. "Obviously I'm not as talented as these guys, but you can't let anybody outwork you. You can't let anybody bring more energy than you do," he says. "That was the whole philosophy, 12 guys being ready to play, coming to practice and being prepared."

He almost never got into the game, but he prepared every practice like he was going to. He treated every practice like he was lucky just to be on the court with that team, and you've got to figure it rubbed off on his teammates.

But Laettner and Davis made sure everyone practiced like Burt, demanding total effort. "Christian and I are very intense, and I wouldn't say that we would threaten our teammates, but we were definitely locked in," Davis says now.

Bodies hit the floor for loose balls, elbows flew under the basket, the guys went out there every day and fought. Amaker says he had never seen such intense practices, and that he hasn't seen them since. Krzyzewski let them leave practice early some days so that they wouldn't kill each other.

With so much talent on the team, guys had to battle for their jobs every day. Lang couldn't relax because he had to fight for playing time. Kenny Blakeney pushed Marty Clark for minutes off the bench. Krzyzewski says Hurley, who was firmly entrenched in the starting lineup, still practiced "like a maniac." Even Burt, who was competing with no one, took elbows from Laettner, and knees to the chest from Davis.

But they left it all on the court at the end of the day. From Laettner to Burt, the team would roll together. "They wouldn't let you be a loner," Burt says of the co-captains. The team went to movies and comedy clubs, played Tecmo Bowl on Sega Genesis, played pool (Davis says he's the best, his former teammates disagree), shot the breeze and cracked jokes. They went to N.C. Central for basketball games, and Kyoto's for Japanese food. Burt even cut a few of the guys' hair.

Grant Hill remembers one time when Laettner and Davis egged his room freshman year-and the window was open.

They used to show up en masse to parties on West Campus with their own music and throw it into the tape player. As long as their music was playing, they'd chill at the party. When the music stopped, it was like Hot Potato. They'd take the tape out and head over to a new party, taking everyone that was at the first party with them.

"Hanging out with one another, when you know each other, when you spend time with each other, when you break bread with one another, so to speak, you know each others intentions-everything is pure," Grant Hill says. "So when you are in the heat of the moment and the battle, and Bobby Hurley yells at Laettner, Laettner knows it's not personal. He knows Bobby, at the end of the day, is trying to accomplish what he is trying to accomplish, and that's win. It enabled us to be real with one another, if that makes any sense. It was special."

When the ball swished through the net, Laettner took off on a dead run away from the basket, hands held high, legs flailing, mouth wide open. You've seen the photo.

Lang, under the basket, threw himself on the floor and started making a hardwood angel. The rest of the players chased Laettner, wishing he'd just stop running so they could celebrate.

Finally they caught up to him and they all wound up on the floor, yelling and screaming and exulting in their victory.

Thomas Hill hadn't moved. He stood frozen in front of the Blue Devil bench, hands on his head, repeating the words "Oh, my God," as he hugged assistant coach Pete Gaudet.

"I just remember from the time he hit the shot to the time we started practice two days later it was just a long celebration," Grant Hill says. "I remember celebrating on the court; I remember celebrating in the locker room, celebrating on the airplane; I remember celebrating when we got home."

A week later, they were National Champions.

Fifteen years later, no team has matched the Blue Devils back-to-back titles, and with the way the college game is changing, it seems unlikely anyone ever will. Laettner might never have come back to defend that title if he was playing now and Grant Hill also may have left school-that's if he came at all.

But more than that, all of them had lives outside of basketball and all of them could cut loose on the weekends with regular students without worrying about photos showing up on Facebook or badjocks.com.

"Kids today in highly visible programs have less of a life outside than those seniors," Krzyzewski says. "At universities now... everything is off-campus. It doesn't mean they all drank. If you turned back the time machine, and you were on Duke's campus in the early '90s compared to where it is now, it was a whole different thing.... They did have a lot more fun. There's no question about it."

The players still see each other occasionally. Laettner and Davis own properties together and recently bought the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies, so they're together all of the time. The rest of them are scattered across the world.

Thomas Hill works a little with Laettner and Davis, and also owns his own company. Burt works at a New York investment bank; his championship ring and piece of the net are locked up in a safe deposit box. Lang is coaching in the Japanese Basketball League; Blakeney is an assistant at Marshall, and Clark runs clinics for high school players. Grant Hill's the only one still left in the NBA-finally healthy as his star-crossed career appears to be back on the upswing.

Men get older; life and families and jobs intervene; the teammates see each other less than they would like.

But put a couple of them in the same room, and all of a sudden, it might as well be 15 years ago. Old jokes fly back and forth and old billiards rivalries are renewed. They're kids again and they're on top of the world, maybe the best team college basketball has ever seen.